Misogyny in Fandom
Specifically in the Supernatural, and specifically of the lady-on-lady hating variety.
It's a pretty well established fact that most of the reoccuring female guest stars don't have a lot of success on this show, a lot of this is blamed on the (mostly female) fan's possesiveness on the boys. This is contrasted with the high success rate of how men are recieved. So what does this mean? Do the female fans really hate women that much? Are we that jealous? Honestly I don't think we can completely discount that, certainly I've been know to mutter, "grr, stupid what's-her-face, she's not good enough for Dean!". But how far does that go? Is this something to be completly blamed on us being shallow?
Short answer- Hell no.
Long answer-
Let's make some list! First off, here are the female reoccuring characters
(+ means I love them, = means like, # means "eh", and * is for hate)
For the ladies-13
Mary +
Jess+
Meg+
Ellen =
Jo *
Ruby v. 1.0 +
Ruby v. 2.0 *= (I'll explain at the bottom why she gets two)
Bela *
Ava +
Lilith + (and by this I mean, I think she's an awesome villan)
Pamela +
Anna =
Tessa (reaper) +
The Boys-17
Papa Bear Winchester+
Bobby+
YED+ (same deal as with lillith)
Andy+
Jake *(bitch, as with most fans I really liked him until he ganked sam, jerkface)
Gordon +(as a villian) *(cause he's a jerkface too)
Agent Hendrikson +
Kubrick (That one Jesus crazy guy who broke Gordon out of jail) * (weirds me out)
Zachariah *(jerkface)
Castiel ++++++++
Chuck +
Trickster+
Ed=
Harry=
Alistair+ (the villian likyness again)
Urial+ (who doesn't love The Bitch?)
Ash+
(There's probably more but I'll have to go back and rewatch my dvd's to make sure.) Now let's make another set of list of one shot charachters who I think they should bring back)
Female-19
Amy Acker's character in Dead In the Water (Andrea Barr) ++(i would watch Amy Acker paint her house, that's how much i love this girl)
The girl from Bloody Mary (Charlie) +
Missouri Mossley ++
Maggie the Ghost Facer +
Mary (the young and the older one)+
Amelia=
Claire+
Diana Ballard (Linda Blair) +
Emily from Scarecrow= (how can you not respect this chick after watching the way she torches that tree at the end?)
Deanna Cambell (Mary's mom)=
Tamara (from The Magnificent Seven) = (this is one tough cookie, I really wanna know how she's doing now)
Kat (from Asylum) + (cause she's badass)
Kate Milligan (Adam's mom) = (is no one else curious about the woman and how she caught John Winchester's (if not heart then) attention?
Lenore (Amber Benson, the vampire leader from Bloodlust)+
Gertrude Case (the old lady who molested Sam in Red Sky at Morning)+ (because she's my old lady hero)
Layla Rourke (Julie Benz from Faith) ++(Julie Benz is up there with Amy Acker)
Mara Daniels (the boy's lawyer from Folsom Prison Blues) = (because she's smart)
Sarah Blake (Provonence) + (girl has balls)
Nancy Fitzgerald (Jus in Bello) +
Male-13
Corbett +
Paster Jim =
Adam =/# (maybe in a flashback?)
Daniel Elkins # (I want a scene of him mentoring a young John)
Samuel Cambell (Mary's dad)+
Jimmie Novak++
Lucas Barr (Dead in the Water)+
Michael (Something Wicked)+
Mr. Wyatt (After School Special)=
Ronald Resnick (Nightshifter)+ (MANDROID!!!
Rufus Turner (Time is on My Side, he's kind of like the information broker for the guys, like Barbara Gordon is for the Justice League)+
Spruce (Ghost Facer)=
Bill Harvelle (Ellen's husband) #
And since we're all charged with being shallow, here's (yet another) list of potential and full out love interests-
Cassie = (this is actually the girl I was refering to in the opening, but that still doesn't mean I didn't at least like her)
Jess+
Meg+
Ruby v.1 +
Ruby v. 2.0 =* (again, see bottom)
Anna = (but if it was just her hair then she'd get a +)
Lisa Braeden (Ben's mom) #
Ava +
Gertrude Case (the old lady who molested Sam in Red Sky at Morning) + (haha, of COURSE she had to go here!)
Layla Rourke (Julie Benz from Faith) ++
Lori Sorenson (from Hookman) =# (She was a little whiny, but you can kind of understand why)
Madison (Heart) =# (dumping a basket load of your sexy panties on the table that some FBI agent that you've barely met is sitting at makes you seem a little skanky, but she definetly gets points for making Sam watch her soap, and then of course, how brave she is at the end)
Sarah Blake (Provonence) +
So what does all of this mean? (other than the fact that I must 1-have a lot of free time to go through every entry on the supernatural superwiki character page, and also 2-feel strongly enough to actually do it)
Granted, I may have miscounted or left someone off, and also, this is a matter of personal preference, but here's how I interpret this, out of everybody listed here, these are the only people who got a *.
Jo, Ruby v. 2.0, Bela, Jake, Gordon, Zachariah
For Jake, Gordon, and Zachariah the reason I don't like them is pretty much that their character's have done bad things, and I don't feel like they have enough redeimable qualities to make up for it. This is pretty much personal preference, I think they all make good villians (or at least foibles) for the boys, but I don't feel any reason to like them despite (or especially because) of their flaws (which I've been known to do, see Uriel above).
The girls, though, it's different. I've heard people say that the reason fans didn't like Jo was because they couldn't handle a strong female hunter. Except Jo wasn't a strong female hunter, in my opinion she was more like a whiny teenager. Here's why I think that, she wants to be a hunter, and her mom, understandably doesn't, so what does Jo do? Well first she get's into a screaming match with her mom where we get to hear her mature reasoning such as "You can't keep me here!" or "What are you going to do, chain me up in the basement?!". Then she runs away from home. This is the part that bothers me the most.
When I was younger, like Jo, I wanted to get out of my parents house(control) do my own thing. Due to certain circumstances, my mom (like Ellen) didn't think I was ready, and fobade me to do it. But I left anyways, like Jo. Here's how we differed in appoaches, while Jo and her mom screamed at each other I listened to what my mom had to say, told her that her concerns were valid and that I had considered them, but that I was leaving anyways. I found my own means of leaving and I left, without her permission, but at least with her knowledge.
So it bothers me that she would just away in the middle of the night like a kid breaking curfew, and then dare to get offeneded when someone questions whether she's adult enough to start hunting. So what does she immediately do to prove her maturity? Demand that the boys lie to her mother. Is it really a suprise that people wonder if she's taking this seriously? I don't like her for the same reason that I don't like most teenagers, they're whiny, aragant, and slightly out of touch with reality. This also translates to why I really didn't like her being treated as a love intrest to Dean. She acts like she's 15 and what's more, she looks like she's 15, when I see her fawning over Dean (cause that's attractive and empowering) I don't see "sexual tension" or "relevant to the plot" I see "jailbait" and "she probably has notebooks filled with doodles of "Mrs. Dean Winchester" stashed under her bed".
I feel like all of this comes down to the fact that Jo was not an interesting enough character to make me want to watch her grow up onscreen. Especially since it felt like the writers thought she was way more mature than I ever saw.
Next up, Bela. This one is more simple, the main thing I didn't like about Bella was that everytime she came up against the boys (or ok, almost every time) she came out ahead. I think a lot of this has to do with poor character development. When they first introduced Bela she wasn't really a person, she was more of a characture, with her british accent, suave attitude, and really nice apartment we all got distracted from what could have been a worthwhile characture. We got quite a few tantalizing hints about Bela's past later on in the 3rd season, but by then I was so sick of the "mystique" of the "fabulous, wonderful, world class theif who always gets her way" that it just wasn't enough to make her human.
And a small note about her being a love interest, one reason that I was really against it is because it just didn't feel like it would be a mutual thing, I didn't mind their flirting so much, but any actual sex just seemed like it would be another thing for Bela to use against the boys, like it would be a win for her and just another way to (not sure how else to phrase this) screw the boys over. Which is pretty much how she treated her every interaction with Sam and Dean so I feel justified in thinking that.
And then there was Ruby. I loved Ruby v. 1.0 from the beginning, she was sassy, mysterious, and best of all, she advanced the plot. And then season 4 and suddenly our wonderful snarky Ruby had gotten not just a new body, but a completely different personality to go with it. Where v. 1.0 was snarky 2.0 was subdued, with 1.0 you could never tell what her real agenda was, while we were supposed to believe that 2.0 was doing this out of the goodnes of her heart. Originally I hated the change in her personality because it took away everything that made me like Ruby and it really made me hate the character. And then "IKWYDLS" aired and I started wondering if the change was a diliberate move on her part to control Sam. Which is what I hoped was happening because it would finally make her character make sense again. Which, of course, is exactly what they did. So that's why I gave 2.0 a =, because she finally makes sense to me, and you really have to admire her cunning and dedication (even if it does make her a lying hoe), I'm actually excited to go and rewatch season 4 because I think I can finally appreciate Guineve's performance instead of being irked at her character's development.
My final point is, of course woman are going to be more critical of other women, it's how we're trained by society, just like men are more critical of other men. If you want to say that the girl fans are being unfair to the girl actors, there's probably a little truth in that, but what people aren't pointing out is we're not the only ones. Go back up this post and compare the size difference between the girl characters I'd love to see again, vs the boys. This show is so good at making us care about all these one shot peripheral roles, or the damsels in distress and then combletely fumble with the ones they're willing to give more screen time too.
The first season especially featured so many strong, sassy, interesting female roles that fans instantly loved, and yet we've never heard from them again. You want all the lady hating to stop, then bring back Missouri, or Ellen, don't kill off badasses like Meg or Pamela, or at the very least, make it all worth it with complicated (and plot relevant) story archs.
Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. I'm not saying that fans aren't sometimes too hard on the girls (sorry, Genieve!) but, come on guys, blame all around. Maybe have some faith in the fans to wonder WHY we don't like someone other than automatically assuming it's something so shallow and ridiculous as "OMG!!! They can't have girls on this show!! They're ruining the eye candy!!!"
I was gonna try and end this with something positive so that people don't think that Supernatural isn't my most favorite thing in the entire universe, but since I doubt anyone is ever going to make it through this entire thing so I'm not even going to bother appologising for all of the venting and rambling (despite my love of list, I am totally NOT an organized thinker) and just end it with something that makes me happy.
It's a pretty well established fact that most of the reoccuring female guest stars don't have a lot of success on this show, a lot of this is blamed on the (mostly female) fan's possesiveness on the boys. This is contrasted with the high success rate of how men are recieved. So what does this mean? Do the female fans really hate women that much? Are we that jealous? Honestly I don't think we can completely discount that, certainly I've been know to mutter, "grr, stupid what's-her-face, she's not good enough for Dean!". But how far does that go? Is this something to be completly blamed on us being shallow?
Short answer- Hell no.
Long answer-
Let's make some list! First off, here are the female reoccuring characters
(+ means I love them, = means like, # means "eh", and * is for hate)
For the ladies-13
Mary +
Jess+
Meg+
Ellen =
Jo *
Ruby v. 1.0 +
Ruby v. 2.0 *= (I'll explain at the bottom why she gets two)
Bela *
Ava +
Lilith + (and by this I mean, I think she's an awesome villan)
Pamela +
Anna =
Tessa (reaper) +
The Boys-17
Papa Bear Winchester+
Bobby+
YED+ (same deal as with lillith)
Andy+
Jake *(bitch, as with most fans I really liked him until he ganked sam, jerkface)
Gordon +(as a villian) *(cause he's a jerkface too)
Agent Hendrikson +
Kubrick (That one Jesus crazy guy who broke Gordon out of jail) * (weirds me out)
Zachariah *(jerkface)
Castiel ++++++++
Chuck +
Trickster+
Ed=
Harry=
Alistair+ (the villian likyness again)
Urial+ (who doesn't love The Bitch?)
Ash+
(There's probably more but I'll have to go back and rewatch my dvd's to make sure.) Now let's make another set of list of one shot charachters who I think they should bring back)
Female-19
Amy Acker's character in Dead In the Water (Andrea Barr) ++(i would watch Amy Acker paint her house, that's how much i love this girl)
The girl from Bloody Mary (Charlie) +
Missouri Mossley ++
Maggie the Ghost Facer +
Mary (the young and the older one)+
Amelia=
Claire+
Diana Ballard (Linda Blair) +
Emily from Scarecrow= (how can you not respect this chick after watching the way she torches that tree at the end?)
Deanna Cambell (Mary's mom)=
Tamara (from The Magnificent Seven) = (this is one tough cookie, I really wanna know how she's doing now)
Kat (from Asylum) + (cause she's badass)
Kate Milligan (Adam's mom) = (is no one else curious about the woman and how she caught John Winchester's (if not heart then) attention?
Lenore (Amber Benson, the vampire leader from Bloodlust)+
Gertrude Case (the old lady who molested Sam in Red Sky at Morning)+ (because she's my old lady hero)
Layla Rourke (Julie Benz from Faith) ++(Julie Benz is up there with Amy Acker)
Mara Daniels (the boy's lawyer from Folsom Prison Blues) = (because she's smart)
Sarah Blake (Provonence) + (girl has balls)
Nancy Fitzgerald (Jus in Bello) +
Male-13
Corbett +
Paster Jim =
Adam =/# (maybe in a flashback?)
Daniel Elkins # (I want a scene of him mentoring a young John)
Samuel Cambell (Mary's dad)+
Jimmie Novak++
Lucas Barr (Dead in the Water)+
Michael (Something Wicked)+
Mr. Wyatt (After School Special)=
Ronald Resnick (Nightshifter)+ (MANDROID!!!
Rufus Turner (Time is on My Side, he's kind of like the information broker for the guys, like Barbara Gordon is for the Justice League)+
Spruce (Ghost Facer)=
Bill Harvelle (Ellen's husband) #
And since we're all charged with being shallow, here's (yet another) list of potential and full out love interests-
Cassie = (this is actually the girl I was refering to in the opening, but that still doesn't mean I didn't at least like her)
Jess+
Meg+
Ruby v.1 +
Ruby v. 2.0 =* (again, see bottom)
Anna = (but if it was just her hair then she'd get a +)
Lisa Braeden (Ben's mom) #
Ava +
Gertrude Case (the old lady who molested Sam in Red Sky at Morning) + (haha, of COURSE she had to go here!)
Layla Rourke (Julie Benz from Faith) ++
Lori Sorenson (from Hookman) =# (She was a little whiny, but you can kind of understand why)
Madison (Heart) =# (dumping a basket load of your sexy panties on the table that some FBI agent that you've barely met is sitting at makes you seem a little skanky, but she definetly gets points for making Sam watch her soap, and then of course, how brave she is at the end)
Sarah Blake (Provonence) +
So what does all of this mean? (other than the fact that I must 1-have a lot of free time to go through every entry on the supernatural superwiki character page, and also 2-feel strongly enough to actually do it)
Granted, I may have miscounted or left someone off, and also, this is a matter of personal preference, but here's how I interpret this, out of everybody listed here, these are the only people who got a *.
Jo, Ruby v. 2.0, Bela, Jake, Gordon, Zachariah
For Jake, Gordon, and Zachariah the reason I don't like them is pretty much that their character's have done bad things, and I don't feel like they have enough redeimable qualities to make up for it. This is pretty much personal preference, I think they all make good villians (or at least foibles) for the boys, but I don't feel any reason to like them despite (or especially because) of their flaws (which I've been known to do, see Uriel above).
The girls, though, it's different. I've heard people say that the reason fans didn't like Jo was because they couldn't handle a strong female hunter. Except Jo wasn't a strong female hunter, in my opinion she was more like a whiny teenager. Here's why I think that, she wants to be a hunter, and her mom, understandably doesn't, so what does Jo do? Well first she get's into a screaming match with her mom where we get to hear her mature reasoning such as "You can't keep me here!" or "What are you going to do, chain me up in the basement?!". Then she runs away from home. This is the part that bothers me the most.
When I was younger, like Jo, I wanted to get out of my parents house(control) do my own thing. Due to certain circumstances, my mom (like Ellen) didn't think I was ready, and fobade me to do it. But I left anyways, like Jo. Here's how we differed in appoaches, while Jo and her mom screamed at each other I listened to what my mom had to say, told her that her concerns were valid and that I had considered them, but that I was leaving anyways. I found my own means of leaving and I left, without her permission, but at least with her knowledge.
So it bothers me that she would just away in the middle of the night like a kid breaking curfew, and then dare to get offeneded when someone questions whether she's adult enough to start hunting. So what does she immediately do to prove her maturity? Demand that the boys lie to her mother. Is it really a suprise that people wonder if she's taking this seriously? I don't like her for the same reason that I don't like most teenagers, they're whiny, aragant, and slightly out of touch with reality. This also translates to why I really didn't like her being treated as a love intrest to Dean. She acts like she's 15 and what's more, she looks like she's 15, when I see her fawning over Dean (cause that's attractive and empowering) I don't see "sexual tension" or "relevant to the plot" I see "jailbait" and "she probably has notebooks filled with doodles of "Mrs. Dean Winchester" stashed under her bed".
I feel like all of this comes down to the fact that Jo was not an interesting enough character to make me want to watch her grow up onscreen. Especially since it felt like the writers thought she was way more mature than I ever saw.
Next up, Bela. This one is more simple, the main thing I didn't like about Bella was that everytime she came up against the boys (or ok, almost every time) she came out ahead. I think a lot of this has to do with poor character development. When they first introduced Bela she wasn't really a person, she was more of a characture, with her british accent, suave attitude, and really nice apartment we all got distracted from what could have been a worthwhile characture. We got quite a few tantalizing hints about Bela's past later on in the 3rd season, but by then I was so sick of the "mystique" of the "fabulous, wonderful, world class theif who always gets her way" that it just wasn't enough to make her human.
And a small note about her being a love interest, one reason that I was really against it is because it just didn't feel like it would be a mutual thing, I didn't mind their flirting so much, but any actual sex just seemed like it would be another thing for Bela to use against the boys, like it would be a win for her and just another way to (not sure how else to phrase this) screw the boys over. Which is pretty much how she treated her every interaction with Sam and Dean so I feel justified in thinking that.
And then there was Ruby. I loved Ruby v. 1.0 from the beginning, she was sassy, mysterious, and best of all, she advanced the plot. And then season 4 and suddenly our wonderful snarky Ruby had gotten not just a new body, but a completely different personality to go with it. Where v. 1.0 was snarky 2.0 was subdued, with 1.0 you could never tell what her real agenda was, while we were supposed to believe that 2.0 was doing this out of the goodnes of her heart. Originally I hated the change in her personality because it took away everything that made me like Ruby and it really made me hate the character. And then "IKWYDLS" aired and I started wondering if the change was a diliberate move on her part to control Sam. Which is what I hoped was happening because it would finally make her character make sense again. Which, of course, is exactly what they did. So that's why I gave 2.0 a =, because she finally makes sense to me, and you really have to admire her cunning and dedication (even if it does make her a lying hoe), I'm actually excited to go and rewatch season 4 because I think I can finally appreciate Guineve's performance instead of being irked at her character's development.
My final point is, of course woman are going to be more critical of other women, it's how we're trained by society, just like men are more critical of other men. If you want to say that the girl fans are being unfair to the girl actors, there's probably a little truth in that, but what people aren't pointing out is we're not the only ones. Go back up this post and compare the size difference between the girl characters I'd love to see again, vs the boys. This show is so good at making us care about all these one shot peripheral roles, or the damsels in distress and then combletely fumble with the ones they're willing to give more screen time too.
The first season especially featured so many strong, sassy, interesting female roles that fans instantly loved, and yet we've never heard from them again. You want all the lady hating to stop, then bring back Missouri, or Ellen, don't kill off badasses like Meg or Pamela, or at the very least, make it all worth it with complicated (and plot relevant) story archs.
Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. I'm not saying that fans aren't sometimes too hard on the girls (sorry, Genieve!) but, come on guys, blame all around. Maybe have some faith in the fans to wonder WHY we don't like someone other than automatically assuming it's something so shallow and ridiculous as "OMG!!! They can't have girls on this show!! They're ruining the eye candy!!!"
I was gonna try and end this with something positive so that people don't think that Supernatural isn't my most favorite thing in the entire universe, but since I doubt anyone is ever going to make it through this entire thing so I'm not even going to bother appologising for all of the venting and rambling (despite my love of list, I am totally NOT an organized thinker) and just end it with something that makes me happy.