Fiction, gender, women's pain, and MAN PAIN.

[prozacpark]

"This one time I hit a girl with my car. It was the most traumatic experience of my life and she kept trying to make it about her leg. As if my pain meant nothing."So, I've been thinking about Man Pain, what exactly IS it, its awesome power to make me hate a character like I never thought possible, how narratives view women's pain vs. men's pain,

Comments

[nicole_anell]

Heh, well I can't say we'll ever agree on Wesley, because there my own distaste for manpain comes into conflict with my irrational love for people who Fail Epically and bring about their own torture.

But yeah, I really like the way you defined this. And for me this is the kind of narrative that always thrives on girlfriend-fridging. (And of course my Wes got a double high score there. *sigh*) I like my share of grief stories; it's not that I don't believe that pain is *real*. But it's such a cliche when the focus ends up squarely on the widower/lover's heartache, like Well This Is Certainly The Worst Thing That Can Happen To Anyone, without any consideration for *her* actual life and the tragedy of it being taken.

(May I suggest The Crow as an especially rage-inducing example of manpain? It was the ~favorite movie~ of an ex-boyfriend of mine and I had to watch it. So: the goth protagonist comes back to avenge his own death, but mostly the death of his Dialogue-Less Girlfriend who was gang-raped and killed alongside him, because

[prozacpark]

Which I completely understand? While I'm a lot more rational about my love for fictional men these days, I did crush on freaking Michael Guerin back in the day (for which, I'm appropriately ashamed now), and I'm still a lot more likely to crush on the Baltars than the Sam Anders', who have to grow on me through their love for my OTCs

[nicole_anell]

AAAAAAAH, I still don't understand how that pregnancy and miscarriage was Entirely About Tigh, considering (a) it was HER FREAKING PREGNANCY, and (b) hi, Tricia Helfer had SIXTH BILLING in the credits. (Michael Hogan? Outranked by her.) The hell does it take to get a storyline of her own?

[prozacpark]

A penis, apparently. Especially in season 4.5.

[ellestra]

Thank you for putting this into words

[prozacpark]

Yeah, the women-hate is why I mostly stay out of mainstream fandom, too, and experience it through the filter of my awesomely women-positive friendslist. But the lack of meta/fanfic focused on certain aspects of women's narratives makes me sad

[ellestra]

I started to watch BSG for Athena's and Helo's storyline. I stayed after because I liked other people too but the show worked hard to scare ma away. However sometimes I'm almost thankful she wasn't much on screen - at least her character didn't get a chance to get as screwed as others. And Boomer just makes me angry so i try not to think about it. After all one cannot change the past

[lyssie]

I have the suspicion that season four would have been less about John if Skiffy hadn't interfered and gone, "Make this accessible to people who like wrestling!" otoh, I don't know whether to believe that or not.

[imelda72]

Even Baltar has a sort of inverted manpain, where he thinks it's about him, but the narrative often mocks that notion.

I was wondering why I didn't mind Baltar's manpain, and this is exactly it. Because he is just so ridiculous. He's certainly the queen of manpain, but the narrative doesn't sympathize with him for it. Usually.

Here via a link from a link

[agnes_bean]

As someone who loves Baltar to many bits, I think the reason his manpain doesn't bug is, as you suggest, because Baltar's it is narratively positioned to be more or less like Cordelia's quote. His self-centeredness is an acknowledged (and poked-fun-at) character flaw, which I can totally get behind. I love me some characters with flaws, and selfishness is one I can really sympathize with and like to see characters deal with -- if, you know, it is actual, intentional character flaw, and not an unintentional result of how the narrative presents thins.

[prozacpark]

That's a very good point about dramas and their focus on man pain. One reason that I've always preferred genre fiction is because I sort of enjoy getting some of that in the form of metaphor? Strip that away and give pain to me in its non-disguised form, and it might offend me, but it might also make me laugh at the melodrama. I'm, in theory, fond of fictional pain, but it has to be more of the Rebecca Locke or Kara Thrace vareity where the issues present themselves as competence and layering and not breaking down and whimpering in Man Pain, if that makes any sense? I need it to be given to me in non-typical ways.

I was trained to think that women were only valuable when they were rejecting femininity.I've had this problem, too, in the past. I'm going to rec it to you if it ends up being good, but right now, I'm reading "Alien to Femininity," a book about genre fiction that argues that genre fiction allows heroic narratives to only the 'strong women,' and that 'feminine women' are punished or ridiculed by the narrative. And

[lilacsigil]

Wonderful post! It had me doing the dance of "Yes this is true, omg your brain is so smart

[prozacpark]

"the worst thing that could happen is your (possessive deliberate) wife/girlfriend/child dying" when there are women and children right there in the narrative trying to avoid getting killed. It's like they don't really count or something.THIS, yes. And I've noticed that I'm just...a lot more likely to connect with the characters who are 'othered' by the text? Realizing which makes me uncomfortable sometimes, but fiction has certainly conditioned me for it with just this sort of crap

[lux_apollo]

I really shouldn't be reading this at 1:30am, because right now I'm too tired and all the ranting is just making me want to douse your vitriol with some nice, cold milk.

I object to you generalizing this as 'MAN PAIN' out of principle, because it shifts the focus away from what the phenomenon really is - sexist gendering of the narrative lens.

So there. Blah.

[lokifan]

Surely 'man pain' is sexist gendering of the narrative lens by definition, and prozacpark is talking about that? What focus is being shifted from?

[lux_apollo]

By categorizing something with a label like 'man pain', you are creating a sexist environment too - one in which dialogue and narrative about the experiences of men is devalued.

I'm all for feminism and better representation of female and non-heteronormative experience in the narratives and points-of-view of our media, but that doesn't mean that underrepresented groups should get a get-out-of-jail-free card to say and phrase things however they like, no matter how unequitable those phrasings are.

I've had to have this discussion many times over the last few years with colleagues volunteering for the Women's Centre or Rainbow Centre at my school's Diversity and Equity Office. It doesn't matter how down and out things are, we still have to play on the two way (multi-way?) street of respect.

[prozacpark]

Firstly, "manpain" is actually a fandom term, which describes a genre fans seem to love. This is my critical definition of the term and how I see it. So the term isn't mine.

And gods forbid that someone ever devalue men's narratives. Clearly, only women's should be constantly devalued and ridiculed. If there's going to be an equality of any kind, fiction is going to have to learn to decrease the value it places on men's narratives, because that importance comes at the expense of women's stories. So, yes, these sexist narratives need to be devalued and put down if they're ever going to disappear.

And in case it wasn't clear, I'm not disrespecting ACTUAL men, but sexist metanarratives (and people's conditioned response to them), so whatever you might THINK you're defending here, I can't help but think you're defending sexist, male-centric narratives that devalue women.