Basic Trope: Women and femininity inherently cause drama and intense feelings.
- Straight:
- A woman walks into a gym and all of the male gym rats start drooling over her.
- The Ingenue daughter and Bratty Teenage Daughter often put themselves into problems, that cause their father to become extremely protective toward them.
- A woman causes trouble for a group of people trying to concentrate on important business.
- A Final Girl is trying to evade a dangerous killer.
- Exaggerated:
- Every single woman in the film, without exception, creates angst.
- Sasha is So Beautiful, It's a Curse, a Dumb Blonde who cries over every small thing, constantly schemes against all the other characters, and is a Damsel in Distress every episode.
- Downplayed:
- Rather than the trope being exhibited with multiple characters or one character who is an extreme example, it's instead present in one or two subtropes, such as a Sissy Villain or a Territorial Smurfette.
- Agent Peacock hero solves problems and saves the world, while Damsel in Distress often puts herself into problems.
- Justified:
- The show is a Lifetime Movie of the Week intent on displaying women as obligatory victims of external circumstances.
- Men in the show aren't accustomed to women, so they don't know how to deal with them or teach them badass skills.
- Inverted:
- The story is a Feminist Fantasy of women getting things done, while the male characters cause problems or stress through stereotypically male traits (e.g. Small Name, Big Ego Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy who drives the heroines into problems).
- The girl and Sensitive Guy in the show are treated as the Flawless Token, while straight, manly male characters are incompetent and Too Dumb to Live.
- Subverted: Using the gym example - the male gym rats look in her direction... then turn out to be looking at a much more interesting event behind her.
- Double Subverted: The "interesting event" is a bunch of cheerleaders showing off.
- Parodied: Men literally can't function right around women in this universe - they're always distracted, tongue-tied, prone to stupidity, and often need saving from things they can otherwise avoid.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Some drama and tension are caused by women and femininity, and some of them have different causes.
- The trouble is caused by a Brainless Beauty Damsel in Distress princess, but then the Girly Bruiser Knight in Shining Armor heroine, Sasha, steps in, defeats the problematic monster, and saves the princess. However, when Sasha suffers from a Heroic BSoD, she becomes a Hysterical Woman with unstable superpowers and accidentally destroys everything that costs the life of the princess, but then she recovers it and she Took a Level in Kindness. Her recovery causes her to lose all of her powers and puts herself in danger, but the effeminate Captain Peacock saves her in time only to reveal he's a Sissy Villain who acts like a hero to lure in innocent and helpless victims. After going through some internal reflection he pulls a Heel–Face Turn to become a proper hero alongside Sasha, but Sasha is So Beautiful, It's a Curse and so distracts the male villagers to the point where they chase her; Captain Peacock decides to Gender Bend Sasha to reveal that she is actually a "guy", but Sasha can't take being the opposite gender and the men keep chasing him since the male Sasha still looks, dresses and behaves like her feminine self. He eventually accepts this since he knows he can embrace it, and make everyone in the village become a pretty boy.
- Averted:
- None of the conflicts are the result of women existing; instead, the problems are caused by non-human sources (such as natural disasters or the genderless Monster of the Week.)
- The story is a Sugar Bowl with full-fledged gender equality. All men and women are extremely respectful to each other, they always help each other out, and there is No Antagonist and no troublemaker of any gender at all.
- Masculine men, masculine women, feminine men, and feminine women live separately in four divided communities or even planets of their separate species, each with members of only one gender and expression. There are only homosexual relationships and reproduction, no communities need others to survive and they don't even realize the existence of each other, so it's impossible for problems and drama to be caused by different gender identities and expressions.
- Enforced:
- The writer is a He-Man Woman Hater and lets his Author Appeal bleed into his work.
- The writer is a Female Misogynist and lets her Author Appeal bleed into her work.
- Lampshaded: "If shit happens, look for the women involved in it. There is always a woman involved when shit happens."
- Invoked: A female character banks on her ability to cause Distracted by the Sexy so she can gain followers of her own.
- Exploited: The Vamp of the series uses her femininity as a weapon to destroy men for her own selfish designs.
- Defied: Both men and women come to an agreement that their interactions must remain as minimal as possible, mostly because women don't want to be described as evil sowers of discord and misery among men on one hand; and on the other hand, men would rather live peacefully with the female half of humanity rather than having to resort to violence and coercion to keep them in check all the time.
- Discussed: "So, it's not possible to have women anywhere without something horrible happening because of them, even if they don't do anything, even if they do truly mean well?" "Women exist; this in itself is a problem, like it or not."
- Conversed: "How come fiction always does its best to make men paranoid about women and women behave like constant troublemakers?"
- Implied: A female character passes through the scene. A few moments later, the men find themselves unable to do what they want, much to their frustration.
- Deconstructed: Because men and women just can't come to an understanding and just can't interact with each other normally due to women's femininity being considered disruptive at best and destructive at worst, humanity slowly fades to extinction since both sexes just can't get along anymore, not even for reproduction, and actively avoid one another.
- Reconstructed: Men eventually come to terms with the idea that women never asked to exist as women for the sole purpose of making men miserable. Women are just men's Distaff Counterpart, nothing more, nothing less, and femininity isn't inherently evil or chaos-inducing.
- Played for Laughs: Two men have a Wimp Fight over a woman who can't care less.
- Played for Drama: The male characters reacting like this is a clear indicator of the setting being a No Woman's Land.
- Played for Horror: A Serial Killer's agenda involves going after women exclusively and leaving men untouched, believing that if he can eradicate femininity, he's doing the world a service... and this includes torturing said women as well, in gruesome ways.
Back to Womanliness as Pathos.
