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

Sure but the movie is just one while the game have being more, is not like Kano who was retcon from japanise amaerica to Australian for teddy boggart who played him in movie(I mean Kano is right now a ink suit actor for him), Kitana should have being Asian sooner.

The gender change did get bought up as part of the sexist hatred thrown at Captain Marvel. Though I still stand that that was a situation near-totally contained to social media.

I also recall there being no complaints from the usual suspects when the Antman and Wasp movie made the Ghost a black woman.

In part of how much nobody know about antman, I mean the fact he move from a avenger founder to a super duper minor guy in the team said volumes

I will said if there something nobody complain and I baffle me is Valkire in ragnarok, she is awsome action heronie woman of color who.....is and slaver

And slave a white, blone, blue eye men...a movement usually done by fetish pulp maganizes

and finally is reveal she was part of Odin atack foce, which would be good except he was a warmonger for one know how long.

She get way with all this actually, is surprising there wasnt a outrage, even a fake one from atl boys and you would expect the second point would rile them really good.

Clarify, if you could please. Sources would also be nice.

Sure! I'll start with my first point, specifically that men and women have differences in personality and interest.

Regarding personality, men and women are cross-culturally different in traits such as aggression, agreeableness, and susceptibility to negative emotion.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12265 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11519935

The last of these articles examined 26 different cultures worldwide, and with an N of ~23,000 (which is a gigantic sample size).

It's also true of interest, by the way. Men and women, again cross-culturally, have differences in interest.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Things_Women_and_People_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Sex_Differences_in_Interests

This is also evident in small children. Girls, from a *very* early age, prefer to play with dolls, and men with trucks.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/icd.2064 https://www.pitt.edu/~bertsch/Todd_et_al-2016-Infant_and_Child_Development.pdf

We also see this in gaze durations in even younger infants.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9430-1

We also see the same thing in other primates.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

The best explanation for this is pre-natal exposure to hormones, which either masculinizes or feminizes the brain. Evidence for this is seen in girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), in which females are given an abnormally higher dose of testosterone than normal. These girls display more masculine behaviors in play style, choice of toys, etc.

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/87/11/5119/2823336 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15693771 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2015.0125

Now, I am absolutely *not* denying that environmental influences play a factor: they do, and a very large one. But the science is quite clear that men and women have inherent differences in personality that are cross-cultural, robust (they don't go away the harder you look at them), and seen as early as infancy. These are then, of course, molded and shaped by societal norms and parenting.

Edited by TheThoughtAssassin on Oct 14th 2019 at 9:38:37 AM

Yeeeeaaaaah you’re wrong here. Like. Very wrong.

If you drop a toddler down in front of 2 different toys, a truck and a barbie, and they’ve never played with a toy before... they’re gonna pick one at random. Probably whichever one is shinier or more colorful.

You can’t say “women are inherently more likely to be afraid of violence” when you’re exclusively talking about cultures with patriarchal histories. Those cultures (aka every culture) are going to treat people differently all throughout their lives, and that’s going to affect how they react to things, how they behave, how they view themselves.

Not to mention, gender is not that simple. Where do trans people fit in to this? Nonbinary people? Intersex people? Women born with two X chromosomes?

"If you drop a toddler down in front of 2 different toys, a truck and a barbie, and they’ve never played with a toy before... they’re gonna pick one at random. Probably whichever one is shinier or more colorful."

I posted several studies that directly contradict this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/icd.2064 https://www.pitt.edu/~bertsch/Todd_et_al-2016-Infant_and_Child_Development.pdf https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9430-1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

"You can’t say “women are inherently more likely to be afraid of violence” when you’re exclusively talking about cultures with patriarchal histories. Those cultures (aka every culture) are going to treat people differently all throughout their lives, and that’s going to affect how they react to things, how they behave, how they view themselves."

What is more likely, that every culture (even when separated for centuries) on earth independently constructed a society resulting in the same exact personality differences between men and women, or that men and women are just inherently different (which we know is the case with anatomy?). By the way, most of those studies addressed the cultural issue, which is the whole point of asking the question.

"Not to mention, gender is not that simple. Where do trans people fit in to this? Nonbinary people? Intersex people? Women born with two X chromosomes?"

These are sexual differences, meaning men and female. Interestingly enough, this exact science actually legitimizes transpeople by demonstrating quite clearly that there is a masculine and feminine brain; trans people have a real, demonstrable disconnect between their bodies and their brain chemistry.

Here's a wonderful summary by Steven Pinker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mYeZ9by-eM

"There is a technical term for people who believe that boys and girls are indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization: 'childless'."

Edited by TheThoughtAssassin on Oct 14th 2019 at 10:14:17 AM

I also want to add that these studies aren't without criticism. They are, like all science is. But this literature does represent a broad consensus within psychology.

Sure, there are some differences.

It's a holdover from when we were stunningly sexually dimorphic even by ape standards versus our currently relatively mildly dimorphic (we are currently the least dimorphic of the great apes by a long way — even bonobos are arguably more sexually dimorphic, and they're pitiful by typical pan standards).

Losing the great sexual divide is the price we paid for getting gud at specialising in the generalist approach to tool use from the autralopiths onwards.

So, yeah. We got gracile and boosted culture because not having such a rigid biological shackle helped us survive.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Oct 14th 2019 at 3:08:51 PM

Absolutely. And again, I'm not trying to say that men and women are so incredibly different therefore "women belong in the kitchen" or something. I'm only stating that the science is quite clear in that men and women do retain *some* inherent differences in personality, interest, anatomy, etc. And that these may indeed affect their portrayal in fiction.

To summarize and quote former President of the APA, Diane Halpern:

"Yet, despite all the noise in the data, clear and consistent messages could be heard. There are real, and in some cases sizable, sex differences with respect to some cognitive abilities. Socialization practices are undoubtedly important, but there is also good evidence that biological sex differences play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences..."

Edited by TheThoughtAssassin on Oct 14th 2019 at 10:12:19 AM

Culture is our biggest, baddest determinative. And has been since before we started carting burning embers about for quick, dependable fire-starting.

Religion being a part of it, too.

I would say that's up for debate, given just how much literature there is on cognitive sex differences. But I will agree that the overwhelming consensus is that both nature and nurture are at play, not just one or the other. The exact percentages (50/50, 60/40) are of course up for debate.

It's at this point I generally chuck David Hume into the ring and do a runner. Fair warning... <gets ready to shotput a statue of a Scot>

Of course the question would be unto some extent biology play a hand and were culture start to do so.

I will said culture understand biological diference but it take at a sort of truism of most sort becauser cultural understand of gender is really fucking hard.

Also a paleoconservative? here in this forum? now that is much for a change.

There are dozens of us! Dozens! And not all of us Pat Buchanan!

Question about the toys thing, then.

How are boys inherently, biologically designed to gravitate towards toys of trucks and army men... when both of those are things created by human beings? How did we evolve to a point where male infants are wired to want an object that has only existed for about 100 years? Were boys wired that way back in the 50s, only half a century after the automobile was invented?

I'm reminded of the two separate meltdowns that occurred when the black/white mix actress Zendaya was cast as Mary-Jane Watson for the MCU Spider-Man films.

First when the casting was announced and she was speculated to be MJ, but that one died down when the creative team revealed her character was actually "Michelle".

Then again when "Michelle Jones" turned out to still be the franchise's adaptation of MJ nonetheless. Cue the cries of "She's not named Mary-Jane tho! They're gonna kill her off and bring in the REAL Mary-Jane!"

Uhhhh

You're asking for us to give the original Mortal Kombat game brownie points because they had a last-second realization that, in a game featuring nine characters, one of them should be female?

That's, like, the bare minimum of female representation. And they almost didn't even do that much.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 14th 2019 at 8:49:32 AM

But, seriously mate: hormones certainly have an effect on the nervous system, alright (heck, they are part of the nervous system).

But (and this is a big but), hormones don't enforce cultural ideas through learned behaviour and teaching. The whole package of physical, mental, environmental and situational feedback loops that makes us up does that.

Is-Ought. Always.

It's nature and nurture in a dance... and we've been piling the nurture on for long enough for it to dogpile the nature and make it lose, say, the wisdom teeth along with a lot of musculature that makes it harder to grow frontal lobes at the same time.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Oct 14th 2019 at 3:53:58 PM

The answer is the very rough separation of interests between "things" and between "people."

To put it another way, women are (on average) more interested in people, and men (on average) more interested in things; by "things" I refer to non-anthropomorphic objects like cars, trucks, etc. This is supported best by a meta-analysis of 47 studies with a total of 503,000 subjects.

"Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140

So in the case of modern toys with modern inventions (trucks, cars, tanks, etc.) it's just a more recent manifestation of inherent tilt towards gadgety things.

The Wikipedia page on neurological differences has a section pointing to studies indicating that while young boys do better on average at stuff like solving mazes, young girls do better at actually memorizing the stuff in said mazes.

Indeed. Sex differences in memory are lot more blurry, but women are shown to have an advantage in remembering where objects are in a given space.

Ellis, Lee, Sex differences: summarizing more than a century of scientific research, CRC Press, 2008

Halpern, Diane F., Sex differences in cognitive abilities, Psychology Press, 2000

I actually have some beef with the latest MK game, honestly. MKX was great with this stuff. Three canonically queer characters (Kung Jin, Mileena and Tanya) and one other who was heavily gay coded (Cassie Cage).

Cassie dresses fairly masculine compared to other characters, is voiced by a woman who voices several notable queer video game characters, she has short hair, tells every male character who hits on her to fuck off, and she even has a DLC costume that puts her in a tuxedo.

Fast forward to MK 11, where NRS seems to have realized people viewed Cassie as a lesbian, so they gave her long hair, recast her actress to one who sounds like a valley girl, have her constantly overuse modern teenage slang, half her outfits are pink, and she loses her role as the main character to a man by the end of the first chapter of the game.

Oh, and Kung Jin, Mileena and Tanya are all missing from the roster, despite being fan favorites.

There’s a reason people on tumblr crack jokes about Cassie undergoing bimbofication.

"hormones don't enforce cultural ideas through learned behaviour and teaching. "

You can said is culture who enforce that stuff by truism that exist just because, kinda like how we workship the sun in part because we are not a nightcycle creature, if could see in the dark, our religion conception would have change.

I would contest a littke bit about Cassie being code lesbian because she is a) a military brat and b) the daughter of sonya, a hardass like few.

And well, each MK game change protagonist, look how Raiden was the protagonist in MK 9, then cassie and then Liu kang and even THEN the cage family took a center stage from most of the game.

Edited by unknowing on Oct 14th 2019 at 11:03:35 AM

It's kind of hard to think of these games as "progressive" anyway when one knows about how messy things are at the actual studio. Especially the horror stories concerning the sexism there.

Girls are taught from an early age to look at and listen to other people. Boys get different lessons.

Which is why girls on the autism spectrum are harder to diagnose: when a boy squirms away from "being nice" in a social situation as a toddler or younger, he's more likely to be let off the hook for it.

Girls get to feel like they have been Really Bad™. Really, really bad. And, often get given extra social practice as a result (because nobody wants to be a wallflower instead of a princess).

Because little girls have to share, ask about the needs of others before their own, mustn't speak unless spoken to and are allowed to be a little shy. And, if they dive behind a book instead of joining in with the circle after muttering rote polite nothings about rote safe topics, it's seen less bad than if a boy tries to hide that way.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Oct 14th 2019 at 4:04:23 PM