My thoughts on Femslash

[kansan_entrails]

There's been a lot of discussion of why femslash isn't as popular as slash. It seems to baffle some folk that slash can be so popular in the realms of fandom. What especially confuses them is how fangirls who claim to be more interested in the ladies than the dudes could possibly prefer male/male slash as opposed to female/female femslash (kept in

Comments

[gryphonsegg]

Yay, you posted it, and it is every bit as good as I'd hoped it would be!

I particularly cannot get into live action stuff because of the Generic Prettiness factor.I have this problem too. Yeah, Generically Pretty and Impossibly Beautiful are rampant problems in animation and comics (from all countries, not just the US and not just Japan), but it doesn't bother me on such a deep level there because it's so obvious that the characters are drawn or computer-generated. With live action, I cannot stop thinking about how the casting director(s) probably had the chance to cast women who would have been perfect for the roles in question but never even considered them because they didn't fit the narrow beauty ideal, and the women who did approach the ideal closely enough to get cast were then required to go through a huge amount of making-up and making-over to cover up every bit of individual variation, and their images were probably digitally altered anyway just in case any symptoms of biology showed through. Oh, and some of them,

[kansan_entrails]

The drawn line can be shaped into anything. You can have a female character be a talking cat and have it make sense.

Also, I hate that physical appearance is what determines worth for women. Even in feminist circles we've been force fed this notion of beauty = feminine so hard that it's hard to disasociate the two.

[gryphonsegg]

Oh, yes. It has long been huge problem in fandom that merely having one or two conventionally pretty/feminine traits (especially large breasts or blond hair) is considered grounds for presuming that a woman has all other conventionally feminine traits and is completely lacking in any skills, capabilities, or personality facets that aren't usually associated the "Hot Chick" or "Pretty, Pretty Princess" stereotypes. And now there's a bit of a backlash going on among (thin, white, able-bodied) feminists, whereby defending and rooting for conventionally sexy and feminine female characters is supposed to be the right thing to do and preferring female characters who are plain and/or tomboyish is a sign of hating female sexuality and "femininity" (which somehow exists apart from society expectations or actual women's behavior).

[kansan_entrails]

You know that thing I always bring up about the Us v Them/One way or Another arguement? I think it's cropping up again.

[gryphonsegg]

something I wish I saw more of in media is female characters who acted like cornballs

I want to come back to this point, because it's a really good one. Part of the problem is that lots of people involved on the production side won't let female characters be silly or goofy because it might interfere with being sexy. They can be funny, but only as ditzes, sarcastic snarkers, or purveyors of (or punchlines to) sex jokes. It's better than it used to be-- if nothing else, at least sarcastic, snarky girls are an option now-- but female characters still aren't allowed as full a range of humor as male characters are.

In that respect, it's similar to the "be athletic and smart, but not too athletic or too smart" problem. At least female characters now commonly display a wider range of abilities than they used to, but they still don't get the same range of abilities as male characters. And female characters' competence is often portrayed in ways that strike me as hollow: Swing that sword to show how empowered you are, but don't develop

[kansan_entrails]

And worse yet, even if there were a rare cornball female character she'd get pegged as incompetent by some parts of fandom. -sigh-

I think you'd like Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time. She's a huge science geek (even if the science in this universe is made up science).

[gryphonsegg]

LOL, you say that as if the science in TF2 and superhero comics were not made up science! Or as I like to call it, SKIENCE!!!@

[gryphonsegg]

if there were a rare cornball female character she'd get pegged as incompetent by some parts of fandom

Yeah, I've already seen this happen over and over. Examples include Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter fandom, Miss Martian in Young Justice, and the mother of them all, Orihime in Bleach. A male character and a female character exhibit the same level of silliness, naivete, absent-mindedness, social cluelessness or willingness to believe off-the-wall theories. Fandom judges the female character to be unintelligent on that basis and judges the male character to be an eccentric genius on the exact same basis. I RAGE. And you know I damn sure don't like the YJ cartoon's portrayal of Miss Martian. It's poorly-thought-out, badly written, and insulting to girls. But I've seen comics fans claim that the problem with the cartoon version is that she's incompetent, which is NOT the real problem there.

[gryphonsegg]

a lot of writers, particularly male ones, tend to fill their casts with dudes with maybe one chick (can't let things get too gay now)

Oh, hey, I almost forgot about this part! I saw a case of this just yesterday. The book is Prison Ship and is exactly what it says on the tin: it's set on a spaceship which is basically a big, self-contained prison. All the prisoners are male. All the staff are (officially) male. Its secret mission is to get some sort-of-ex-military guys (officially cashiered but on call for special occasions) into position for an off-the-books mission. The military forces of the various interplanetary governments range from mostly male to all male. And the people organizing this thought it would be a great idea to sneak in exactly ONE female agent disguised as a (young and slender, of course) man. The set-up is one of the very few that even I have to admit makes an all-male cast completely justified. Seriously, if I were an officer in charge of making this mission work, I would say, for perhaps the first and

[kansan_entrails]

MEN KISSING?! I'm pretty sure that didn't happen.

Definately didn't happen. /Kate Beaten comic reference

I just had a thought about the casting madness. What if they got a woman to voice 2 instead of a man? Eccentric genius woman having an affair with her young male apprentice? Hurm...8)