Girly and Manly

[yukinoomoni]

You know, women gamers put up with a lot that we're not given credit for. If you're like my sisters and I, you were raised with gaming at a very young age. As such, we always had to place our emotions and actions behind a male protagonist - and hardly ever did we complain. For us, it never took away from the game, nor did it really matter that they were male. We were able to adapt to a male-dominant virtual world. And yet when games nowadays come out with female protagonists they are (generally, here) passed over by the majority of male gamers, who for some reason find playing such games akin to getting castrated. Why is that?

It's the same with books. Young girls and women have no problem getting behind a male protagonist and reading books by males, but dare give books to boys or guys by female authors or female protagonists, and you're (generally) snorted at and told that "that's chick-lit". Males deprive themselves of really good characters when they do this, but are never even told such. And yet when women actively seek out fiction written by women or starring females, they're labelled as (generally) anti-male. Why is that?

Is it the way we are raised, in a society so biased on gender-division? Boys toys and girls toys, boys clothes and girls clothes (so much to the point of actually making the way shirts and pants open and close differently for each sex), boys books and girls books, boys sports and girls sports, hen parties and stag parties, ect ect ect... Yeah, I understand that boys and girls are different in obvious ways, but do we have to indict it so much in ways so extreme? Why do we assume a guy is "girly" because he enjoys the colour pink or writes poetry? Why do we assume a girl is "butch" because her hair is short and enjoys cars? Why do things have genders assigned to them (sometimes literally in some languages)? Why IS that? Aren't we past all of that by now?

To me, the reason why feminism is not only stalled, but spiralling backwards in some ways, is because of our inability to even admit the above. If we admit it, we would finally be admitting the problem, and recognising that things need to change. But we are too lazy as a society, and thus nothing gets changed.

Comments

[unjapanologist]

Agreed. The way we assign genders to pretty much anything and then devalue the 'female' things by making them non-universal is really, truly harmful. But it's not as bad as saying women shouldn't be allowed to vote, so that means anyone who points out the nasty effects of gendering everything and the kitchen sink is just exaggerating, right?

The male and female protagonists thing was expounded upon really well in this post, methinks. Long quote:

"Male is default. That’s what you learn from a world of boy dogs and Smurf stories. My daughter has no problem with this. She reads these books the way they were intended: not about boys, exactly, but about people who happen to be boys. After years of such books, my daughter can happily identify with these characters.
And this is great. It’s the reason she will grow into a woman who can happily read a novel about men, or watch a movie in which men do all the most interesting things, without feeling like she can’t relate. She will process these stories as being primarily not about males but about human beings.
Except it’s not happening the other way. The five-year-old boy who lives up the street from me does not have a shelf groaning with stories about girl animals. Because you have to seek those books out, and as the parent of a boy, why would you? There are so many great books about boys to which he can relate directly. Smurf stories must make perfect sense to him: all the characters with this one weird personality trait to distinguish them, like being super brave or smart or frightened or a girl."

[yukinoomoni]

Precisely what I was thinking. That's a really good article.

[cypsiman2.livejournal.com]

It is the poison of male privilege in our culture, that men are so used to being considered the norm and women a "deviation from that norm".

[amelia-seyroon.livejournal.com]

Some people think we're still living in the stone age.

[the-flowergirl.livejournal.com]

At least in the Stone Age, they revered women for being the bringers of life.

[dorknessrising.livejournal.com]

Seconding cypsiman2. Also throwing in that as women, we have no problem reading/playing/watching stuff by men with men in the lead because we don't really have much of a choice. There isn't a whole lot out there otherwise. Not to mention that we're raised to automatically think men are awesome.

It's not quite the same for guys. They're expected to behave and adhere to their gender role (aggressive, dominant, powerful, and horny) just as we're expected to adhere to ours (demure, quiet, obedient, and virtuous). On top of this, there is a certain, subtle level of misogyny that is still deemed universally acceptable. It's gotten better over the years, but it's still there, and men are groomed to it from the day they're born. Instead of seeing the opposite sex as awesomely awesome (the way women are taught), men are trained to see the opposite sex as inherently inferior and unimportant, and something to be scorned.

Women can easily identify with a male character because we've been encouraged and conditioned that it's acceptable to do so. Men don't readily identify with female characters because they've been taught the opposite, and are afraid of having their masculinity questioned.

[the-flowergirl.livejournal.com]

+1

[the-flowergirl.livejournal.com]

The clothes opening and closing thing really has to do originally with class structure.


I think I have a better question. Why is a girl assumed butch because she prefers to wears men's clothes and finds them more comfortable?

[dorknessrising.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this. The women typically buying those fashions had either maidservants or at the very least a female sibling to button them up. Men didn't (because, yanno, men can do that by themselves and don't need a chaperone like their poor helpless sheltered wives).

Why is a girl assumed butch because she prefers to wears men's clothes and finds them more comfortable?

YES. I can never find women's blazers that don't feel like I'll split them at the seams if I cross my arms =/ And can we extend this to bath products, too? Yes, I wear men's deodorant because 1) I'm allergic to anti-perspirant and women's deodorant sans A-P is never strong enough, and 2) I want to smell like something other than a flower shop or baby powder (that last one is just fucking creepy).

[the-flowergirl.livejournal.com]

I think it was less that women needed to be chaperoned and more of they needed help due to the sheer amount of clothes they had to wear. However, not all women had servants, so how peasant women's cloths be? Would the buttons be on the men's side or not, since they were quite obviously dressing themselves.


Well, they want us to be nothing more than little girls anyway: No curves, no boobs, no pubes, it should hardly be a surprise that they want us to SMELL like a little girl too.

[dorknessrising.livejournal.com]

I don't think the peasants were buying clothes that nice in the first place.

I know, I know. It's still creepy D=

[the-flowergirl.livejournal.com]

No, but they still had to wear the same amount of clothes.


The skinny jeans trend really isn't helping with the no curves thing.

[quorothorn.livejournal.com]

"Is it the way we are raised, in a society so biased on gender-division?"

I'm pretty certain the answer there is 'yes'.

And I say that based somewhat off personal experience: the fact that, from a young age, I was reading books with female protagonists regularly (some of these remain personal favourites today) is likely one reason I'm perfectly happy to read books/watch shows with female protagonists now. (I got lucky, basically.)

I would say "and play games", only...well, there's simply not that many of them with female protagonists that I've seen. I just took a look at my PS3 library, and:
Devil May Cry 4, Prototype, both Ratchet & Clanks, all three Assassin's Creeds, inFamous, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Just Cause 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Bioshock, and Batman: Arkham Asylum: all male protagonists.

Dynasty Warriors 6, Final Fantasy XIII, and Resident Evil 5 (and I guess Top Spin 4, LOL, though it should be noted that, as with Dynasty Warriors 6, there are more male "options" than female) are a mix.

Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Saint's Row 2 allow you to pick (so far I've gone with two female and two male, between those three games).

And I guess LittleBigPlanet is neutral. x)

Definitely less of a mix in the gender of the protagonists compared to my reading mainstays (and that's factoring in one of my all-time favourites being The Lord of the Rings, where there's like three females in the entire cast, wut [even though Eowyn and Galadriel are freaking awesome, but anyway]). If I step back to my more extensive PS2 library, it doesn't get better, either. Same for my smaller PS1 library.

Really, aside from those games where there's multiple protagonists, at least one from each gender, or games where you can choose the protagonist's gender, I can only think of a handful of notable games with a female protagonist.

SO, I guess what this bit of babble adds up to is that I agree with you.

Also, some may laugh, but I do wonder if things like the new My Little Pony show attracting a "periphery demographic" are a positive sign. Sure, there's certain problems with aspects of the fanbase (when are there not, I suppose), but at base, what we have here is males willing to openly say "yes, I like this show with female protagonists". Call it a start, perhaps.

[yukinoomoni.livejournal.com]

I think it's safe to assume that you are definitely the exception =3.

[quorothorn.livejournal.com]

I'd rather be commonplace, TBQH. x)

[urania-calliope.livejournal.com]

THIS.

So we work, one person at a time if need be, to change all this.

[uponadecember.livejournal.com]

It's really rather depressing. There's no way around it. Girls have to specifically ask for "boy toys" and boys get laughed at if they dare ask for "girl toys." I only hope that it won't be like this forever.

[silverthunder]

Everyone else has already kinda summed up my thoughts on this. Being "girly" is considered so shameful that even a fair number of actual girls don't want to be seen that way. And yet, if a girl is too "manly" she is frequently viewed with scorn - I guess because her "primary purpose" in society (y'know, being pretty and sexy as an object of desire for men) is being compromised.

[dorknessrising.livejournal.com]

Ugh, so much this. We can't win no matter what we do.

[angelchan-2004.livejournal.com]

Plus, you know, admitting a problem means there IS a problem, and nobody ever wants to do that. So we're "perfectly fine," when in reality there are people still dealing with this shit daily.

Or, if you look at something like Bayonetta (I've not played this, mind, but I've seen clips that have made me cringe), the female main character is so overly sexualized that it draws men in and makes them say, "HEY A GOOD FEMALE MAIN CHARACTER" when really it's just ass and crotch and boob shots a lot of the time.

[secondlina.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of us having unisex media, as well as media designed for a specific gender. The problem right now is that unisex media only exists if you are a girl (as you said, we can take have a male hero just fine) and that gender-directed media is stereotypical dribble. The extremes are too powerful. They are rooted pretty deep in social conventions and religious conventions.