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

[etrangere]

this is brilliance. brilliance. (haha i also tend to love evil women / bad girls / anti heroine very easy; but have trouble with the good girls. Then again I'm the same with the men).

I have so much hatred for Adama's manpain. Of course I'm a hypocrite because I love Wesley (despite recognising the silly manpain involved). I guess Wesley's just prettier when he suffers *shallow*

[prozacpark]

Yeah, I have a general preference for morally ambiguous characters and prefer evilish men, too. Unfortunately, in fiction, the assholery of men often presents itself as assholery towards women in particular, and fiction/fandom excuses/glorifies this? Which has possibly made me a lot more picky over my bad boys than the bad girls. :)

[prozacpark]

Yes, that. Which is why while I love the Batverse in theory, in practice, I have only been able to fall in love with "Birds of Prey." Which is awesome, and I like its lack of Man Pain. <3

[ojuzu]

Oh, yes. That's it, Bruce Wayne! Use your money to build incredibly fancy gadgets no-one but you will ever use! It's not like those orphanages over there need money or anything.

Or, to be more on point: he could have achieved similar results by donating money to medicine and social services and actively campaigning for policies and candidates who dealt with the underlying roots of crime. INSTEAD OF BUILDING A SUIT WITH LITTLE EARS ON IT.

[scrollgirl]

Well, to be fair, Bruce Wayne does donate to medical research and orphanages and all that other good stuff. It's just that the narrative doesn't really focus on his charitable acts, they're just taken as given, because Bat-planes and Batmobiles are, well, cooler.

That said, Batman has EPIC Man Pain. It's really frustrating and it's one of the reasons I don't bother buying comics any more.

[orange_creative]

I am so glad I read your meta. I always loathed it when characters couldn't see past their own problems (I get frustrated, stop watching, facepalm through the rest of the episode, etc.). I just never really had any particular terms to match to how I felt about it.

And then there was the critically acclaimed "500 Days of Summer," which consisted of nothing but a guy's Man Pain-ish POV on his relationship with a flighty girl, and we never get her POV, just his dressing her up in his patriarchal meta-narratives.

This. A couple of my friends told me that they really liked this movie and recommended it. I started watching it, then stopped about half an hour through. Right off the bat, I couldn't take the main characters dramatics because ONE TRUE LOVE wasn't in love with him. I despised the way his POV was glorified, that his heartbreak from being dumped by a girl who had been honest and straight-forward about what she wanted from the relationship since the beginning somehow made her the bad guy. Granted, as I skimmed through the

[prozacpark]

Yeah, that's exactly my reaction to Manpain, too, and I'm generally not someone who lets my dislike for a character get in the way of liking something? But enough manpain would force me to shun any canon.

I liked Summer a lot, too, and the more he vilified her, the more it made me like her. I really don't understand why the movie isn't about his own issues and his inability to take her for what she actually is and stop forcing her into his narratives. And it amazes me that people sympathize with his POV instead of seeing him as an incredibly unlikable jerk who ignores Summer's boundaries in hopes that she'll change her mind that he actually is? Sigh.

[kattahj]

I really don't understand why the movie isn't about his own issues and his inability to take her for what she actually is and stop forcing her into his narratives.

I came out of the cinema feeling that that was what the film was about. Which was why I loved it. I felt that it was a deconstruction of the common romcom position that if you REALLYREALLY love someone then they're obliged to fall in love with you too and live happily ever after. I absolutely identified with Summer and felt that the film validated me in that. But I've come to understand that many people think quite the opposite.

[scottyquick]

I despised the way his POV was glorified, that his heartbreak from being dumped by a girl who had been honest and straight-forward about what she wanted from the relationship since the beginning somehow made her the bad guy.

... what? Were we even watching the same movie? It's made very, very clear that Summer is not the bad guy, that Tom is just too in love with the idea of her, not her.

[lls_mutant]

Here through ivanolix. could not agree more about manpain! And you just summed up every reason I detest Jack Shepard on LOST and adored John Locke. For Jack, it was all about him. For Locke, it was all about overcoming and what he could doWhat's frustrating about BSG was that it could be pretty good at the pain thing before season 4. Not perfect, mind you. Far from it. (Like you said- Helo and Athena. Once Athena had Hera, she lost all storylines that were NOT Hera-centric. I HATED that.) But Lee sent up Adama's manpain quite a few times. Baltar had manpain, but like you said, we were meant to find Baltar's manpain quite ludicrous. And there were characters without it that had very real pain and emotional journeys that DIDN'T descend into that. Tom Zarek, for example. Early Saul Tigh. (And even after he killed Ellen, a lot of the issues were dealt with nicely there because it was about him working through genuinely justified guilt, and a lot of it was about her, not him.) Early Galen Tyrol- the guy who begged for 40 more

[prozacpark]

Yeah, Jack's Manpain was what made me give up on "Lost." The episode where Boone DIED, and his death was all about Jack's guilt and suffering? Last straw. I was very fond of Locke, too.

Early BSG did incredibly well with tapping into the POV of 'others,' and set up a narrative arc that forced you to look at all sides? And then all the complexity started dying slowing started from season three until we ended with the epic fail of season four. And Athena's role being reduced to the mother of the special child of god's new generation was especially offensive because fiction already has issues with the idea of motherhood.

A lot of the Man Pain earlier was portrayed as character flaws? Tigh's being the primary one, so that when he made things all about himself, the text questioned it. But season four was just...devoid of any and all subtleties that had made otherwise problematic arcs work for BSG.

[danniisupernova]

I...actually can't decide if I hate Adama more or Tyrol. But it's a tough call.

Tyrol for me, hands down, no questions.

Tyrol was just constantly DESTROYING the women who loved him with his Man Pain. Boomer: OMG UR A CYLON! PPL WILL THINK I'MA CYLON TOO! I'M GOING TO MAN HANDLE YOU AND SAY HORRIBLE THINGS TO YOU BECAUSE YOU MADE ME LESS POPULAR!!
Cally: OMG, MY WIFE HAS PTSD! IT'S SOOOOOO ANNOYING!

Seriously, wtf Chief? Everyone's life is just dissolving around him and all he can think about is what a huge inconvenience it is to him!

Nothing makes me love Buffy like fandom's constant hatred of her for being oh-so-selfish.

THIS.

Great meta!

[prozacpark]

That's an insanely (and depressingly) accurate description of Tyrol's relationships with Boomer and Cally. I'll never understand my friend who LIKES Tyrol because she thinks that he stood by Boomer through the Cylon identity crisis, which makes me wonder if we were watching the same show.

Seriously, wtf Chief? Everyone's life is just dissolving around him and all he can think about is what a huge inconvenience it is to him!

Dude, THIS. I have repressed a lot of season 4.5, but another classic example of Manpain is in the finale when Tyrol's manpain over having lost his wife (who apparently annoyed him anyway!) was so great that it was more important to strangle Tory to death while everyone watched at the risk of ruining their truce than it was for HUMANITY TO SURVIVE. So, having remembered that, I'll happily agree to hate Tyrol MORE with you. ;)