posted
cleome and Rick, I always enjoy the engaging thoughtfulness, sharp humor (usually), and way with words you each bring to all your posts. You're known for speaking from conviction, yet with open minds. You're gifted in that way, and I love that about you.
You each are speaking some deep female/male stuff. I'm sorry for the pain that often comes with topics like this. But I'm thankful for each of you.
-------------------- "Been killed--didn't like it." (Duplicate Damsel, Legion of Super-Heroes #10)
From: Groga | Registered: Aug 2003
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quote:Originally posted by He Who LSHes: The decision to "move on" is entirely yours, Rick. I don't want you to leave. I enjoy your posts, even when we disagree--no, especially when we disagree. It's good to have a viewpoint that challenges my own. It helps me to clarify my own thinking.
But only you can decide if enough is enough. If you're going to post strong opinions on any given topic, you have to be prepared for some to disagree with you and for some to even take offense.
He Who, I don't mind if people disagree. Hell, I've done it many times. But apparantly I just push Cle's buttons. I respect her too much to keep doing that. So it comes down to avoiding her or leaving. Unless you know a different path.
-------------------- Damn you, you kids! Get off my lawn or I'm callin' tha cops!
posted
A different path? Why not agree to disagree?
-------------------- The Semi-Great Gildersleeve - writing, super-heroes, and this 'n' that
From: The Stasis Zone | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
Not necessarily. It just means you acknowledge your differences and leave it at that.
I have a dear aunt I love very much, but with whom I do not see eye to eye on important stuff such as religion, politics, etc. I've found it works best to listen to her concerns, agree with her when I can, not contradict her too much, and speak the truth (as I see it) only when absolutely necessary--because I love her and respect the relationship too much to jeopardize it by having to be "right."
But that's my solution. You may have to work out your own.
-------------------- The Semi-Great Gildersleeve - writing, super-heroes, and this 'n' that
From: The Stasis Zone | Registered: Jul 2003
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cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
HWL, so far as I'm concerned, that's what "scroll" is: a synonym for: Agreeing to disagree.
Nobody has to avoid any subject they wish to discuss in order to keep me posting on the board. I'm a big girl now, even if I still have a big mouth, too. :/
LT, thanks for your comment, too.
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
Legion, thanks for the kind words. I predict a long and happy existence here for you. I've enjoyed watching you become a fine poster here as well.
-------------------- Damn you, you kids! Get off my lawn or I'm callin' tha cops!
Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by cleome: "Men With Boobs" is simply the narrow-minded reader's/viewer's way of writing off any female character who doesn't fit their own personal notion of what constitutes "womanly" behavior.
Not when I use it. When I use it, it's a denigration of the writer who doesn't bother to add any depth or complexity to a female character, and just writes the same macho jerk character he always writers, but describes her as a woman this time, and, quite often, gets applauded for it, despite reinforcing the sexist notion that the only way men will read / watch something with a female protagonist is if she's symbolically 'castrated' of all female characteristics other than bouncy breasts.
It's the same sort of logic that leads to women in business being told that they have to act like men to succeed, which, IMO, is bullcrap, since studies show that American businesses with female CEOs and boardmembers are *more successful financially* than those with exclusively male executives. If all the businesswomen added nothing other than a male perspective, and didn't have valuable contributions of their own to make, that wouldn't be the case, they'd add nothing to the corporation that another male executive wouldn't have added. But they do, and it's a pretty significant margin, as I recall.
Equal doesn't mean identical. We should celebrate differences, not oppress people into conforming to some mythical ideal that everybody is exactly the same.
Rick (and I) should be able to be proud of being men, and you should be able to be proud of being a woman, and not have to live in a world where everything is judged by male standards, and written from a male point-of-view and 'default to male.'
Reinforcing the idea that there is no difference between the genders only subtracts from what it is to be a woman (or a man, for that matter) and shoves women back into the ghetto they've been stuck in for thousands of years of being 'men without penises' (John Byrne, for instance, liked to call Sue the 'distaff' member of the Fantastic Four, and we all know what he meant by that).
I use 'men with boobs,' instead of 'men without penises,' since I find it less offensive to refer to a lazy characterization of a woman character as a man plus something, than the more common 'man missing something' assumption used by others.
I pretty clearly described how Ellen Ripley displayed some behaviors and qualities that where more associated with female roles in Aliens, and none of them involved fainting, petticoats or makeup. They involved being fiercely protective of Newt, and being willing to make the morally right choice, even if it wasn't the easy choice or the 'logical' choice.
None of that was meant to imply that her 'female' characteristics were inferior or that I was restricting her to some role, which seems to be what you got from that.
Indeed, most of your argument suggests that you didn't really read my post, but stopped at my criticism of male writers who write women characters without any depth or nuance as writing 'men with boobs.'
If I go back and edit out that phrase, is the meat of the argument less offensive to you?
Registered: Aug 2006
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cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
[snip]
quote:Originally posted by Set:
quote:Originally posted by cleome: "Men With Boobs" is simply the narrow-minded reader's/viewer's way of writing off any female character who doesn't fit their own personal notion of what constitutes "womanly" behavior.
Not when I use it...
This explanation only makes sense if you're intending to communicate effectively with those most like yourself. If you have any goals beyond that, and somebody tells you that your usage of a particular expression majorly pushes her buttons, maybe you should consider discarding it-- at least before this particular audience.
quote:When I use it, it's a denigration of the writer who doesn't bother to add any depth or complexity to a female character, and just writes the same macho jerk character he always writers...
It's the same sort of logic that leads to women in business being told that they have to act like men to succeed, which, IMO, is bullcrap, since studies show that American businesses with female CEOs and boardmembers are *more successful financially*...
I guess that's your perspective. But I've read stories and seen flicks and the like in which somebody got applauded for writing women who seemed "credible" to them and the only impression I got from their portrayals were weepy Barbie Dolls or soulless ciphers that were mainly there so people couldn't claim that the two male stars were fighting because they were in love with one another.
Or else, they clumsily paste some stereotypical "girly" trait onto the character as a way of saying that, "Yeah, she's all Action Girl and stuff but see? She's still a GIRL!" I HATED that a stupid love story needed to be grafted onto the end of the first Matrix film because -hey!- otherwise Trinity wouldn't have been a Real Woman™. No, she had to do it all for Lurrrrrrve. [groan] I know plenty of women who had the same reaction, BTW.
There is plenty of pressure on women in the workplace to be more "feminine." Look up the court case in which the judge ruled that it's a firing offense for a female employee to refuse to wear makeup to work. Naked face = "man" apparently. Or at least something disturbing and unsavory. Look up an organization called "Bully Broads," sometime. I was on a feminist board more or less regularly when that one started getting press and the rage among professional women from all up and down the class spectrum was through the roof.
quote:Equal doesn't mean identical. We should celebrate differences, not oppress people into conforming to some mythical ideal that everybody is exactly the same.
Which is not what you're doing. You're trying to replace one form of conformity with another. There's room for all kinds of women in a large cast of characters, and the ones who are logical thinkers, or stoic, or who don't get all fluffy over babies and kittens and so forth are not less than human if that's how they roll.
quote:Rick (and I) should be able to be proud of being men, and you should be able to be proud of being a woman, and not have to live in a world where everything is judged by male standards, and written from a male point-of-view and 'default to male.'
But there is no one male POV. There doesn't have to be one female POV, either. You do not have to demonstrate your pride in being men by implying that women who don't fit YOUR notions of what we should be must be ashamed of ourselves; that there's something in us that's unnatural and wrong.
quote:Reinforcing the idea that there is no difference between the genders only subtracts from what it is to be a woman...
What if I told you that I don't think that personality differences between a random man and a random woman are likely to be any more pronounced than the differences between two random men or between two random women? (Yeah, people will spin tiny, subjective differences into something huge and irrevocably wired in to humans because they're invested in that notion of how humanity works.) Because honestly, I don't. Especially in the worlds of fantasy and adventure, where we already hand-wave a bunch of daily-grind-type crap out of the way because its sense of realism harshes our buzz.
quote:I use 'men with boobs,' instead of 'men without penises,' since I find it less offensive to refer to a lazy characterization...
I don't.
quote:I pretty clearly described how Ellen Ripley displayed some behaviors and qualities that where more associated with female roles in Aliens, and none of them involved fainting, petticoats or makeup. They involved being fiercely protective of Newt, and being willing to make the morally right choice, even if it wasn't the easy choice or the 'logical' choice.
And there's nothing wrong with that. But I don't want every female character to be Ripley, okay? Any more than I want every male character to be James T. Kirk. Or, to use rickshaw1's example: Hawkeye Pierce. I'd die a happy woman, though, if every female character in fiction got the screen time and personality depth that those characters have gotten.
As a woman who never had and never wanted kids, the last thing I want to hear is that every woman in pop fiction better start cranking out kids, or at least better run around protecting somebodies' kids, because otherwise the more aggressive aspects of her personality are incompatible with her being heroic.
quote:If I go back and edit out that phrase, is the meat of the argument less offensive to you?
I wouldn't bother at this point, since nobody who wanders into the argument later will understand what we're talking about if all references to it are snipped out. Maybe you could think twice about using it in the future, though.
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by cleome: [snip]
quote:Originally posted by Set:
quote:Originally posted by cleome: "Men With Boobs" is simply the narrow-minded reader's/viewer's way of writing off any female character who doesn't fit their own personal notion of what constitutes "womanly" behavior.
Not when I use it...
This explanation only makes sense if you're intending to communicate effectively with those most like yourself. If you have any goals beyond that, and somebody tells you that your usage of a particular expression majorly pushes her buttons, maybe you should consider discarding it-- at least before this particular audience.
Which is *exactly* what I did. I went back and edited it out, as I said I would.
You informed me that it was offensive to you, and I not only stopped using it, I went back and removed it, so that you wouldn't have to see it again.
If I were to tell you I found being called narrow-minded and being *TOLD WHAT I REALLY MEANT* by someone who apparently knows better what I mean than I do mildly annoying, would you go edit that out?
Or at least stop with the personal attacks and condescending preaching to me 'what I really mean' when I say something?
quote:
quote:If I go back and edit out that phrase, is the meat of the argument less offensive to you?
I wouldn't bother at this point, since nobody who wanders into the argument later will understand what we're talking about if all references to it are snipped out. Maybe you could think twice about using it in the future, though. [/qb]
But there's my answer. You don't want me to fix anything. It's too late, and your mind is made up. I'm always going to be wrong and you know better than me what I mean by what I post.
I argue for a broader range of female characterizations than 'helpless damsel' or 'macho girl,' for characteristics that are downplayed in modern media as 'feminine' to be no longer denigrated or scorned, and you say that's some sort of proof that I'm 'narrow-minded' (your exact wording for me) and that I *want* women to be helpless sex kittens.
I say 'more respect for women!' and you say 'sexist!'
I (obviously) don't even get it, and I suspect I never will. Go on, call me names, think whatever angry thoughts you want, or that I'm a narrow-minded sexist whatever, I don't think that we'll ever agree on this.
I get in arguments on RPG forums with guys who insist that male players shouldn't play female characters in role-playing games, because 'they can't do it right,' and I rebut that women are human beings, and that if your player plays his character in such a way that it's a believable *HUMAN BEING,* then he's 'doing it right.'
And that anecdote has as much to do with *our* disagreement as Trinity's starry-eyed and treacly love for Neo (which, to me, felt more like the Wachowski brothers creepy attraction to their own hero character) or some critic somewhere that praised a performance that pissed you off, and you've decided to take out on me. Pretty much none.
I'm not the oppressive patriarchy. My last few bosses have been women. I've worked as a dishwasher and a secretary (more than once, usually for women, although I had one macho boss who refused to call me his secretary, despite the fact that I screened his calls, booked his flights, picked up his laundry and brought him coffee). I'm not a partisan for either side of the great gender war (and, frankly, think it's pretty stupid, since the majority of us end up living our lives with a member of the opposite sex, to consider them somehow 'inscrutable' or 'other' or 'from Venus' or whatever, since that just guarantees that they will never really 'get' their spouse, and miss out on a huge amount of joy in life).
There are macho jerks out there. There are men who denigrate women, and even an entire organization of young men who trade secrets for how to manipulate women into jumping in bed with them. Sad, pathetic little men, IMO, who may never realize that the best sex is with someone who loves and trusts you and is doing their level best to make the experience as good for you as you trying to make it good for them. They might as well be having sex with a sock, and, given the opinions of women they hold, they probably would treat the sock better.
Still not me. Sling your arrows towards those who have earned such contempt. The world is *not* short of targets deserving of your ire, sadly.
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
This topic has obviously pushed buttons for some people, but let's not let it get out of hand, okay?
-------------------- The Semi-Great Gildersleeve - writing, super-heroes, and this 'n' that
From: The Stasis Zone | Registered: Jul 2003
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cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
I don't know what to tell you, HWL. I don't even remember --at any time in this discussion-- telling Set that he was sexist or part of the oppressive patriarchy or what-have-you. I don't know where all his anger and defensiveness is coming from.
All I'm trying to say --maybe in a roundabout fashion-- is that I understand when people don't like cookie-cutter characterization in their fiction. I don't like it, either. But the idea of a sharp, unalterable divide between masculine/feminine and a specific group of behaviors that you can only hope to see credibly on one side of that divide is absurd to me. A good writer should be able to sell it even if it's unfamiliar to the reader. And sometimes a reader has to put aside some of his or her own prejudices for it to work as well.
I hope this makes some kind of sense.
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
[snip]
quote:Originally posted by Set: ...Sling your arrows towards those who have earned such contempt. The world is *not* short of targets deserving of your ire, sadly.
First of all, I didn't "sling any arrows" here, except in your imagination.
Second of all, I honestly don't need you to tell me what sexism is and where it is. I already know, believe me. I know more about it than you can possibly imagine.
I also don't need you to tell me how to deal or not deal with it. Before you were just disagreeing strongly, which I can handle. But by instructing a woman in what you regard as the proper way to deal with sexism, you are most assuredly out of line.
Stop it.
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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quote:Originally posted by cleome: I don't know what to tell you, HWL.
I'm not pointing fingers at anyone. I respect you and Set (and Rick, too), and have always enjoyed reading each of your intelligent and articulate posts.
However, I feel that emotions are starting to cloud reason in this topic. I want to encourage everyone to take a step back, draft your response, and then wait awhile before posting to see if it is truly necessary to take such a confrontational approach.
Also, whichever side of the debate you are on, try to see things from the other person's perspective: What has brought him or her to this place? Why did he or she respond that way?
And, most importantly, never take any response personally.
-------------------- The Semi-Great Gildersleeve - writing, super-heroes, and this 'n' that
From: The Stasis Zone | Registered: Jul 2003
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cleome46
or you can do the confusion 'til your head falls off
posted
Eh. I think at this point, I'm going to consider it locked. At least to me personally. I've said my piece or done my time or whatever. There's no more blood to be had from this here stone. :/
-------------------- Hey, Kids! My "Cranky and Kitschy" collage art is now viewable on flickr. Drop by and tell me that I sent you.
From: Vanity, OR | Registered: Dec 2008
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