A male equivalent would be a separate trope, at the very least, and I think the nature of its implications would probably be considerably different as well.

Really? I've never seen that happen. If anything, a male character's manliness is always praised to the heavens, while a sensitive male character is bashed for not being "manly" enough.

Actually, if a male acts too masculine, he gets accused of Testosterone Poisoning.

Possibly within this wiki Rose64bud, as us Tvtropers are a more enlightened bunch, who should be too Genre Savvy to apply Real Women Never Wear Dresses or the inversion to anyone (if not, someone help their souls)but not out there in the internets.

True, the inversion is rare, now I think about it, it's probably too rare to put any examples down, Real Women Wear Dresses exists becuase the amount of people believing it is large and vocal, the inversion however does not have the same following, it simply had enough to anger me,and I let that get the better of me to be honest.

Testosterone Poisoning could actually be a part of this 'masculinity bashing' I'm talking about; portraying masculine men as idiots. Some instances are clearly bashing men that are clearly too masculine to be real, and masculinity, like all things, is dangerous in excess, therefore these instances are only bashing dangerous behaviour, however, some instances of Testosterone poisoning do seem to be bashing all masculine men, or even just men in general.

As for 69.107.84.6 I've realised that people bashing 'manly' men are not great and vocal enough to make a trope, but just to give you an example just look at how people expect feminine men to automatically be sensitive and masculine men to be cold and ruthless.

Actually, I believe the trope is less about personality traits, and more about character actions, such as wearing skirts. Or at least, both are relevant.

"Once a female character is seen doing something a little, well, too domestic for her own good, say, doing menial household chores, or getting dressed up really fancy, or being too chummy with dudes..."

And the trope isn't just about female characters acting feminine, either; it's about disproportionately angry fan reactions when a female character does something that fits traditional feminine stereotypes (especially if she is actually a well-rounded and strong character).

Yeah, I realize now that I worded my question wrong. Basically, my problem is the entries which are like "Character X wears a skirt but she's actually badass" - that's just taking the trope literally. Characters are not bashed simply for wearing a skirt, they're bashed because people associate skirts with "girly"/"anti-feminist"/etc. However, in case of canon, if canon has no such association (ie. the skirt is obviously used to make her more classy and more like an Ojou/Lady Of War) I don't see the point of including the character on the list. However, it makes sense when canon is aware of the trope and is using/lampshading/averting it.

I hope I'm being clear...

It's about any thing a character does that is 'feminine' being treated as if it is bad. That can be anything from wearing dresses to enjoying gardening.

Being "feminine" shouldn't be thought of as inherently bad. I wonder...if said character is portrayed as being girly, sensitive, and then turns out to be a strong badass character, would that be an inversion or a subversion? Just wondering.

Okay, I clearly didn't get the meaning of this trope when I first read it. I just think equating this with You Say Girl Like Its A Bad Thing makes no sense, since the two titles seem to be diametrically opposed to one another irreconsilably.

I think that would be like an inversion of Real Men Wear Pink... which doesn't have its own trope, since Real Men Wear Pink is averted so commonly in both real life and fiction that such a trope would effectively be People Sit On Chairs.

Wow, what an asshole. On top of being a troll, he's also sexist. I don't think the quote belongs here since it's not a comment on women though. It's a comment on Spoony's insecure masculinity. Er, sorry. It's a comment on how in Spoony's worldview, men that liked a song in a video game are apparently not real men and women are "better" than men who like this song. Therefore implying that women are lesser than men...

...and women on that site love to talk about how brilliant he is. Goddamn, I'm going into Straw Feminist mode. I need to stop.

I think this trope makes a valid point and isn't just a load of opinions (many examples are, but many arn't, same with alot of tropes). It's wrong to hate a female character just becuase she's female and feminine. The ideas behind this phsycology are very un-feminist and expect women to behave in a way that is unrealistic according to the many different personalities out there.

It's a tricky line to straddle - on the one hand, female characters do get the shaft a lot in media and genuine discussion of roles of women in media and how they're portrayed is vital. There's plenty of room to criticize shallow stereotyping.

This trope is a pretty dangerous one though - it's pretty easy to go from attacking backwards Stay In The Kitchen thinking to simply attacking women for being women. In which case you're not promoting feminism or better approaches to gender, you're just reinforcing status quo (i.e. "Feminine things are bad").

What I find myself not appreciating about a lot of the examples is this outright demonizing of people who dislike female characters for being what they consider stereotypically feminine regardless of their reasoning.

I personally have a hard time really liking most female characters because most writers have an idea of "feminine" that is somehow incompatible with being, say, actually COMPETENT at anything relevant to the interesting parts of the story (Relena of Gundam Wing is pretty much the Ur-example; yes, she's a pacifist and really good at being a figurehead, but since it's a giant robot show about cool robots having awesome space battles, her merits look kind of doofy by comparison), or being of any worth beyond being a foil to a male character.

"Feminine" isn't usually as simple as a character trait; I can't think of very many examples where any given female is actually on equal terms with her male peers, especially in large ensemble casts where girls are relegated to either a maternal role, or a love-interest for a more important male character. I think a lot of the problem comes from the association that pink and frills and such are intrinsic to the kind of ineffective, passive character that a great deal of female characters in several works represent; looking at a lot of the examples, some of these girls just don't do much when you consider the kind of things their male counterparts are getting up to.

I just don't think it's fair to demonize people who dislike certain female characters by bleaching out every possible argument against their portrayal as being "They don't like her because she wears a pink dress". Moreover I know there's at least a couple of examples of "the fandom hates this female character because she does this feminine thing" when the loudest complainers never (or very rarely) complained about the character, but at the writers' decision to portray her the way they did.

As it stands, this is just a big Complaining page.

At Seven Dead Pine Trees.

I totally agree with your opinion. There is a reason to complain when the feminine characters, though good and nice, are not active in the development or the story, or aren't cool. That's a valid complain. But that's not what's being criticised here. It's OK if people think "I don't like her because she isn't interesting or adventurous or a fighter". That's perfectly OK. The problem is when a character that isn't liked for not being adventurous or a fighter, gets bashed and furiously hated for being feminine. The case is severe with Sansa Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire (beware of the spoilers, for some reason, the markers didn't do their job, and ASOIAF suffers greatly if you get spoiled). Sansa can be annoying and somewhat boring, since playing the harp is fun to do and listen to but not to read. What she is not is an evil traitor. This trope is about female characters being despised for no other reason than being feminine. We aren't talking about them being "uncool". We are talking about them being accused of things they just didn't do, while characters who do far worse get away with it only because they have he ability and willingness to commit violent acts. Some girls are hated because they don't kill.

Your criticism is perfectly OK. This trope is not for when the criticism is "the female character is normal and therefore not interesting". This trope is for "the female character is evil, a traitor, brutally dumb, because she is girly". "Relena not interesting". Fine. "Relena a bitch because she won't get into the mecha". This trope.

And I totally agree with that! But so many of the examples on the page don't actually reflect that, or instead go out of their way to rephrase common complaints in a fandom specifically to make people who make those complaints look stupid.

The Samurai Champloo example for Fuu is exactly what I'm talking about; she does get a lot of Die For Our Ship and hatedom from the yaoi fandom for Mugen and Jin, but a much greater amount of the camp that dislikes Fuu thinks she's irritating because she mainly exists to eat a lot, get kidnapped, and function as a plot device to keep the boys from killing each other before the end of the show and keep them moving on the road, and her personality is much less complex because unlike the other two main characters, she doesn't have a corresponding foil or interesting, complex backstory. I remember watching the show and skipping several of her scenes because they contributed next to nothing to the story and weren't entertaining to watch.

Or the Valkyria Chronicles example, which is probably worse; I have never seen anyone complain that Alicia was "stripped" of her magic powers or that being a baker is somehow wrong, but I have seen people complain that Alicia's magic powers made her stupid because she looks everywhere but herself for answers, and tries to kill herself because her boyfriend didn't tell her that it was okay to not kill herself, or that the game suffered because the writers were so focused on dropping anvils that they never even presented the idea that Alicia could find something responsible and sane to do with her powers. I haven't played the entire game, I admit, and I haven't played it in years, but I do remember being disgusted at that arc of the story purely for those (and similar) reasons.

And then there's the Real Life example of the childfree nutjob who insulted a woman for miscarrying— what does that even have to DO with Real Women Never Wear Dresses? The .. ahem, let's be diplomatic and say vehement, section of that group tends to openly hate the self-centered and heteronormative parent-child culture that all women are expected to want to and actively participate in, and childless/childfree women and couples are sometimes subject to some pretty rotten discrimination and condescending attitudes— one lunatic being an asshole on the internet does not constitute this trope!

It's just Complaining.

Oh, tropes applied when they don't really fit the work? I'm afraid it's not a question about this trope specially, but of tvtropes in general. Lots of tropes that don't apply get applied all of the time when they don't really fit. However, that criticism of yours is correct. Still, that happens in many of the trope pages. The problem is, as long as there are genuine cases of the trope, the page about the trope should still exist. So, the trope itself it's not "just complaining", but many of the examples are incorrect. Not that it doesn't happen in the rest of the wiki.

I haven't read Samurai Shamploo, but do I hate the kidnapped girl trope. Got too old at the third time, a headbanger the millionth time you see it.

Does this page even need examples? It seems like the description chould stand by itself without examples and it's just an invitation to Natter.

Well, yes, but most other trope pages aren't so completely saturated in what amounts to exaggerated whining about fandoms. Of course I'm not familiar with every single work on the page, but if the ones I do know are any example, then a large quantity of the examples on this page are basically bullshit rewritten by people who want to demonize the non-fans of whatever female character they're championing. It's one thing to list examples that have to be shoehorned in to fit a trope (or simply don't fit it at all according to the actual trope description and not a general idea of what the trope is about), it's another to exaggerate a common fandom complaint into creepy misogyny; this isn't about people just being wrong about the way the trope applies, this is more about people using the trope page to complain about opinions they don't like.

I'm with Fighteer. The description can stand on its own, and the examples ought to be moved to a Darth Wiki, or Troper Tales.

I'm not familiar with every fandom mentioned either, but in the ones I know I've seen the trope in action. Often it goes hand in hand with Die For Our Ship, but just as often it's people criticizing a female character for being feminine/mild-mannered/not a fighter, etc. (= weak) instead of aggressive/fighter/kickass (= strong). It's a common fandom complaint, but it is mysogynistic.

But that's the point! It's not a trope if it isn't in a work. Fan Dumb is not the same as a literary device used in media!

We have plenty of tropes on this sight dealing with fandom behaviors, hence the existence of this one.

No, there are plenty of pages on this site dealing with fandom behaviors; they are also not tropes. Just because there are lots of them it doesn't make them trends in media productions. That's like saying putting lots of apples in a bag of oranges turns them into oranges.

Tropes have to have examples from the work to be tropes. This is just a page detailing the opinions of people outside of the work. I'm with the opinion that all the examples need to be cut and the description can stand on its own.

S/he once vandalized the Die For Our Ship page with some Relena bashing. That may have something to do with it.

Honestly, I can see two reasons for that. 1)The picture is up there BECAUSE Mulan is cutting her hair to "shed her femininity", and goes on to be a soldier only at the end to go back home.

2)Mulan get's it pretty bad, it makes since for her to be the page image. The fact that this image is pretty friggen iconic of her character doesn't hurt. XD

Exactly, Mulan's one of the most obvious examples of this. Disney went from damsel-in-distress Megara to Action Girl Mulan and people still complained about the supposed sexism of her being kinda feminine. Give a mouse a cookie and he'll ask for a glass of milk.

That, and it was a convenient excuse to reference a Zelda meme. o.o

Let's not forget Buttercup in the Powerpuff Girls anime. Then there's characters like Utena or Oscar where wearing a dress is a significant moral crisis due to their gender issues. I think it might be, but put it on YKTTW first.

I think one should be put through YKTTW, because I am absolutely sick of seeing this trope potholed and treated as what you mentioned by people who apparently just read the title. If anyone can come up with something, I'd be really grateful.

If you're saying that there should be a different trope for women who simply don't like wearing dresses and skirts, I agree. How about Does Not Like Skirts? And yes, there's a difference between that and shunning anything considered 'feminine' on the basis that it signals weakness (something I'm still trying to convince a few family members of). I say you should go for it.