The Weirditude of Gender Nerdery
Aug. 4th, 2011 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_gneechThis will be a long one, Websnark style. I apologize for the length, but I've got a lot to say here.
Imagine, if you can, what life was like for geeks and budding geeks in 1975-1976. Batman was all about camp. Star Wars was a pile of notes on George Lucas's desk. The only really cool thing we had was Star Trek, and that was a canceled, not-terribly-popular show that was on life support by means of a Saturday morning cartoon. The only people who cared about it were NASA employees and the uncool kids.
But we made the best of it, and when you had enough kids together you could actually decently "play Star Trek" with a different actual person taking the role of Kirk, Spock, etc. Since I had the largest collection of Star Trek figures, including the Enterprise Bridge Playset, I got to call the shots on what we would do with it. On one particular afternoon, we actually had something like six of us together, including a girl whose name has long been lost out of the fuzzy recesses of my memory. She had dark hair, and I remember liking her because she was into all the same fantasy/SF stuff that I was, or at least didn't go "Ew!" at it the way most of the girls did. But she lived in a different neighborhood, which when you're six years old, might as well been another planet, so I rarely had the opportunity to play with her.
In any case, I was handing out figures for people to play with; I kept Spock for myself naturally, but pretty much let everybody else take whomever they pleased. But I left Uhura in the box, because she was such an nonentity. All she ever did was answer the phone and occasionally say, "Captain, I'm frightened." What kind of a character is that?
This girl -- I'm going to call her Melissa for purposes of the anecdote (and because I do remember knowing a girl named Melissa) -- strenuously objected to this when I suggested she play Scotty. "I don't want to play Scotty!"
"How can you not want to play Scotty? Scotty's cool!" (May not have been my exact words ... I was six.)
"But I'm a girl!"
This stymied me. It had never been an issue before: most of the time there were no girls around to play with anyway, and so if there were girl roles required, one of the boys would just take it. Playing a cross-gender role was something you just did if it was required to make the playing happen. (I myself became quite adept at the role of Kimba's girlfriend, which seemed perfectly ordinary to me at the time and caused me much confusion when it bugged my best friend later. But that's another story.) But for !Melissa it was apparently a big issue, and that left us stuck, because there was only the one girl figure: Lt. Uhura, who was only surpassed in boringness by Yoeman "Look At My Legs, Captain" Rand. If there had been a Lt. M'Ress figure, or even a Number One (Majel Barrett as human supercomputer, one of the coolest characters in Star Trek ever and therefore absolutely hated by the network), all would have been fine.
(It's worth noting that Uhura did become cool later, particularly in Star Trek III, but that was decades away. Even her badass moment in "The Lorelei Signal" episode of the animated series only came because none of the Men Folk were around to be badass instead. And remember also, I was six, and didn't realize that the reason Uhura was boring was because race and gender politics forbade her from being interesting at the time.)
This was my first real confrontation with the phenomenon of The Chick, and it's something that really starts jumping out at you once you notice it. As someone in the blogosphere recently said (and I'm still looking for the exact quote, I'll get back to you with it): many writers, especially of pop or genre fiction, default to male (and usually white male) for a character unless there's a specific reason to do otherwise. Need a leader? White male. Smooth talker? White male. Gadgeteer? White male. Romantic Interest? Oops, guess we'll make this one a female. Etc. Among other things, this leads to there being a character who is The Diversity Kid ("Chinese girl in a wheelchair, score!"), whose main role is to be The Diversity Kid, and who always rings false in the role.
Even being aware of this tendency isn't enough to keep it from happening in your work: in NeverNever, both Mopsy and Jenny sometimes fall into the "The Chick" category, although I did try to make them interesting characters in their own right. (I was a little annoyed with myself at how often Jenny needed rescuing, but on the other hand just about everybody in the cast needed rescuing at least a few times.) Suburban Jungle was a bit better in this regard, largely because I started with a female protagonist and built the cast to be the people who were important to her life. Given how easy it is for me, a person who at least likes to think of himself as being proactive on this issue, to fall into it, it's not hard to see why this is an ongoing phenomenon.
Now, fast-forward to today, where gender issues in geeky lit are in a state of high dudgeon. DC comics recently got reamed for its notable lack of female heroes and female creators (not to mention comics' record generally for stuffing women into refrigerators). There is a strange backlash against girl geeks going on, especially ones who are what is traditionally thought of as "attractive" ... and of course there's a backlash against the backlash.
Into all this wanders My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which as I mentioned before is a very girly show for girls that is girly, but is also just a straight-up awesome show, thus having a lot of crossover appeal. That there should be bronies, geeky male fans of a girly cartoon show, should be considered a Grand Thing, shouldn't it?
Well apparently, not everyone thinks so. Consider this comic from Shortpacked!:
Now, I'm not a regular reader of Shortpacked! so I don't know the context here. This comic came to my attention by way of a MLP:FIM blog in which the blogger didn't wanted to be associated with the term "brony" because to him it apparently means "male MLP fan who is a jerk about it." This, as far as I can tell, is nuts. (Which is also my reaction to fans of anthropomorphic animals generally who don't want to be called "furries.")
But there are a lot of things in this comic that stick in my craw. First and foremost, it's clear that the guy is being a jerk; however, this is being held up more or less to be, "This guy is being male." That in itself is a trend I've been sick of for years. Second, there is a noticeable disconnect between MLP:FIM and the merchandise it is ostensibly being made to sell, and that creates natural frustration on the part of fans who want to support something they like by buying the merchandise. ("I love Rainbow Dash, she's got so much attitude! I'll go buy a Rainbow Dash toy! Er, what's this doe-eyed waif with Rainbow Dash's name on it?") I can't speak for everybody, but speaking only for myself I don't have a problem with the doe-eyed waif qua itself, my problem is that there isn't anything with the Rainbow Dash I was looking for. [1]
But my real problem is in the line "Males have 6/7ths of the Justice League, 90 percent of the Avengers, 12/13ths of Transformers, and now you've taken My Little Pony." Presumably this is intended as an indictment of the concept of The Chick, which is a concept that needs indicting. But it's also built on a fundamentally bad premise: how exactly has My Little Pony been "taken" and from whom? Does one jackass mouthing off suddenly turn all of the ponies into colts instead of fillies? Is the woman in the comic now somehow prevented from liking My Little Pony because it's not an all-girls club any more? The little rejoinder at the end, "Sorry, we noticed something we didn't have," also sticks in my craw because, of all the crazy things, it feeds negative stereotypes -- i.e., the rapacious and plundering white male.
In short, the fundamental premise of this comic seems to be that boys shouldn't be liking stuff for girls because girls have so little stuff of their own. But isn't that just as ridiculous as saying that girls shouldn't like superheroes because superheroes are meant for boys? Either that or "boys are pretty much all jackasses and anything they touch is ruined," which is also a premise that I don't much care for. (The irony that this comic was written by a guy is also not lost on me.)
Some of this is just the natural growing pains of any fandom, I imagine. The original brony rant about "I'm totally not a brony!" was an almost point-by-point copy of the same "I'm totally not a furry!" rant I've seen a hundred times. But really, it's getting old. Anything with human beings involved is going to include assholes sooner or later, and people really need to get over that.
Oh, and for the record, I handed over the Uhura figure so !Melissa could play her, and a good time was had by all. Until we realized the delicate hands of the Uhura figure didn't have an opposable thumb and so couldn't hold a phaser. But that's also a post for some other time.
-The Gneech
[1] Well, there is the one set of tiny little ponies from the show, noticeably missing Applejack and Fluttershy. What's that about?
Imagine, if you can, what life was like for geeks and budding geeks in 1975-1976. Batman was all about camp. Star Wars was a pile of notes on George Lucas's desk. The only really cool thing we had was Star Trek, and that was a canceled, not-terribly-popular show that was on life support by means of a Saturday morning cartoon. The only people who cared about it were NASA employees and the uncool kids.
But we made the best of it, and when you had enough kids together you could actually decently "play Star Trek" with a different actual person taking the role of Kirk, Spock, etc. Since I had the largest collection of Star Trek figures, including the Enterprise Bridge Playset, I got to call the shots on what we would do with it. On one particular afternoon, we actually had something like six of us together, including a girl whose name has long been lost out of the fuzzy recesses of my memory. She had dark hair, and I remember liking her because she was into all the same fantasy/SF stuff that I was, or at least didn't go "Ew!" at it the way most of the girls did. But she lived in a different neighborhood, which when you're six years old, might as well been another planet, so I rarely had the opportunity to play with her.
In any case, I was handing out figures for people to play with; I kept Spock for myself naturally, but pretty much let everybody else take whomever they pleased. But I left Uhura in the box, because she was such an nonentity. All she ever did was answer the phone and occasionally say, "Captain, I'm frightened." What kind of a character is that?
This girl -- I'm going to call her Melissa for purposes of the anecdote (and because I do remember knowing a girl named Melissa) -- strenuously objected to this when I suggested she play Scotty. "I don't want to play Scotty!"
"How can you not want to play Scotty? Scotty's cool!" (May not have been my exact words ... I was six.)
"But I'm a girl!"
This stymied me. It had never been an issue before: most of the time there were no girls around to play with anyway, and so if there were girl roles required, one of the boys would just take it. Playing a cross-gender role was something you just did if it was required to make the playing happen. (I myself became quite adept at the role of Kimba's girlfriend, which seemed perfectly ordinary to me at the time and caused me much confusion when it bugged my best friend later. But that's another story.) But for !Melissa it was apparently a big issue, and that left us stuck, because there was only the one girl figure: Lt. Uhura, who was only surpassed in boringness by Yoeman "Look At My Legs, Captain" Rand. If there had been a Lt. M'Ress figure, or even a Number One (Majel Barrett as human supercomputer, one of the coolest characters in Star Trek ever and therefore absolutely hated by the network), all would have been fine.
(It's worth noting that Uhura did become cool later, particularly in Star Trek III, but that was decades away. Even her badass moment in "The Lorelei Signal" episode of the animated series only came because none of the Men Folk were around to be badass instead. And remember also, I was six, and didn't realize that the reason Uhura was boring was because race and gender politics forbade her from being interesting at the time.)
This was my first real confrontation with the phenomenon of The Chick, and it's something that really starts jumping out at you once you notice it. As someone in the blogosphere recently said (and I'm still looking for the exact quote, I'll get back to you with it): many writers, especially of pop or genre fiction, default to male (and usually white male) for a character unless there's a specific reason to do otherwise. Need a leader? White male. Smooth talker? White male. Gadgeteer? White male. Romantic Interest? Oops, guess we'll make this one a female. Etc. Among other things, this leads to there being a character who is The Diversity Kid ("Chinese girl in a wheelchair, score!"), whose main role is to be The Diversity Kid, and who always rings false in the role.
Even being aware of this tendency isn't enough to keep it from happening in your work: in NeverNever, both Mopsy and Jenny sometimes fall into the "The Chick" category, although I did try to make them interesting characters in their own right. (I was a little annoyed with myself at how often Jenny needed rescuing, but on the other hand just about everybody in the cast needed rescuing at least a few times.) Suburban Jungle was a bit better in this regard, largely because I started with a female protagonist and built the cast to be the people who were important to her life. Given how easy it is for me, a person who at least likes to think of himself as being proactive on this issue, to fall into it, it's not hard to see why this is an ongoing phenomenon.
Now, fast-forward to today, where gender issues in geeky lit are in a state of high dudgeon. DC comics recently got reamed for its notable lack of female heroes and female creators (not to mention comics' record generally for stuffing women into refrigerators). There is a strange backlash against girl geeks going on, especially ones who are what is traditionally thought of as "attractive" ... and of course there's a backlash against the backlash.
Into all this wanders My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which as I mentioned before is a very girly show for girls that is girly, but is also just a straight-up awesome show, thus having a lot of crossover appeal. That there should be bronies, geeky male fans of a girly cartoon show, should be considered a Grand Thing, shouldn't it?
Well apparently, not everyone thinks so. Consider this comic from Shortpacked!:
Now, I'm not a regular reader of Shortpacked! so I don't know the context here. This comic came to my attention by way of a MLP:FIM blog in which the blogger didn't wanted to be associated with the term "brony" because to him it apparently means "male MLP fan who is a jerk about it." This, as far as I can tell, is nuts. (Which is also my reaction to fans of anthropomorphic animals generally who don't want to be called "furries.")
But there are a lot of things in this comic that stick in my craw. First and foremost, it's clear that the guy is being a jerk; however, this is being held up more or less to be, "This guy is being male." That in itself is a trend I've been sick of for years. Second, there is a noticeable disconnect between MLP:FIM and the merchandise it is ostensibly being made to sell, and that creates natural frustration on the part of fans who want to support something they like by buying the merchandise. ("I love Rainbow Dash, she's got so much attitude! I'll go buy a Rainbow Dash toy! Er, what's this doe-eyed waif with Rainbow Dash's name on it?") I can't speak for everybody, but speaking only for myself I don't have a problem with the doe-eyed waif qua itself, my problem is that there isn't anything with the Rainbow Dash I was looking for. [1]
But my real problem is in the line "Males have 6/7ths of the Justice League, 90 percent of the Avengers, 12/13ths of Transformers, and now you've taken My Little Pony." Presumably this is intended as an indictment of the concept of The Chick, which is a concept that needs indicting. But it's also built on a fundamentally bad premise: how exactly has My Little Pony been "taken" and from whom? Does one jackass mouthing off suddenly turn all of the ponies into colts instead of fillies? Is the woman in the comic now somehow prevented from liking My Little Pony because it's not an all-girls club any more? The little rejoinder at the end, "Sorry, we noticed something we didn't have," also sticks in my craw because, of all the crazy things, it feeds negative stereotypes -- i.e., the rapacious and plundering white male.
In short, the fundamental premise of this comic seems to be that boys shouldn't be liking stuff for girls because girls have so little stuff of their own. But isn't that just as ridiculous as saying that girls shouldn't like superheroes because superheroes are meant for boys? Either that or "boys are pretty much all jackasses and anything they touch is ruined," which is also a premise that I don't much care for. (The irony that this comic was written by a guy is also not lost on me.)
Some of this is just the natural growing pains of any fandom, I imagine. The original brony rant about "I'm totally not a brony!" was an almost point-by-point copy of the same "I'm totally not a furry!" rant I've seen a hundred times. But really, it's getting old. Anything with human beings involved is going to include assholes sooner or later, and people really need to get over that.
Oh, and for the record, I handed over the Uhura figure so !Melissa could play her, and a good time was had by all. Until we realized the delicate hands of the Uhura figure didn't have an opposable thumb and so couldn't hold a phaser. But that's also a post for some other time.
-The Gneech
[1] Well, there is the one set of tiny little ponies from the show, noticeably missing Applejack and Fluttershy. What's that about?
Originally published at gneech.com. You can comment here or there.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-04 07:19 pm (UTC)Amber is an old-school MLP fan. She was into them before their being made "cool" by the new TV series, and prior to that, their "cameo appearance" in the first Transformers live-action movie. So she doesn't really have any problem with the new toys being more like the old toys than being like the characters in the TV series. The fact that this "Bronie come lately" does have a problem and calls her "nobody" (and her aggravation) is something I can understand.
The Shortpacked toy store in which Amber (and her foil co-worker Ethan) works is a magnet for toy jerks, of which Brody the Bronie is the latest. David Willis is an equal-opportunity lampooner of toy jerks of all stripes, so this strip just continues that theme. It is not meant to be derogatory to all Bronies/MLP fans, and it does air a legitimate complaint--although it's unlikely that the merchandisers of MLP will deign to respond to this complaint, as the target market is not the toy jerks of the world.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-04 07:24 pm (UTC)-TG
no subject
Date: 2011-08-04 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 05:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 06:04 am (UTC)The context being more that using the term "brony" was supposed to be uni-sex for all MLP fans, to which the girl that started the thread found to be derogatory at best, insulting at worst. "Brony", as a lot of us guys had understood it, was originally intended specifically to describe all the guys who had been pleasantly surprised by the show and were now openly admitting that they enjoyed the characters. (It's open to interpretation, of course, as the level of interest varies from one person to another.) The double-meaning, of course, was to give that almost-douchebag-like, Jersey Shore "tag" of Bro-, to "macho it up".
Having said all of that, it did occur to some that the idea of going to such lengths to define the guys in the fandom meant, for some reason, now needing to give the ladies some kind of equally fitting nickname for their side of the gender wall. (Y'know, as if it was somehow necessary, as opposed to just calling everyone "MLP Fans".)
As I recall, the creators of the show actually solved that by making a promotional video that first acknowledged the term "bronies" and almost as quickly referred to the main characters as "fillies", which just seemed the logical term to use, anyway.
I don't believe, however, that this was intended to imply anything along the lines of guys being the default fans, though. At least, not by the majority. There might have been a few misguided types that did, but, aren't there always? :P
no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 11:35 am (UTC)-TG
no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 01:04 pm (UTC)As for gender roles? Uh, so much is preconception of the "it's this way so it must be this way" even though it might well be the (or an) other way at other times or places. Maintaining a system with "We do it this way because we've always done it this way." is just another way of saying, "We never thought about it - and don't intend to."
no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 01:11 pm (UTC)This, as far as I can tell, is nuts. (Which is also my reaction to fans of anthropomorphic animals generally who don't want to be called "furries.")
Given the way the phenomenon is morphing, I intend to stop using "brony" and just use "MLP fan" myself.
Different how?
no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 02:18 pm (UTC)Since the outside-the-fandom story of MLP is becoming "Look, men like this show too!" instead of "Look, here's an awesome show!" I can see how gals who like MLP might not appreciate it and I don't want to exacerbate the problem.
It's not like I'm going to go around saying, "I'm totally not a brony!" 'cause that would be pointless. But I am going to use a more inclusive term in my own discussion of it.
Does that make sense?
-TG
no subject
Date: 2011-08-04 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 12:46 am (UTC)Our ultimate conclusion: Gender roles are complete bullshit.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 04:37 am (UTC)-TG
no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 08:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-06 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 06:51 pm (UTC)Also: It's deeply satisfying to know this show is converting 4channers into furries. -:D
Agreeing with this. Also cf. "Furry fandom has been taken over by those people and we need to take it back."
no subject
Date: 2011-08-10 01:14 pm (UTC)I am not quite sure how you are interpreting 'don't change toys I like just because you don't' to 'boys are not allowed to watch the show'. O.o
no subject
Date: 2011-08-10 02:24 pm (UTC)I thought the premise of the cartoon was 'if you like a children's show for girls, you should not complain because the toys are things little girls like'. Or insist that the show/marketing tie-ins be tailored to your desires.
Honestly, if that was how the comic had read to me, I wouldn't have any objection to it -- I completely agree with that idea. But the line "[males] have taken My Little Pony" is where the gender wars stuff comes into it. I don't see any way to interpret that line other than "boys are not allowed to watch the show because that ruins it for girls."
Similarly, if the comic had just been "that guy is a jerk for discounting all those people who love the rooted-hair ponies," I would have stood up and cheered. But it wasn't. "That guy" was suddenly elected to the role of "all males," even the males who love the rooted-hair ponies and have for years.
I know that women have to put up with a lot of crap that men don't; and I know that women get the shaft in almost every form of popular culture. I don't want to deny or minimize either of these things. But I also think that the only real way to make that better is to break out of the idea that "men's stuff" = "popular" and "women's stuff" = "niche." This is why I think it's so cool that talk-incessantly-about-their-favorite-stuff spend-lots-of-money-on-pop-culture boys like a show that is designed to appeal to and enrich the lives of girls. 'cos I want there to be more stuff designed to appeal to and enrich the lives of girls!
But instead of "Yay, this will make it easier to make good shows for girls!" we're getting "Boys ruin everything!" And that makes my teeth grind.
-The Gneech
[1] By way of disclaimer, I don't have a stake in the "what the toys should be like" issue in and of itself. Hasbro made the show to market the toys; they don't make the toys to cash in on the show.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-10 07:04 pm (UTC)Also, the last male character is a new one; I am pretty sure he is there to sympathize with her complaint by noting that there's a real chance that the cool-thing-girls-like will be changed to make it more appealing to boys (while there's little chance of the JLA being changed to appeal to girls beyond tokenism.)
no subject
Date: 2011-08-10 07:10 pm (UTC)-TG