metas?

[hoosierbitch]

Can anyone point me towards some good metas about why hating (or disliking) female characters is wrong, why it happens so often, and why they're hated in the first place? I know I've read a lot of good ones, but I neglected to bookmark them, and my googling has thus far been futile. Any links to good meta comms/delicious archives would be greatly appreciated too.

Thanks in advance! :-)

Comments

[krait]

All right, here's a few things.

Sexuality and Slash Fandom by Diaskeuasis delves a bit into the misogynistic overtones of slash, in an historical context (as the subtitle, 'Or, from "We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other" to "For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, Fraser is sucking Ray's cock" suggests).


"Fanfic Symposium: When Worlds Collide" discusses male privilege and how it can infringe on fandom 'female spaces'.

QFS Revisited by Cathexys discusses slash as a sexual orientation or action performed by women, with some discussion of the anti-woman sentiments slash as a genre is noted for.

A post by Patrick Hayden has a brief discussion of the Connie Willis-Harlan Ellison Hugo incident of a few years ago, and its implications for women in fandom. (It's part 3 in the linked post.)

My Buffyholism is Showing - Women, Connection by Gabrielleabelle is a great discussion on Buffy as a fandom that drew in many women, with comparison to other shows. Interestingly, it's not the "strong female characters" she links with Buffy's success, but rather "number of connections between female characters, of all stripes". (There are charts!) Sort of the opposite of misogynistic fandom -- this is "what makes a female-centric/woman-positive fandom", essentially.

[krait]

Some Thoughts On Manpain by Thingswithwings is a lot about misogyny in canon, but also deals with how it spills over into fandom: Of course, because shows and movies so often set things up in this way – "the woman has to die so that the man can have a story" – manpain becomes easy to defend, in fannish circles, via a sort of fatalistic Watsonian attitude. "Why did they fridge that lady," folks will say, and other folks will come in to helpfully explain to you that hey, if they hadn't killed the lady, how would the plot have possibly gone on?

How about all the ladies? by jlh discusses divisiveness in fandom and how setting up a dichotomy of hates-female-characters/likes-female-characters can easily turn into "just another reason why I'm a better fan/feminist/writer than you".

The flip side by Bookshop is about heteronormativity being widespread in slash, and the often misogynistic results: I don't want to use the word "hate" about any female character, period. But that said, I *do* hate that it's so hard to turn off the automatic negative voice in my brain, because we're trained to hate women and girls--by society, but also by m/m slash fandom itself.

Mary Sue - testing the boundaries by legionseagle (with further discussion here)has some great reflections on the fandom tendency to condemn any competent female character as a "Mary Sue" regardless of what that term technically was developed to mean.

The FanLore page has some links mixed in with a pretty detailed overview of the major ways in which female characters are treated by fandom: ignored, reviled, pushed out of the way to make room for slash, the rarity of f/f...

A Fandom Misogyny Bingo Card!

Pardon me briefly, I must vent includes some great anecdata regarding female characters' treatment by fandom and how it seems to have a double standard (a Stargate-fandom comment, a Criminal Minds comment, and a Torchwood comment particularly stand out to me as things I have either seen myself, or become aware of despite not being in that fandom!)

[secretsolitaire]

Wow, thanks for that manpain essay. Major food for thought there.

[hoosierbitch]

You. Are. Amazing.

Thank you so much for this--I really needed to be able to put some of the troubling posts that I've seen creeping into both of my main fandoms into perspective. This has helped restore my faith in the intelligence of fandom, given me ideas for how I can improve the portrayal of women in my stories, and helped me to be able to articulate my own stance on the issues much more clearly and comprehensively.

THANK YOU!

[krait]

Oh, you're welcome! I'm so glad you found it helpful -- I didn't have anything directly on the topic, but I discovered I had all sorts of things that circled around it, closing in slowly. :D