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

Re: From metafandom

[scrollgirl]

Yeah, I agree that rejecting one pairing in favour of another isn't limited to slash.

That said, the vitriol against female characters that get in the way of an OTP has always been worse than the hatred of a male character equivalent.

Re: From metafandom

[carolyn_claire]

Eh, maybe. It might depend on the fandom. In my largely John/Rodney portion of fandom, I'd seen very little John/Teyla hate (even knew of a few for whom it was a plausible, if not practiced, het ship) and was surprised to hear that there was any--I think it was Tielan I first saw talking about it in a post. Since then, I've definitely seen some ugly remarks coming from J/E shippers. I don't usually hang out with the crazier J/R shippers, though, the ones who want to kill Keller, etc., so maybe that's where it's happening. My feeling, through my own experience, has always been that that's a fringe group, though.

In SG-1, though, the Jack/Sam vs Jack/Daniel wars? Dear Lord. There again, not the slashers (or shippers) I hung out with, so I only know about it from afar (as far as I could get.)

Re: From metafandom

[scrollgirl]

I don't usually hang out with the crazier J/R shippers, though, the ones who want to kill Keller, etc., so maybe that's where it's happening.

Perhaps so, but my point is rather that you don't have McKeller 'shippers bashing John because he gets in the way of their pairing. Or you don't have Daniel/Vala fans bashing Jack, or McKay/Zelenka fans bashing Carson. The female characters are usually the ones that bear the brunt of fannish negativity, not the male characters. Woolsey never faced a fraction of the negativity that Sam did, coming over to SGA.

I remember the 'shipper wars, and I was a Jack/Sam basher. Not the worst offender, and I tried to give Sam the character her due, but it's not like Sam-bashing was a rare or unusual thing in that fandom. Daniel-fans (and I count myself as one) are/were extremely protective.

Also, McShep fans might not hate Teyla, but damn, for a while there I couldn't read a fic without tripping over Chaya-hate.

Re: From metafandom

[sally_maria]

I think there is where the difference between canon and non-canon ships comes in though. There's simply not the same reasons to bash a non canon pairing, even if it is the slash OTP that ate fandom. It's not there in the show, so you can just ignore it.

When you object to a canon ship though, it's easy to feel that you have to point out what is wrong with it. Attacking the rival character is an easy, though obviously problematic, way of doing that. And as I said below, the rival character is far more likely to be female, so that means that you get more bashed female characters, even if misogyny didn't exist - which I'm not suggesting for a moment.

Re: From metafandom

[carolyn_claire]

I was a Jack/Daniel shipper but not a Jack/Sam basher (I've never been a basher of any kind, actually. Critical, like I am with Mulder, but not a basher. *g*) But I did see, as a slasher, the depth of hatred spewed by some J/S shippers toward the slasher, and some of that involved Daniel. I never engaged or had a relationship with anyone who did this, but there were certain places I did. Not. Go. It was scary.

Re: From metafandom

[scrollgirl]

Actually, perhaps the only way to do a fair comparison is to look at queer texts, where the male/male and female/female romances have just as good a chance of being canon as the male/female. Unfortunately I think Torchwood still proves that women get it worse than the men. I have no idea about QaF or The L Word.

Re: From metafandom

[sally_maria]

Yes, that is very true, though again I don't think it's limited to slash fans. I think it's less to do with the orientation of the pairing and more to do with who is being "fought over". It's usually either 1 male or 1 female, or 2 females, fighting over 1 male. Since fans are much more likely to bash their favoured character's rival, statisically, it's more likely to be a woman.

What happened in fandoms where the one being fought over was a woman? From what I remember long ago, it was Angel and Spike who bore the brunt of the Buffy ship wars, not Buffy.