you know whatās really genuinely unsettling? the degree to which men fucking do not want to sympathize with/be interested in women.
male audiences will happily watch a dozen superhero shows, but then something like Agent Carter or Supergirl turn up and theyāre panned from the first trailer and have to struggle for ratings. male audiences will watch countless installments of a franchise as long as itās about men doing man things but the second a character like Rey or Furiosa or god forbid four entire female Ghostbusters steps up and takes a position of prominence itāsĀ āpandering sjw bullshitā.
itās not pandering. men just aggressively donāt want to have to be invested in a womanās narrative and itās really gross.
anyway re: everyone telling me toĀ āStop making this a gender thingā or some variation on that
this isnāt like⦠an opinion Iām pulling out of my ass here? this starts where earlier than tv shows and hollywood blockbusters, when all the kids in a class are reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Eragon o Lord of the Rings or Maze Runner or whatever the hip book is right now. the books like that, the ones that become popular reading, are overwhelmingly about male leads, because male is still considered the default.Ā
thereās a split in YA literature, between books that areĀ āfor everyoneā andĀ āfor girlsā, and thatās honestly the entire issue in a tiny little box right there. stories about men are supposed to be accessible for everyone, but stories about girls are seen as 1.) inherently for women and 2.) something that only women will care about.
men grow up in a society that doesnāt make them go out of their way to get into the heads of women and empathize with then. historically itās been very easy for men to not engage with female-led media if they donāt want to, whereas (like someone else commented on this post) girls and women have had very little choice in the past because everything was about men. we didnāt even question it.
and now the women are arriving in mainstream media in ways that say theyāre important and they matter and
small (or sometimes not so small) but loud-enough-to-be-acknowledged groups of men lose. their. shit.
because they think thereās something inherently Not For Them about a womanās story, and they never learned how to deal with it.
(also once again, because Ā LOT of yaāll donāt seem to get this here: Iām trying to talk about knee-jerk reactions to female-centered works – often before they even come out. not whether or not you personally thought [x show or movie] was good. ya feel?)
i donāt think iāve ever read a single post that iāve agreed with so totally and so immediately and hereās why:
i love books, right? and from the ages of about 11-15 i was insanely invested in teenage/ya fantasy and sci-fi. harry potter, percy jackson, all of the books op listed above- and one of the things that made those books so great was that you could have a conversation about them with anyone! a lot of the guys in my class also loved this type of genre and iād often talk about books with them (even my own brother has read all of the books listed above) weād have long, interesting conversations about these books and it was great.
but then iād mention something about the hunger games, or the divergent series, or uglies, the raven cycle, mara dyer, the mortal instruments, the selection, etc. and the response would always be the same: eitherĀ āi havenāt read itā orĀ āi couldnāt get into itā orĀ āit doesnāt seem like my type of thingā
even outside of the ya genre, looking at something like contemporary fiction or whatever- do you know how many guys will talk endlessly about the great gatsby or catcher in the rye or any other male-centric novel? but when you bring up something as influential as pride and prejudice or jane eyre or practically /anything/ written by/focused around a woman- you get the same responses as before
society has made it so that women have no choice whether to engage with male-centric stories or not: from children, a big portion of the media we consume focuses on the male perspective and like,,, thatās not necessarily a bad thing /in itself/- the bad thing is that it doesnāt work both ways and itās not an even split. whereas young girls are surrounded by and expected to empathise with films/books/media concerning men, itās not the same for young boys: they have narratives that either focus entirely or largely around them.Ā
women have no trouble consuming media that focuses on a male narrative because itās been labelled as the default, the ānormalā- whereas men struggle to watch/read anything that doesnāt focus around them because theyāve never /had/ to.
This is very much true from a race angle as well. White men are the main characters in nearly every piece of popular media. Because that is the mainstream, nearly all people consume it. All people learn to empathize with white men and see them as fully fleshed out human beings – even internalizing the idea of white men as the default human being.
White men, however, only have to be exposed to narratives about themselves. They have to go out of their way to find something NOT about them. When theyāre exposed to any piece of media thatās not about them, they feel left out because theyāve literally never known what it is to be left out of media unless theyāve intentionally sought out narratives about POC/ women. Very few actually seek out those narratives because not being centered is unbearably foreign and uncomfortable to them.
If we want to change this, we need to stop telling boys, āno, this toy/book/show is for girls.ā Start giving them books and shows that have diverse characters at a young age. Donāt let your kids reach adulthood without challenging white male supremacy in media by introducing them to things by and about POC/women in general. If you have a white son, this is especially crucial.
Haha this is why im not paying to see a male movie. Im not buying tickets or dvds of male stars. Writers. Or directors
@actuallyhashtag full offense but I donāt want approval from trans exclusive feminists, thanks
And like it gets so much worse when itās WoC
mod v
When I brush my daughterās hair and elaborately braid it round the side of her scalp, I am doing the thing that is expected of me. When my husband brushes out tangles before bedtime, he needs his efforts noticed and congratulatedāsaying aloud in front of both me and her that it took him a whole 15 minutes. There are many small examples of where the work I normally do must be lauded when transferred to my husband. It seems like a small annoyance, but its significance looms larger.
My son will boast of his clean room and any other jobs he has done; my daughter will quietly put her clothes in the hamper and get dressed each day without being asked. They are six and four respectively. Unless I engage in this conversation on emotional labor and actively change the roles we inhabit, our children will do the same. They are already following in our footsteps; we are leading them toward the same imbalance.
Hefnerās philosophy admittedly differed from the mainstream heterosexuality of the 1950s ā but only in the sense that it was built to better privilege straight men. As Barbara Ehrenreich detailed in her book The Hearts of Men, before Playboy, bachelors were seen as losers who couldnāt get wives of their own. (They were also suspected of being gay, as the implications around the phrase āconfirmed bachelorā still attest.) Hefner changed the public perception of single men, turning them into swinging (hetero) sex gods having adventures that poor henpecked married men could only dream of. This idea is still with us today ā if youāve ever seen an episode of Entourage or read a pick-up artistās blog, youāve reaped the benefits of Hefnerās work. But the change was never meant to make sex more fulfilling for women, or even queer men. Far from it.
[ā¦] In the pre-Playboy variety of sexism, women were children who had to be taken care of and disciplined by their husbands. In the new, āradicalā Playboy philosophy, women were sour, scolding mommies to be rebelled against or hot commodities to be acquired. This split between conservative misogyny and hip, āliberalā misogyny is still with us, and still expressed in much the same terms. But Hefner never challenged the sexism at the heart of the social order ā he just wanted to remove any responsibility men might bear to the women they slept with, and make sure menās experience of sex was consequence-free. His revolution re-arranged the surface, but left the underlying structure of patriarchy intact.
the more pissed a get. now, iām not saying disney needs to make shang canonically bisexual (*cough* disney should definitely make shang canonically bisexual *cough*) but likeā¦this changes some of the core lessons of the animated movie?? like
animated mulan:
shows a romantic relationships that is strongly rooted in friendship and mutual respect (unlike many other disney movies)
moral: gender is not your most important characteristic. your gender alone does not define who you are
live action mulan, apparently:
itās totally healthy to date someone whose personality you actually canāt stand so long as You Want To Bang ThemĀ ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
and all of thisā¦just to removeā¦.any slight hintā¦ā¦.of bisexual subtextā¦ā¦ā¦
Can we also talk about the transphobic undertones here? Like, he hates this one soldier who is Suspiciously Not Performing Masculinity Quite Rightā¦..up until the moment the (heteronormative) narrative reveals that soldier to actually be a Perfectly Bangable Cis Lady! Whew! (So grossā¦)
[caption: a tweet from Nerdy Asians @nerdyasians which reads: The new character “Chen Honghui” hates Mulan all the way until he finds out she is female. This change from icon Li Shang is very suspicious]