Serious business time.

[dark_puck]

bookshop makes a post about something that has been bothering me about fandom in general for a very long time:

Fandom is not woman-positive. Fandom needs all the urging it can get just to talk about female characters, let alone talk about them nicely. Fandom prioritizes men above everything. Fandom prioritizes male-based fantasies, and fandom

Comments

[shadowsong26]

...i agree with all of this except this particular point: "We perpetuate misogyny when we venerate canons that have high numbers of male characters and only one or two girls."

because liking stories with predominantly male characters is automatically antifeminist? bullshit. i'm allowed to like 1776, PoTC, etc even if they only have one or two women. it doesn't mean i'm a fucking misogynist. especially if they're, y'know, historical stories where an absence of women *makes sense*. so it really really bothers me when i'm told i'm a bad person for being a fan of something with few to no female characters. especially novels set in eras and situations where more women present would be inappropriate.

that being said, everything else about this post is spot on, there needs to be more discussion of female characters in fandom. even in the stories where there aren't many of them, which are freaking okay to like, too.

[beckyh2112]

It is possible to demonstrate misogynist/racist/ableist/homophobic behavior without being misogynist/racist/ableist/homophobic. The point isn't "you are a bad person for liking this", the point is "the constant acceptance of stories that exclude women is hurtful to women".

[shadowsong26]

i know. it just...the way it was phrased really got under my skin. especially since that lumps in historical fiction--such as 'master and commander', which had *no* women (though i hated that for entirely unrelated reasons--where including women would do a disservice to the story with other stories where it isn't necessary to the setting to have women.

[shadowsong26]

*to not have women. i can type.

[shadowsong26]

what i mean to say by this is...a story shouldn't necessarily be accepted or not accepted on the basis of how many women it contains. i guess. i don't know, i don't think i'm being very articulate.

[beckyh2112]

If we did not live in a misogynistic society, this sort of thing would not need to be called out. But we do live in a world where the great preponderance of stories are stories about men and boys.

In an ideal world, a story that excludes women would be no more problematic than a story that excludes men.

[shadowsong26]

yeah, you're right. sorry for being cranky about this :/