Rant Rant Rant

[botias]

What about the whole 'women in refrigerators' thing?

If women can have rape fantasies and Cinderella fantasies by the bestseller load, surely men can be allowed their fantasies in which fate has decreed that the only way they can honor their one true love is to become a (single chick-magnet) superhero with a tragic past instead of say 'going to the next step'. Look at Supernatural. I don't like the show. It's not my fantasy. But, when the blond guy's girlfriend/fiance gets offed, it rescues him. He was teetering on the brink of the domestic, the mundane, the meaningless, the tedious, the conventional.

Should we have men vetting romance novels? Should we make the heroes less hung, less wealthy, less charismatic, less tall, less confident and skilled in bed, less thoroughly whipped by the heroine by the end of the book, so that men can be more comfortable with what we read? Cuz the number of penis enlargement emails in my inbox tells me this does matter to guys. I have never yet, in all my days, in even the most enlightened and modern of romances, read one in which the hero has a receding hair line or is a mall security guard. I did read ONE where he had a spare tire, but only because she was his personal trainer and she fixed him. O.O

Violence arouses people, women no less than men. Are shows like CSI a symptom of a sick society, or is media the way that healthy people express that part of themselves? Historically people have expressed this by behaving brutally towards other people and this is still the case in most parts of the world; I honestly think we might be looking at a positive change.

While I'm at it, I don't buy the 'women can express/feel hatred for men, but the reverse is not OK' thing. The wheel turns; the person who is powerless today holds the whip tomorrow. Hatred is never OK. Is a woman who hates men likely to rear children who end or at least temper the war between the sexes? Will she foster goodwill towards her sex in her relationships?

Comments

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

No clue about the refrigerator context, and I don't read romance novels. Or watch "Supernatural", come to that. I might change my mind if the characters start having receding hairlines and thighs... :D

Huh-- CSI as therapy. I like it!

And no, women who hate men are just as tiresome as men who hate women. I know a few of the former, and avoid them like the plague!

[botias.livejournal.com]

The refrigerator thing refers to the hayooge cliche/trope of female characters existing only so that they can be killed so as to set a male character on the course of a heroic destiny, or render him interestingly tragic. :)

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

Ah-ha! Not watching the show I missed the reference, but I'm all too familiar with that cliche. I grew up with Magnum: PI!

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

And Star Trek!

[botias.livejournal.com]

I guess the term originated from the comic book world. Yeah? You want to see some heroes with receding hairlines? :D There are a few in TV and movies: Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, Sean Connery. I thought the bald character of Keith Mars on Veronica Mars was plenty good looking. Thighs are a little harder to come by I think.

[kittyspike.livejournal.com]

Did someone put you in a fridge today? 'Cuz I'd be mad too - I hate being cold.


*hugs* People and society at large suck in general. I try not to think about it too much or I get really angry. And hate really doesn't do anyone any favors in the end.

As for Supernatural, I do watch it, and yes while Sam's unfortunate run-in with the yellow-eyed demon forced him back into adventure, that domesticity is what his brother secretly longs for. Dean was never on "our" side of life; he's always been fighting demons. He's always been on his own. He has dreams of settling down. One episode in particular made him think that he had a son, and in the end when he found out the kid wasn't his he was sorely disappointed.

If you don't like it, that's fine. :) I'm just saying, there is more to the show than Sam's broody tragedy. Running along side that is Dean's silent plea for something he'll never have, something he regrets taking Sam from. Something he resents his father for taking from them both when they were children.

[botias.livejournal.com]

What I'm saying is that these 'secret longings' might be, to some extent, crocodile tears, at least on the part of the writers. :) That it's not a coincidence that there are all these stories about people for whom domesticity is impossible.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

I agree and disagree! that is all, because I have to do something, but I will essay you later.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Sounds good. I just remembered where else I have encountered magical vaginas! In fiction thankfully. It's not unusual in romance novels, if the hero has been blinded by a blow to the head, for the heroine's magical vagina to cure him of his blindness.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

To be fair the magical healing cock trope is just as insidious in YA and romance fiction I think.

And in fanfic I think it's practically a legal definition.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, yes, you are right. There are plenty of heroines who are cured of their sexual/relationship angst/baggage by one good romp with the hero. But I've only known magical vaginas to restore the blind to sight!

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

At least promise me it was psychological trauma induced blindness...

[botias.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry! But I'm afraid they literally make it better via the intensity of the orgasm experienced due to the magical vagina. Fortunately this is very rare, and mainstream romance takes itself too seriously for such plotlines these days. I can totally imagine it happening in fic though. I'll bet Spike could do it with just his tongue.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

... o_O

well having seen the length of Spike's tongue, maybe it could.

[diachrony.livejournal.com]

Nope, I saw a pr0n film where the magic cock of magical fucking brought the blind woman's sight back.

[botias.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. My impression of pornos is that they do seem to have a rather farcical bent to them oft times. :)

[kyence.livejournal.com]

Well, for stuff written "for" men, so to speak, you have the hot perfect women with huge knockers and stuff: look at WWE or many an action flick. So I guess there's some of the same thing there.

That being said, I don't think romance novels are geared towards men, and there may be very few male romance novelists out there (or, more than we think if they use a female pseudonym). There's plenty of fiction out there written by men (and yes, women, too) that have well-developed relationships with imperfect characters on both sides of the gender spectrum, but the underlying theme is usually about more than just the romance itself, and that the theme is not "fantasy." With fantasy, things will be unrealistic. I used to know a couple of good examples off the top of my head of "imperfect guy romance" but I've since forgotten them.

There has been men in fridges,too, where the murder of her lover/husband/brother sets her off on a quest of vengeance. That Jodie Foster flick "The Brave One" is a recent example. In the old RPG Phantasy Star (1988), the heroine, Alis(a), sets off on the quest to avenge her brother's death at the hands of the tyrant.

I don't know if there are more women than men in fridges, though. Violence is part of the human condition. And people love to watch it: at least nowadays it's staged well-enough that we don't have to watch gladiators being slaughtered. And quite frankly, with special-effects as they are, most would probably moan it's not gory enough if we were. But public executions have been around for millenia, so it's nothing new: people took their children to beheadings, so I can't say we're worse. We're probably better because we expect everyone who watches this stuff to have a distinct sense of reality and less violent interactions with people in exchange for the vicarious exposure.

Cool topic :)

[botias.livejournal.com]

I wasn't saying romances were geared toward men. I was just saying that women don't alter their fantasy lives to suit male preferences, so they probably shouldn't ask men to do the same.

Not all guys in romance novels are 'perfect'. Sometimes their features are 'too masculine and craggy to be called handsome'. *rolls eyes* And the Brits seem to have a kink for blind guys, which I share, perhaps dating back to Jane Eyre. It's not unusual for romance novel heroes to have limps or other physical symbols of their emotional wounds (which of course the heroine heals with her love--the emotional wounds not the physical ones, though I can think of a few cases of blindness that were cured by the heroine's magic hooha). Back in the early eighties, romance novels went through a trend where they were trying to be less fantasy oriented, and I remember some heroes in wheel chairs or who were double amputees, etc.

Yes, there have been men in fridges. I think the numbers difference is mostly to do with the lack of female protagonists. I agree that today's virtual violence is preferable to the real deal of times past.

[botias.livejournal.com]

P.S. For more and better discussion of this topic, I recommend this post:

http://resolute.livejournal.com/515915.html

[diachrony.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure what I think about this given that I actually don't have rape fantasies or Cinderella fantasies. My vanilla self appears to be somewhat abnormal.

And I'm sick of the women-in-fridges thing mainly because it is so common, whereas it's frustratingly rare to find interesting front-line female characters. If there were more balance, I don't think the women-in-fridges trope would be so noted and so despised.

[botias.livejournal.com]

What I was trying to say here was that I believe the WiR phenomenon is a side-effect of the fact that men, and the fantasies that appeal to them, dominate the action/superhero genre; that it's not fair perhaps to insist that men tailor their fantasy lives to appeal to women when women would be very much unwilling to do the same; and that popular female fantasies can be equally dark and/or unappealing to (even unfriendly and unfair to) to males.

I'm leery of saying that just because I don't like something or it squicks me, people should stop doing it. When I first got into fandom, for example, I could have said that about slash. Also, I would be very sad if someone took away my non-con based on the argument that I can't tell fantasy from reality and that I might start to think non-con was OK in RL.

I'm all for more strong female action leads. Terminator, Buffy, Alien, RoboCop were all films that had strong female action leads and that I believe I enjoyed a great deal more because of that fact. Not because I appreciated the political correctness of it, but just because it made it a more satisfying experience for me.

[bendy1.livejournal.com]

Well I failed to look up any sources so here are some jumbled thoughts instead, yay.

On the I agree side, yes men have a sexuality they are entitled to express, and yes looking at it from a storytelling POV, each girl in a fridge who is there simply to propel a plot should be taken individually.

Tara was refrigerated and JW notably thought it was *more* anti-gay to protect her at the expense of the plot than it would be to treat her as any other character.

And there's something to be said for the idea that an equal playing field in violence is just what the feminist movement ordered.

But. On the I disagree side:

Taking each story individually is harmful in ways that are difficult to quantify precisely *because* they ignore society and culture as anything important. If you want to robustly examine each occurance I don't doubt that you could indeed dismiss some of the listed chilled women.

But the Ayn Rand approach fails, because no individual story exists in a vacuum and each contributes to a culture that absolutely affects people in unfair, unobjective ways.

It's okay to say you are colour blind, or gender blind, or sex blind. It's okay to write your stories as such. But you'd be wrong to think that the true path to equality lies in this approach because the real world is not a nice comfy philosophical journey where if we all had sex together we'd all be a bit queer and pale brown and everything would suddenly be lovely.

IMO you cannot go from 1000000 women in fridges to 'oh yeah I fridged that woman but it was liek totally nothing to do with all those other women in similar rectangular storage units, you weirdo paranoic'.

The starting place is not to be able to fridge as many women as we like and everyone just gets over the whole fridge thing.

The starting place is to recognise all the women in fridges that have gone before and to be able to say that you are saying something about that, whether people will agree or not.

Which means that 1) yes I'm saying porn (and crap off the cuff stories) has to say something, which you may or may not agree with, but I believe everything says something whether we like it or not anyway

and 2)that context and history are important and we can't leap over them and get straight to that equality stuff, because starting from such an unlevel playing field isn't cricket.

Also... it's just bad writing. Which is cool, you know. Not everything is Chekov. But for Joss to kill Tara, with no thought for her sexuality and all the dead lesbians preceding her, and for enough black men to be killed to make it a drinking game... when I watch Supernatural and wait with almost gleeful horror for the Woman/Black dude of the Week to die, it's just crappy writing.

I'm all for lowest common denominators. I actually like comics that present tropes like that, depending on how they deal with it. But when you write like that you *will* be judged on it, fairly or unfairly, because they *are* tropes and it *is* universal and whtehr you meant it or not is almost irrelevant, because we do live in a society with a history and a current culture.

The romance fic/women's fiction that represents men badly, in ways that make me shudder? OMg I hate them. These are not men I know, or women I would want to know. But I would like to separate that and not use it as justification for the flipside? for many reasons, not least of which is that heyyyyy, when it affects how much men in general *earn*, we can talk seriously of male oppression.

As the parent of boys, I have many issues with male depiction in the media, but it is truly a separate issue.

------------

Now whether we can say 'but it isn't *for* us, it's men writing for men and that's YAY' is another matter.

They might be producing it in the majority but whether they like it or not we're consuming it. No-one lives in a vacuum where only men watch tv, and not enough women write comics, and anyway who WANTS to live in a world where consumption of fiction is so divided?

Nah. That idea horrifies me way more than the prospect of being fridged in the media for the rest of my life.