I’m sick of hearing dude-bros whine that companies no longer want to cater to men; that men are being scorned for their sexuality. There’s always whataboutism.
“Well, male characters are sexualized too!” Yes, because that’s something men want. The male characters are portrayed as sexually appealing because they are meant to be a power fantasy for men. These male characters also get better storylines, more in depth personalities, & meaningful dynamics.
Men also get to be conventionally unattractive & still get the girl in the end. They’re allowed to see things about their looks not mattering because what truly matters is what is inside. Do women get that? No. Women are supposed to be hyper-sexual with no kind of carefully crafted story whatsoever. They’re just accessories for men. Men can be deemed unattractive, be attractive, & still be treated like people.
Women though? They have to be a sexy love interest. If not that, they always need to be in support of the male characters. They don’t get to have any kind of depth whatsoever.
The ironic is that I hate when people say that if you dislike an antagonistic or villainous female character, you can’t handle complex women. I think it does nothing for media analysis. Do I believe that we need more difficult, unlikable, & nuanced women? Yes! Do I also think that male characters who are all those things get given more grace? Yes! There are female characters who aren’t even villains but still receive unearned ire.
But I also do think that women should also be allowed to be hated characters without said hatred being rooted in misogyny. Men get to be detestable characters all the time! Women should be able to be multifaceted & complex. I understand why there’s so much defensiveness around disliked female characters, because they get the brunt of misogyny. But it circles back to the idea that women need to be likable in order to be sympathetic or vice versa.
We should be able to combat misogyny within media spaces without falling into the same trap that women somehow, in some kind of way, need to likable in order to be sympathetic. We should be able to point out double standards without having to twist ourselves into pretzels for a female character to be likable.
Women are caged into being exclusively sexually attractive or one-note likable. We deserve more than that. Give us more unconventionally attractive women, villainous women, & nuanced women. This post would be as long as Santa’s list if I were to also point out how much hatred women get if they even dare be anything other than able-bodied, cishet, white women. The unhinged racism/queerphobia/misogyny/ableism combo is absolutely depressing. It’s almost dystopian to witness.
You won't see mainstream studios and publishers putting out anything like that any time soon. We have to write our own novels, produce our own shows, direct our own movies, draw our own comics, and so on. It's just not going to happen otherwise.
Yes to all of this, obviously. I would truly love more complex female villains. My favourite may be Zhou Xun in Painted Skin II, where she literally steals the hearts of men to stay young and ends up falling for the other female lead (it is Chinese, so they can't have explicitly gay characters, but they sleep cuddling, bathe together nude, and literally bind their souls to one another.)
I am currently losing my mind over the show Pluribus and seeing people (I assume men) complain about there being no straight white men and how even in sexual scenes there is no female nudity.
Also it is boring because a lot of it is just women talking to each other.
I love this. Part of my work takes place in a developing nation where being openly gay can get you killed, and as my highly educated, well-traveled local colleague was telling me about this, all of the examples he gave were about gay men. I asked what about gay women and he looked at me in surprise and said 'oh but women and women can't have sex with each other, neither has a penis! And anyway often women like to live together and share a bed for comfort, that's so normal that often women live like this until they die, it's not sexual.' And I realized my job was to nod in agreement, oh of course, what was I thinking.
"'oh but women and women can't have sex with each other, neither has a penis!"
Unironically, this is the reason why lesbians have been historically able to fly under the radar, and gay men have been persecuted (even murdered). The mindset was until 19th century or so that if there was not at least one penis involved, sex could not happen. Homosexuality was strictly forbidden, sometimes with the threat of death penalty, but it was really rare that women were accused of being gay.
"And historians will say they were just good friends" :facepalm
Girl i'm so, so SO tired of the "sexy women seduce protagonist, love story happens and this sexy women at the end was a bad person and BETRAYED everyone!!!"
This is such a overused trope that just fuel the "women bad" fire on men, i see it a lot on anime... When my friends made me go to watch the Chainsaw Man movie and that happened, i just wanted to leave.
In the DCAMU, Son of Batman film, they have a character, Talia, embody this trope. However, it glosses over the fact she raped Batman in order to have said son… Why?
Because she was treated like a SexyWomanTM trope & was so flat as a character that they didn’t recognize her as a rapist. The misogyny was actually crazy. Rape being portrayed as a sexy plot device is so common.
It's because men think rape is attractive. There is a reason it's a top watched porn category. It's also why most straight and bi men have coerced a woman at least once, but usually dozens and dozens of times throughout their lives, if they haven't straight up SAed someone. I'm not even sure if the average man believes in rape to be honest. They don't even consider coercion SA, and the whole world terms it as, "men's needs" like it isn't.
The only time I hear men talk about it in a negative way is if it's a man who raped another man, or if it's a situation where they can use it as a talking point to further their own goals and agendas, sort of like how men only started caring about the Epstein thing once people made it a left versus right thing. Before that they said the women were lying, and they all made fun of it. Or when a man who is also a minority commits rape. Then they will say they care lol.
This happened with Dragon Age: Origins and their one female love interest, Morrigan and technically, it makes sense for her character, but god, I hate it.
Christ. I can’t imagine objectifying women so much that I can just ignore rape just because it’s an attractive woman.
Misogyny has convinced people rape is women’s fault, but also if a woman is a rapist, it’s okay because if it happens to men, they should just be happy a woman is sexually violating them. Women can’t be predators because sex isn’t a mutual act between two people, it’s something men do to women, therefore it can’t be forced on men.
Yet in that same breath people will come up with similar rationalizations for a man raping a woman because it circles back to the idea women have to not “tempt” men to do anything that could possibly, “provoke” men into raping them. Men are somehow the only ”real” threat, but also women must be held accountable for their behavior.
It’s actually horrific to witness in real time.
Dragon Age is one of my absolute favorite franchises (May it rest in peace.) And that always bugged me. Like it felt SO out of character, like you're really trying to convince me that the woman who was your character's dear friend who recognized and called out men's BS trys to coerce you to get a man or you to impregnate her or she leaves was just weird and so out of place. Played through as a guy character once dating another guy when I was a kid and she trys to convince that your boyfriend would want you to sleep with her and impregnate her. Like what kinda straight man fantasy did I stumble into and can I make it go away?! 😭
No, literally 😭
I also never liked her outfit. You're telling me a woman would willing wear that from a cold ass climate where it's constantly raining??? Don't make me laugh.
Media is more powerful than we currently acknowledge. Just look at how many people recall their "sexual awakening" had to do with some TV character. By limiting how women can be represented, media effectively limits how we are able to conceive women.
I really like comics and personally, I'm starting to get more and more the idea that men can't and will never be as sexualized as women.
It's actually disheartening to see all the double D's, waist too tiny to fit all organs in and wardrobe malfunction a second away superheroines and villainesses who's only there to further a man's story. ://
And here is why I don't really watch TV or movies anymore.
I want a lady version of Doctor Doofenshmirtz, basically.
Gimme a girl failure whose powerful and acknowledged to be competent in one specific area whose also not explicitly made for the male gaze, but is sympathetic while openly referring to herself as a villain. I feel like the best example I've seen of this in recent media is Satan from Exploding Kittens the Netflix animated series.
She's beautiful but because of the shows artstyle (and her being a cat), it's hard and weird to sexualize her. She wants to be the bad guy and torture people, but she's actually such an excitable young upstart whose issues at work extend far and beyond "people only look down at me because I'm a woman specifically". Like it's totally because she's a quirky upbeat millennial personality and they view that as being less capable. I swooned when (spoilers ig) God decided to go out with her, validate and defend her in front of naysayers, and they had such genuinely loving chemistry and trust in their relationship with each other.
Also main female characters are always short, thin, petite, but with round butts and large perky breasts (breasts regardless of size are always perky under their chin).
I want a female character that represents me - chubby, pear shaped, tall (5'9) - not extremely manicured and doctored for extreme beauty.
Neither novels/books nor series nor movies portray this kind of woman. And it really is disappointing.
I went to see the new movie about Nuremberg and I loved it. Only one real flaw: the only female character was a sexy journalist who appeared twice and historically she did not even exist. How can it be that even in a serious context like the trial of the Nazis they were able to insert this damned cliché!?
Traditional media, including movies and tv shows, have done so much to inflate men’s sense of their own sexual attractiveness. They feel entitled to have access to women that are out of their league. And when they don’t get it, instead of doing self-reflection they turn into angry incels who have power fantasies about getting rich and powerful and getting all the women as if we’re just some accessory for them to have. The way men dehumanize women in our society is deeply harmful and it has turned them into irredeemable losers.