Male Roles Vs. Female Roles in Fiction: Discussion/Analysis/Troperwank

The impression given is less that he likes to write ass-kicking female heroines because he's a feminist, and more that he likes to write ass-kicking female heroines because that's what gets him off, and then he tries to paper over that with token nods to feminism. There's just something weirdly fetishised about it all

No that's pretty much the vibe I get from him. Not to get Freudian but having a feminist mother adds weight to the idea it's his turn on.

I suppose though if something is bad if it was written as merely a fetish depends on how the viewer interprets it.

Well, if it was "merely" written as a fetish, then it's only good or bad insofar as that fetish doesn't become an ipso facto gold standard that is above critique. Which is a trap I've seen many people fall into. I stopped watching the show after the second season because I really got tired of the Starcrossed Lovers motif with her and Angel. As an awkward teenage boy at the time, her pining for dark, handsome, tortured Angel was everything I'd grown to despise. I'd like to say I've grown up since then, but...I don't really think I have. It still irks the hell out of me, for reasons I can't put my finger on.

Likewise, I think some decent criticism was being made of River and Black Widow.

But it's a delicate problem to talk about because if people build up these characters as "Mission Accomplished" of feminism in media, and then you burst that bubble with insightful complaints, people just throw their hands up and go, "See? This is why I hate this stuff—no one's ever satisfied!"

edited 8th Oct '13 2:08:15 PM by KingZeal

We know he's got a fetish about women in bare feet.

I grew up in a household where there were was no such thing as "men's work" or "women's work" so when I see movies/shows where that is depicted clearly without sensationalism, lampshading or turning it into an anvilicious lesson on feminism, I find them refreshing compared to all the shows that depict men and women as equal but scream "Wow, what a fucking far-out concept, eh?" "Aren't we edgy and progressive?", "all you viewers are sexist bastards and you WILL FUCKING LEARN THIS LESSON!" etc.

To me, it's not a far-out concept. It's normal.

OK, I'm aware that it's not normal for everyone - I've met a fair few people to whom sexual equality was an alien concept - but that still doesn't excuse the obvious anvil-dropping or self-congratulatory "look, we're hip to this equality stuff, aren't we good" etc.

Even if Whedon does have some kind of "fetish" about equality, his portrayal of it is the best I've seen - inasmuch as Firefly/Serenity go, anyway.

edited 8th Oct '13 2:11:12 PM by Wolf1066

No offense, but I really don't think your background is really all that remarkable in this context. It's not like the rest of us all grew up in some regressive Victorian Era No Woman's Land.

At this point, we're not arguing whether Whedon's work is "feminist" but whether it's Fair for Its Day. Whedon's works certainly adhere to less sexist tropes than most television and film, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have some very subtle ones. For example, in the final episode where Jubal Early infiltrates the ship, you simultaneously have an episode where the villain threatens to rape the cutie (Kaylee) and gets defeated by different cutie (River). Does the latter point discredit the implications of the former? Would people have reacted the same if Simon had been the one threatened with rape to motivate Kaylee into doing something?

Black Widow's sexualization is a problem that stems from the comics, and was perhaps exacerbated by some poor casting choices in Scarlett Johansson (who is too tiny and too curvaceous by half to be playing any kind of asskicking superspy). I can see theoretically some problems with River, but I personally don't agree with them.

Thought exercise: how would you guys write River Tam as to not be "fetishy"?

Well right, some people will interpret Whedon's characters as fetishy and some won't. I know I've had to read some stories as a part of critique and have not exactly known how to explain this quality.

Like Wonder Woman started out as a fetish character but she's grown beyond that, I think.

I don't really get your criticism of Scarlett Johansson. I think she did a great job.

edited 8th Oct '13 2:20:22 PM by ohsointocats

Well, we could start by making her unpretty, or her clothing less◊ inclined◊ to◊ highlight it.◊

edited 8th Oct '13 2:27:34 PM by KingZeal

I have the same problem with River Tam as I do with Alice from Resident Evil.

A frial, bio engineered supergod who can just do everything is boring as hell to me.

Its a flat, empty character regardless of the gender and even fails to be a power fantasy for me.

I prefer characters like Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor or to a lesser degree Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft though she's pushing the line.

Linda Hamilton is flawed, has consequences to her being a badass, has strong and realistic motivations, and is still an awesome character.She is also a human character. She trained herself to be the badass, not some chemical injection either.

EDIT: a bioengineered badass I did like was Hanna. She was strong yes, but not to a super human degree entirely. She had a great teacher who raised her with specific training but still possible and she also had the social and emotional problems to go with it.

edited 8th Oct '13 3:01:16 PM by Gabrael

Zeal, I'm 50. Most the people I grew up around grew up in houses where there were strongly enforced gender roles and it was even worse when my sisters grew up (the younger just turned 62).

So my perception is definitely coloured by having seen a lot of movies/series back when sexual equality was a "radical idea" - and that includes as late as the 1980s - and it was variously displayed as shocking, novel, edgy etc.

In some ways, media still hasn't finished growing up with regard to male and female roles. Many things I've seen still struggle to get things - perhaps when some of those antiquated studio execs finally pop their clogs and are replaced by people from the current younger generation, character roles will be better balanced and portrayed more often.

edited 8th Oct '13 3:03:13 PM by Wolf1066

Ironically, Buffy's pining for dark, handsome, tortured Angel became a huge source of conflict in the second season, setting up even more conflict for the third season, and ultimately prompting Angel to leave the show to start his own, taking Cordelia with him. Buffy got over it, grew up, and moved on with her life, while Angel's broody, dark, tortured lifestyle was savagely deconstructed by Cordelia on a regular basis in order to make him get over himself and have an actual life, and both became much better people for having split from each other.

So basically, less Starcrossed Lovers, more Awkward Teenager's First Love.

Would the audience have even believed it if Simon had been threatened with rape, or would they have simply assumed he was being hyperbolic, making empty gestures, etc. This is, itself, a gender issue; we don't really take the prospect of rape-on-male seriously at all. For some of us, it's impossible to even picture a man in that position, and it's hard to create tension when it's not something we can feel at all; it's hard to fear the prospect of Simon being raped if you can't even conceive the notion of a man being raped.

Part of the reason why rape is considered to be a female fear is because a lot of men don't really fear it at all; it's just completely alien to them. For many men, the only time rape is even a topic that enters their mind, is as a worry about the women they love. So it would be very difficult to get an audience to take the prospect of "Simon threatened with rape" seriously when at least the males in the audience are immediately going to dismiss it as a weird, throwaway nonsense line.

edited 8th Oct '13 3:05:00 PM by TobiasDrake

You know I haven't been keeping up television lately but from hearing this conversation, I still think we still have places to go. Why can't we just focus on making strong characters rather than strong females?

Characters like Alice and River are also the reasons that the Amazonian Beauty is considered the exception and not the rule.

Because you can't do the former without figuring out the latter.

edited 8th Oct '13 3:10:15 PM by KingZeal

Possibly introducing the fear of male characters being raped would be a good thing, though.

I don't think it is a problem that a woman is beautiful that makes her unbelievable. For River and Alice it is because it looks like you can break them over your knee.

Take the difference between Columbiana and Haywire. In Columbiana, you had the same 90lb tiny girl being some sort of badass. Excluding how horrible that movie was in general, contrast that with Gina Corrano from Haywire. She is built like a brick shithouse. She looks like if she punches you, you will go down. Just like when she takes damage but keeps going it is believable.

I dont believe that skinny ass River Tam can take out a whole room of Reavers. Most people wouldn't. So they have to say she is genetically engineered, mutated, supernatural, etc.

It isn't a problem but it is an easy cop out that can take the character in a bad direction. Alice is a perfect example of that.

Michele Rodriguez commented how she doesn't take roles of weak or vulnerable women because she doesn't feel like it would be believable. And I agree with her. She picks roles her full talents both physical and behavioral can be utilized in. And overall, she has more credibility in her roles for it.

True. Summer Glau is about as realistic as a badass fighter as Peewee Herman.

I find Waif-Fu quite a stretch of Willing Suspension of Disbelief. But being a serious warrior is not the only way a character can be strong.

In my current WIP, I'm writing a female urbanite thrown into a forest survival situation. Her lack of training and physical conditioning is going to make things difficult for her but her strength is going to be in her determination to endure, survive and learn. She'll get fitter and stronger over the course of the story - not superhumanly strong but still quite capable of keeping pace with more-seasoned people - but her strength from the outset is going to be her "not let it get me down and don't whinge about it" attitude. Her willingness to learn what she needs, not being scared to say "I don't know how, please show me" and knowing that once she learns, she'll be able to do it.

@zeal- I'd think creating new diverse characters WOULD be addressing the issue.

Though this is partly due to my view that we as a culture have been almost totally bereft of originality of late. Too many sequels/reboots/prequels/ect.

As for glau, Her being incredibly badass despite her size is kind of the entire point of the experiments, in addition to the mental stuff. Firefly may be a "harder" sci-fi in someways, but not in everything.

edited 8th Oct '13 5:33:39 PM by Joesolo

I've never warmed to it either. Now, it can be done right - the Swedish movie version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo did so. Noomi Rapace was skinny and wiry sure, but also ripped as hell; every time she flexed you could count her muscles. But in general, I have trouble believing it.

This is why in my detective story my female lead is described as robust *

By itself it is actually one of the worst ways; for any character but for female characters especially. Sure, back in the late '80s when Joss Whedon first conceived of Buffy it was a good idea, and his neat inversion of the standard "disposable chick victim" trope in horror movies was pretty revolutionary. For the time.

These days though, you can't swing a cat without hitting an Action Girl. There are better ways to beef up women's roles in fiction than simply turning them into beefcake.

edited 8th Oct '13 5:35:21 PM by drunkscriblerian

@Gabrael:

You know, I've been thinking about body types and character types, and I actually don't mind petite women performing heavy-duty combat maneuvers. Physical size is often miscalculated and overstated when it comes to being a competent fighter. Having said that, Milla Jovovich's performance as Alice was jarring and contrived largely because her mannerisms and tactics made very little sense, as they did with the protagonist of Colombiana. Hanna's (from the movie of the same name) body movements and agility made sense because she genuinely struggled to fight against grown men twice her size. In other words, Hanna operated as she appeared - like a 15-year-old girl with extensive hand-to-hand combat training. It took her several exhaustive minutes to subdue the two men who attacked her, and I was satisfied that the writers and choreographers didn't just turn her into Jason Bourne Mini Me Female Edition. Hanna seriously had to readjust her tactics and economy of motion to deal with two naturally more powerful foes who were taller, wider and heavier than her.

I have my own bias about fictional women in hand-to-hand fighting situations due to my background, but one of my major complaints is that many of the fictional females suddenly become untouchable whirlwinds when they are faced with hostile foes. This storytelling device seems to be a gross side-effect of the "you go girl" sensibilities of modern feminism. Excessive affirmation of female capability has led to the propagation of inauthentic female characters who developed contrived invincibility. In Alice's case, this is damn-near literal.

You'll notice that several media of past and present latched onto the whole female strength affirmation trope and took it to its logical extreme. A bunch of guys surround a woman. She suddenly whips the piss out of every single one of them when in reality, she would have been pummeled, dogpiled, shot, stabbed or otherwise taken off guard. This trope has its origin in many values such as the belief that a man shouldn't hit a woman and the belief that unconventional tactics prevail because they are unconventional, not despite such. In turn, Western media enjoys token efforts to empower women such as having the woman beat the tar out of a bunch of dudes twice her size. It's pandering, yes, but as Zeal suggested, this isn't inherently bad. It's just that we may need to dial things back a notch because female affirmation through violence is producing the false notion that a few martial arts lessons and an attitude are all you need to take on several dangerous opponents or even just one.

We have several tropes that explain this character construction trend such as She-Fu, Real Women Never Wear Dresses, Wai-Fu and Combat Stilettos. Think about all of the times you've seen a female character use an upward toe kick on an opponent holding her in a rear waist grab. Think of the number of times you've seen a female character use airborne techniques or some sort of hip throw as if to communicate to the audience "I'm wearing my ovaries on the outside".

Again, these occurrences aren't inherently bad, but they have been overused to the point where they are beginning to turn female action-oriented characters into caricatures of actual female combatants. This is part of the novelty and selling point of movies like Haywire, which by the way I want to see more often. The movie was strongly advertised as a showcase of Gina Carano's MMA prowess, and it greatly helped that Carano has an Amazonian physique that accentuates her Muay Thai and BJJ movements. Likewise, Hanna uses techniques rooted in defensive fighting styles such as Aikido, Eskrima and Krav Maga - systems ideal for a pubescent girl who needs to gather makeshift weapons and stave off opponents sufficiently enough to safely flee.

In short, I don't have a problem with Wai-Fu. I have a problem with how the trope is clumsily and lazily used as a shorthand for "she can fight".

edited 8th Oct '13 5:59:59 PM by Aprilla

Exactly. Hanna sees a five man team of black ops coming for her and she dives in a drainage tunnel and runs like hell. Alice would have somehow taken them all out without a scratch and not been effected at all. Hanna at least breathes harder and shows fatigue as well as emotional development. She is also a skilled linguist and guerrilla fighter. Eric Bana's character also demonstrates himself competent so as Hanna's teacher we can give more credibility to the both of them.

Alice? Thin and well the only thing we have is the T Virus changed her.

You can take the character Hanna places. You can't really take Alice anywhere as evident by the diminishing quality of her characterization and the hairbrained and undercutting plots thathave to be jimmy rigged to justify her eexistence. Alice doesn't have an arc, she has a plateau. Hanna has arcs and substantial material to build from should they continue with her story.

Linda Hamilton's transformation both physically and as a character between Terminator I and II was powerful because she was a well established and sustained character in the first one. They had a plan, knew where they wanted to take her, and gave plausible seeds of her rising to the challenges of the first movie so when she comes back as this cold hard badass in the second, you get it.

I think they did her growth very well and again with Hanna or other characters, there are personal consequences to balance her strengths.

Alice, River, Columbiana, what consequences do they face? None. Sure their friends die a lot but very rarely is that treated as anything significant. They as people don't change or have to be effected in anyway. That's just empty and weak for long term sustainably.

edited 9th Oct '13 7:33:28 AM by Gabrael

I blame tropes like Beauty Is Never Tarnished. Bulky muscles are considered unattractive on a woman, and as I mentioned much earlier in the thread, female characters (with very few exceptions) must be conventionally attractive. And that's not even getting into the beauty-tarnishing effects of black eyes, bloodied noses, and the more severe injuries that can be suffered by someone taking on a gang in a fistfight.

edited 8th Oct '13 6:08:34 PM by Karalora

@Gab: This is interesting, I haven't thought of Alice as anything but standard Mary Sue fodder before. Invincible enough that her adventures are not interesting, but I think see your point. Have you played the games, and if yes do you feel the female characters are done better there, (despite the limited character they receive.)?

I don't think there is any reason why you can't write a character 'one-handed' while at the same time making her a well rounded female character. The trouble is when you start mistaking your personal fetishes for female empowerment in themselves.

Robert A. Heinlein was right to think tough independent Feisty Redhead were hot , but he still was just writing about how hot his wife was.

edited 8th Oct '13 6:27:05 PM by joeyjojo

Well there's also the fact that Wonder Woman has been handled by many, many different writers over the years, many of who probably did not see her as fetish fuel.

However yes you have a good point.

@Aprilla: YES yes yes people overstate how much bulk and whatnot matter in a fight. There seems to be this idea that "someone who is bigger will win, women are smaller and therefore will lose" and then the simple subversion "Small woman wins by doing big man things" which is really stupid. There's a lot to a fight that is not dependent on the combatant's size and a lot of it is just dumb luck.

edited 8th Oct '13 6:48:40 PM by ohsointocats

Actually the deciding factor in real fights tends to be who is more willing to get hurt.

I know that does not make a good deal of sense, but bear in mind; the mere act of striking another human barehanded isn't a cakewalk; I've personally witnessed people breaking bones throwing a punch. Not being afraid of your own blood and seizing initiative is what wins actual brawls.

Basically, you have to be meaner than your opponent.

Historically, Hollywood does a poor job of capturing this concept, mostly because of filming conventions bred out of limitations of the medium - specifically, safety of the stuntmen. In a staged fight, both combatants have to be able to react to "cues" from their partner...they have to be ready to react to a faked punch, kick or grapple. If they aren't, injuries can be the result. This is why most movie fistfights - even very good ones - feel stagey and mannered...it's because they have to be.

Also, Hollywood wants its brawls to feel dynamic; it wants to show us people moving around. real fights involve grappling at some point, and one only has to watch an MMA bout to see how boring - or giggle-worthy - grappling can end up looking. Sure, a lot of MMA submission holds are effective and/or painful as hell. But unless someone has been on the receiving end of one, watching two fighters struggle over who has the upper hand in a grappling match looks a hell of a lot like something else.

Thus the proliferation of "punchy-punchy-block-block-dance" in the average bout of cinema fisticuffs. Showing the kind of initiative and savagery required to win a real brawl would be dangerously unsafe for actors and stuntmen.

Also, the results of such a contest don't look pretty. Hell, they don't even look all that heroic. I've seen what someone who just went through a real fistfight looked like, and not only did they look like hamburger they looked...well, ridiculous. And they supposedly won the fight.

The reason this bears on our discussion; we want our heroes to look heroic - whether male or female - and the real results of an extended brawl don't leave anyone looking that way. Male action heroes toil under the same stricture; I don't know if "face of iron" or "fists of adamantium" are tropes, but they damn well should be. Getting punched in the face turns faces into marshmallows; doing it renders a person's fist skinned and bloody - or full of broken bones if they don't know what the hell they're doing. I've taken some classes on unarmed combat, and both my instructors talked about how stupid punching someone in the head with a bare hand can be. *

Tl:dr: most of the unreality in fight scenes involving women can be traced back to basic Hollywood unreality rather than any form of sexism.

edited 8th Oct '13 7:23:45 PM by drunkscriblerian