on female characters "not being good enough" for main male characters

[tielan]

Thoughts by bookshop on "Why can't a woman be more like a man?":

Oh, and let us not leave out Gwen/Arthur, and Gwen/Morgana. Everyone loves Gwen/Morgana. I love Gwen/Morgana. But if we love Gwen so much, why aren't we happy to see her and Arthur so happy together in S2? Don't we love Gwen enough to enjoy her stepping into her role as main character? Or do we only love her enough to shunt her off to the side to be happy with Morgana, so we can all enjoy the lovely Merlin/Arthur slash.

I want to address the main-male, main-female, secondary-male "triangle" that tends to form a pattern in fandoms.

There are any number of people who defend their love of female-with-anyone-but-male. Which is fine...except that this happens a lot. And it almost always happens that the characters involved are the primary female and the main male. TPTB get them together, or show them attracted to each other, and all hell breaks loose in fandom.

So here's my question: Why is it that the primary female character(s) in any canon are never good enough for the main male character?

The female character is permitted, allowed, acceptable, so long as she doesn't fall for the main male character (whom fans have generally shipped with the secondary - read, geeky - male character).

Teyla is a lovely character and people love her...unless she's paired with John Sheppard. Then it's just bad writing, uninteresting, the dynamic just doesn't work.

Sam is a great, kickass career woman...as long as she's not 'chasing after' Jack O'Neill. The instant she shows any care about him, the character is a betrayal of everything she stands for.

Gwen is a sweetheart, a compass of the heart for Merlin and Arthur both, and an anchor for Morgana. But when she falls for Arthur (and more importantly, Arthur falls for her), she's a slag, a slut, a whore, a stupid bitch who doesn't know her place (or her mind).

Uhura? Is fantastic, an intelligent woman of colour in a world without race or gender biases (allegedly). But the instant she kisses Spock, she becomes reviled, abhorrent, discomforting.

Maybe you really don't like the dynamics between John/Teyla, Sam/Jack, Arthur/Gwen, Uhura/Spock and prefer John/Rodney, Jack/Daniel, Arthur/Merlin, and Kirk/Spock. But if preferring two main, white, male characters in a homosexual pairing always comes at the expense of the canonical male/female het pairing, then isn't that an issue? Doesn't that become a kind of erasure of female characters from the relevance of the story - all the story, both the personal and character-driven arcs of relationships, friendships, and romance, as well as the customary functional elimination of a female character in these shows?

This is a pattern for us (fandom 'us') - go to any fandom and take a look at the fanfic.

Perhaps we should start asking ourselves why - without the excuses and the "but I do like Teyla/Sam/Gwen/Uhura, just not with..."

It's not the individual examples that discomfort me - well, they do, but that's because I love these pairings and I want others to love them, too - it's the fact that these are patterns that get repeated in fandom after fandom, show after show. It's the fact that fandom doesn't do this once, they do it again, and again, and again, and again. And each time, the same excuses get recycled:

"She's just not strong enough to be paired with the male lead."

"She's just not interesting enough for me to care about her."

"She's just doesn't have chemistry with the male lead."

Maybe the individual character of this show isn't your type. Maybe the dynamic just isn't your thing. Maybe it's innocuous, innocent, and entirely unintended. Hooray! No need for this feminist guilt claptrap, break out the beer and lets go sit on the pier with our best buds and be manly men in a subtextual way (except for the part where 99% of us are women)!

Still. There's a pattern in fan behaviour that says a woman is good enough to be paired with anyone 'secondary', but only a male will do for the main male character.

And isn't that sexist?

eta: This post was initially focused on looking at fannish reactions to canonical male/female pairings, and then how that translates into fannish behaviour and attitudes. Also, if your OTP or preferred pairing isn't one of these, it's not a criticism of your pairing preferences, it's a look at why fandoms react in such a viciously negative manner to these specific types of m/f pairings.

Comments

[carolyn_claire]

Yes, this. I want to read stories about women that aren't about who they're in love with, how their romantic relationship is going, how that defines them, etc. There's already so much of that, TOO much of that, in media, to the point that we start looking to apply the Bechdel test to judge the quality of the product. I want stories about women that are about who they are and what they do, not who they fuck. Not that that het can't be hot; it can, in the right hands. My jaded RL palate is picky about how that's handled, though; I want to see her done justice to, I want non-hetero-normative, I want her to be powerful, I want what, for me, is better than the average (fictional or RL) romance. Different. I want to be wowed.

So, no, I don't think people who enjoy and read and write female characters, just not as love interests for the male lead, are being sexist. I think if they like slashing the male leads, it may very well be because that's what turns them on, that's where they like their sex play. They may not be playing sexually with the female characters for any number of reasons that aren't sexist; if they really do enjoy those female characters as much as they say, then those reasons probably aren't.

[astridv]

So, no, I don't think people who enjoy and read and write female characters, just not as love interests for the male lead, are being sexist.

I'm losing track of this discussion; did someone actually say that?

I self-identify as a genficcer myself. I enjoy women in non-romantic storylines. What I personally think is that it's sexist to criticize or vilify a female character for being in a romantic relationship, and that happens all the time. And I don't think it's a good thing that in response to the rightly-criticized 'just a girlfriend' trope (see Sunny Crocket's hapless one-ep-then-dead girlfriends) fandom goes completely overboard in the opposite direction so that now the meme is that a female character must not be in a romantic relationship, thus narrowing further down the parameter of what a female characters is allowed to be.

I do think it's sexist to say that a female characters is all of a sudden defined by her relationship and relegated to being 'just the love interest'. Particularly since I've seen that said about a whole plethora of vastly different women on tv... soon as they get in a relationhip with a guy, they are demoted to just the love interest, and not by the writers - by fandom. I'll quote from my comment elsewhere in this post: This a very male-centered view to begin with. The guy becomes the love interest at the same time, why is that overlooked? In SGA I'd say Keller was the one with the initiative, and both were equals, professionals and leaders of their departments. Why then is she 'just the love interest' and their relationship is declared gender-stereotypical? What makes Uhura the prize to pursue? You could just as easily say Spock is the prize to be pursued by Uhura... many fans would agree that Spock is quite a catch.

[carolyn_claire]

Yes, Tielan said that:

There are any number of people who defend their love of female-with-anyone-but-male.

Perhaps we should start asking ourselves why - without the excuses and the "but I do like Teyla/Sam/Gwen/Uhura, just not with..."

Tielan isn't complaining about people not liking/reading/writing about female characters, at all; she's complaining about people not pairing female characters with the lead male character. And that's because...

It's not the individual examples that discomfort me - well, they do, but that's because I love these pairings and I want others to love them, too

...she wants to see her favorite het pairings get more play. And those who don't want to do that are pretty much beneath her contempt, apparently:

Maybe the individual character of this show isn't your type. Maybe the dynamic just isn't your thing. Maybe it's innocuous, innocent, and entirely unintended. Hooray! No need for this feminist guilt claptrap, break out the beer and lets go sit on the pier with our best buds and be manly men in a subtextual way (except for the part where 99% of us are women)!

Because, in the end, it's writing what she likes that determines whether one is sexist or not:

Still. There's a pattern in fan behaviour that says a woman is good enough to be paired with anyone 'secondary', but only a male will do for the main male character.

And isn't that sexist?

No, it isn't sexist. Not choosing to write the "alpha male" with a woman is not sexist. I have a number of reasons why I don't choose to do so in SGA, for instance, but, according to Tielan, my reasons are only excuses, she doesn't care to hear them and I'm not entitled to them; I'm being sexist because I don't write Teyla/John, end of story. My having written Teyla/Rodney is just part of the problem, because Rodney isn't the alpha-male lead. That I write Teyla at all isn't enough; I have to write Teyla with John. Or, no--she's say that my doing so is just part of a pattern and that the pattern is the problem. Except that patterns are made up of the behavior of individuals. So, you know. Still sexist!

So, yes. Someone is saying that. It's the point of the post.

What I'm not seeing is ALL of slash fandom, or a large portion of it (or maybe I should say the non-writing-a-female-with-the-lead-male portion of it), exhibiting this pattern of female vilification you're talking about. Do some do it? Yes. Do some write stories about killing unwanted female characters? Yes. Is it the majority treatment of female characters? No. The wacky fringes of any fandom will always take extremist views; this isn't how slash fandom, as a whole, operates. Those who think it is may need to remix their flists. My experience among people who predominately write slash has been that they don't do this.

The love interest and the haver-of-a-love-interest is determined by the character's ranking in the show. Anyone Buffy hooked up with was her love interest; she was not theirs. Anyone Kirk hooks up with is his love interest. It's about main-character standing.

[astridv]

It's the old problem in these kinds of discussions, that on an individual basis there's no problem, it only becomes problematic when you look at it from a distance and larger patterns emerge, and they look the same in every fandom. If you don't like to ship John with Teyla, no problem. I don't ship them, no problem. If very few fans across all possible fandoms never ship the main male with the main woman, hm. Worth examining, at least.

What I'm not seeing is ALL of slash fandom, or a large portion of it (or maybe I should say the non-writing-a-female-with-the-lead-male portion of it), exhibiting this pattern of female vilification you're talking about. Do some do it? Yes.

But that is all everyone is saying! Or, most people at least. Of course it's not all of slash fandom. You know I read slash. People aren't saying slash is misogynist and wrong, they're saying there's misogyny in slash fandom and some of the ways female characters are written (or not written) could be, you know, better. Just, slashers read these posts and think it's about them in person. Even when people slap disclaimers on their posts saying they're talking about patterns and trends, not individuals. Same thing that happened during the racism debate (and hey, I know what that feels like because I did that. I guess it's a natural reflex but it's not really helpful.)

You're going out of your way to promote and write the woman, these posts don't even apply to you. This really isn't about you. But they still apply to other parts of fandom, and one should be able to point these things out, even if they don't apply to every single member of the group.

Maybe we need better disclaimers. :/

The love interest and the haver-of-a-love-interest is determined by the character's ranking in the show. Anyone Buffy hooked up with was her love interest; she was not theirs. Anyone Kirk hooks up with is his love interest. It's about main-character standing.

For the record, I have no opinion on Tielan's specific point about alpha male/female lead, I have to think about that first. I have no data on that and I'm staying out of that part of the discussion. I was commenting on the fans' general tendency to disapprove of relationships for female characters, because that has been bugging me for a long time.

[carolyn_claire]

To complain about perceived patterns and trends of behavior in fandom (or anything) and then duck confrontation by saying, "Oh, I wasn't talking about individuals, I was talking about patterns of behavior" is ducking responsibility for one's words. When someone shows up to contest one's assertions, to say to the OP, "You're wrong, I do this and that's not why I do this and I don't think it's why the majority of people do this, as those who I know who do it don't do it for those reasons," that's where the rubber hits the road, that's where one has to respond to the input of the people whose "patterns of behavior" are the source of the assertion. There are no trends without the behavior of individuals. If the trend is a sexist one, then those who are participating in it are exhibiting sexist behavior, on the basis of the assertion. One cannot, with validity, say, "People are doing X for Y reason," and then say to the people who do X and who confront one about this assertion, "Oh, I didn't mean YOU"--who did they mean? They meant somebody, yes? They meant the people who are doing what they're talking about. To duck that is silly, and it's an example of not being willing to put one's money where one's mouth is. If you're going to throw stones, you have to be ready to discuss why you did so with the people who show up with bruises on their heads and stones in their hands, because that's who you're talking about. People who don't get hit by those stones may very well show up to confront about the stone throwing, too, out of principle. It's another hazard of making a contentious opinion known. And it's right that that should happen, because the OP may very well be wrong because they lack information, and they may be saying things that are hurtful to a degree that is unwarranted. They may not be, and that may come out in discussion. Discussion is a good thing. Ducking the discussion, though, with claims that the OP didn't mean anyone in particular is cowardly. Yes, they did, and there's no disclaimer that covers that.

(When those people show up, it is also not discursive to respond to them with "I don't want to hear your reasons! They're just useless excuses! You're X! Go think about what you're doing!" That's not discussion, that's bullying, and it's very not cool. The OP, in that case, has supported nothing about her position and has proved an unwillingness to hear other POVs that indicates the sort of adherence to her own ideas that suggest bias and an agenda. It's a lose-lose as far as discussion goes--on side gets silenced and the other side looks shifty and disingenuous.)

If there's an understanding that the behavior being lamented is a fringe, minority behavior, then it's not coming through in a lot of the complaints/discussions, which are being conducted using generalities that are sweeping everyone up. "There's a problem with slash! It's sexist! There's too much woman bashing!" doesn't sound like "There's a minority group of people who write slash and who bash women!" The problem isn't with slash, because misogyny crops up everywhere; the treatment of women in het sucks, sometimes, too. (It's why I'll only read het recced by people I trust.) But it's not being framed as a minority problem; it never is. And a lot of us who enjoy slash, whether we write female characters or not, are pretty tired of that. The default idea that slashers need to examine their behavior with an eye to sexism more than anyone else does is slanted and biased and wrong. EVERYONE should keep tabs on themselves to root out their isms, because everyone has them. Slash keeps getting the bad rap, and it's considered (often by het writers) natural that its writers should be targets. It isn't.

[astridv]

To complain about perceived patterns and trends of behavior in fandom (or anything) and then duck confrontation by saying, "Oh, I wasn't talking about individuals, I was talking about patterns of behavior" is ducking responsibility for one's words.

What the fuck? This discussion IS ABOUT PATTERNS.

Yes, they did, and there's no disclaimer that covers that.

[eta] I'm talking about the whole hypertext discussion, I see this post as just a part of it. The disclaimer I mentioned was in havocthecat's post.

[carolyn_claire]

Oh, it's about patterns. That's good, because patterns aren't created by the behavior of people. Ducks create patterns of human behavior, it's been scientifically proven.

*headdesk*

There is no discussion of patterns of human behavior that doesn't involve the behavior of humans. Yes? A disturbing trend in human behavior implies that there are humans behaving in disturbing ways. Yes? Because it's not actually about ducks, it's about people, people doing something we don't think they should be doing or for reasons we don't think they should be doing them. Yes? No ducks involved. And because we're talking about trends, we're talking about groups of people, yes? Groups of people behaving in a particular way. And these groups are made up of individuals, yes? Individuals who perform the offending behavior, a lot of them, all at once. These individuals, seperately, are people living individual lives, yes? They don't all live together in a commune or flock on ponds, like ducks. They're individuals in fandom who are doing specific things, at the same time, creating a trend that one may or may not find alarming, yes?

Individuals. It absolutely comes down to the behavior of individuals, regardless of how many of them are involved. There can be NO TREND without the behavior of INDIVIDUALS to create it. And when you opine about that behavior and those who exhibit that behavior come to you to talk about that, it is not valid to insist that you didn't mean that anything that they were doing, personally, was contributing to this trend or was part of the problem. Who did you mean, then? Ghosts? Ducks? It's somebody, right? It's NEVER going to be anybody who shows up to confront you about what you said about people who exhibit the same behavior they do? How do you know that? "There's a trend happening in fandom that I hate to see, group X is doing Y, and I think that's bad." Who else do you mean but participants in group X who are exhibiting behavior Y? And why are you ducking responsibility for having said that about those people when THOSE VERY PEOPLE show up to refute what you said?

I don't understand the disconnect, here. THERE ARE NO TRENDS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR POSSIBLE WITHOUT HUMANS TO EXHIBIT THE BEHAVIOR. When one is talking about trends, one is talking about the people who create those trends, one wants individuals to change their behavior to change the trend, yes? And those people may want to talk to you about what you said. If one's going to say it, one has to deal with that. One SHOULD deal with that; it's not okay to paint a population with a trait like sexism by pointing to the "trend" of sexist behavior in that population and not be willing to discuss that accusation with the members of that population. If no individuals are exhibiting the behavior, then there is no trend. If there are individuals exhibiting the behavior and they don't agree with your assertions, you have to be ready to back your assertions up when challenged. How will you know if there's any validity to the assertion if you won't discuss it with those who disagree? That's not valid or valuable.

[astridv]

Seeing as you're calling me a coward for backing out of arguments I never made in the first place, I'm discinclined to continue this. If you insist to make this all about you even though it never was I can't help it.

Just this:
I don't understand the disconnect, here. THERE ARE NO TRENDS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR POSSIBLE WITHOUT HUMANS TO EXHIBIT THE BEHAVIOR.

Exactly, there's a disconnect. Just an one example - Jason Momoa cast as Ronon, seen individually, isn't racist, he's just perfect for the role. Seen in the broader context of POC constantly cast as aliens, there are racist implications that are impossible to look past. It almost felt like a paradox to me at first. But just because the first is true, doesn't make the second one bit less true.

[carolyn_claire]

I shouldn't have switched from the use of the general "one" to "you" in the above, because I'm not talking about your conversations with me, as I haven't seen you make any assertions that you're not willing to discuss or that you attempt to duck under a banner of "general trends." I'm talking about those who have those who put up disclaimers and don't want to discuss or support their assertions. If you're bothered by my calling them cowardly, I hear that.

I don't agree with you that there's a paradox there, in this case, in part, because I think your example is flawed (in much the same way that the larger argument is.) The SG universe has a big problem with the casting of POC as aliens by default; wider SF media's problem is more the general exclusion of POC, IMO. But I can look at the casting of POC in SG and point to an absolutely verifiable, quantifiable trend that at least gives strong clues to the mindset of TPTB in that situation. One can't do the same with reported sweeping trends relating to women in slash fandom; the sample is too large and the evidence unquantifiable and, through quashing discussion through insisting that "it's not about you" or "I don't want to hear your excuses" there's no opportunity to verify or refute. There's just NO REASON to take that stance in a discussion about the subject, when openness and willingness to take responsibility leads to discussion that can verify and clarify. That's why the ducking makes me angry. As does the idea that "if it's happening, it's bad, even if the reasons for its happening are okay." I think "bad" is very much in the eye of the beholder, there. What's happening? According to Tielan, the problem is that women aren't being paired with the alpha-male. According to some others, it's the underutilization of women in m/m romantic fic. And the list goes on. Who thinks these things are problems, and why, vary widely. There is no monolithic problem, here, there is no agreed-upon evil or solution. There are people saying "I see this and I don't like it" and then not wanting to discuss that in depth with the people their statements impact, while sweeping generalizations are tossed around and the "problem" is different in every post. It's too undefined, too biased and too potentially hurtful NOT to encourage all the discussion one can, or to welcome it once it's started. IMO, disclaimers need not apply.

[astridv]

The love interest and the haver-of-a-love-interest is determined by the character's ranking in the show. Anyone Buffy hooked up with was her love interest; she was not theirs. Anyone Kirk hooks up with is his love interest. It's about main-character standing.

uh, can't edit: I messed up the comment, I was gonna say 'good point' to this and quote something else before the final paragraph...

[tielan]

It's the old problem in these kinds of discussions, that on an individual basis there's no problem, it only becomes problematic when you look at it from a distance and larger patterns emerge, and they look the same in every fandom.

As astridv has pointed out, this isn't about personal pairing choices, when I was talking about the patterns across fandoms - the big picture view. I was using personal examples to illustrate, but I could just as easily added illustrations from Eureka with Jack/Allison or Nathan/Allison vs. Jack/Nathan, or Leverage with Nate/Sophy vs. Nate/Eliot.

You can point to any one of these pairings and say you don't like them and give the reasons, but as fans move from fandom to fandom, the reason for not liking the male/female canon pairings persistently build up. There is a pattern of fans (and this may or may not be you) there's no end to the reasons for not liking the main female in a relationship with the primary male - or not liking the female characters at all.


Fans don't always like the same things - the way a pairing is written, the way female characters are portrayed - but every female is unsatisfactory? Every het pairing written on screen is unrealistic and has no grain of possibility about it?

Yes, the pattern is built on the specifics, but just because the specifics have reasons - and maybe good ones - doesn't mean the pattern doesn't exist.

I don't believe that anywhere in this thread or even in the original post, I've ever said or implied that not choosing these specific pairings means a fan doesn't really love the female character, and that the fan themselves is not worthwhile knowing.

[carolyn_claire]

You ask, at the end of your post, if not wanting to pair a woman with the alpha-male character might not be sexist. You're talking about particular pairings, there--a different pairing in each fandom, but the same dynamic. One should want to pair a female character with the alpha-male; if one doesn't, one is behaving in a sexist way, for that reason. You make your opinion on that pretty clear.

You didn't say what Astrid quoted about people who under-represent women in fandom not being worth knowing, that was Yahtzee. (sp?) She expressed agreement with what Yahtzee said, and I expressed my disagreement with both of them, not you (as you didn't say it.)

If something is happening in fandom that you don't, personally, care for, you can certainly posit any number of negative reasons for its happening and call it a negative trend, one that you think needs to be countered. If people express that they have valid reasons, individually, for the behavior, and you acknowledge that there are valid reasons for the behavior (though you also say you think of them as "excuses" and don't want to hear them), then the behavior is valid and not a negative trend, regardless of how many people exhibit it. A valid behavior is not less valid because 500 people are performing it as opposed to 5. If you're saying that, in a group that large, somebody must be lying about their reasons, just because the group is that large, I'd ask you to present evidence to support that assertion, because it doesn't naturally follow. Because of your bias against that behavior, you're going to be disposed to feel negatively for the performers of it and that negativity may express itself as being suspicious of their motives and veracity, but without evidence to support that, I can't follow you into that assumption. You don't like it, and you want it to stop. That doesn't make it inherently wrong. Those who can be shown through evidence, if any, to believe/behave in this way should be addressed individually; that minority behavior should not be used to create supposed negative trends that can't be supported in their existence through evidence. If one wants to bring up the possibility of a negative trend existing and gather that evidence to to support or refute it, one has to be open to hearing (without bias) the input of those who want to assert either way, and to discuss it without dodging the responsibility to do that under the banner of "trends, not individuals." Individuals make trends, and discussion with the individuals who are being accused of taking part of those trends is important to determining their validity.