Why do males complain about female-led stories or too many female characters when the majority are still dominated by males?
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I don't know. I live a good female lead. Ripley, Furiosa, Marge Gunderson. There's so many, that's just the first three that come to mind. Half the time when I'm playing Fallout, it's female characters.
There are definitely bad female leads in things, too. Just like there are bad male leads. Like, Borderlands 3, basically unplayable. I never finished it. And I really want to be clear, the characters aren't bad because they are women, they are bad due to poor writing. That game had such potential, but it felt like the script was written entirely by highschoolers.
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Is a nice site if you want to expand into Nordic/Swedish books in your collection
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Thanks! A great one is also BookFinder - there are a few versions of it, I know .com and .de and I'm sure there are others.
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This is really well written and I agree with a lot of your points...but when I read "as far back as the early 2000s" I felt about 100 years old.
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I see your nuance better now. I'm saying that diversity is not a qualifier for total artistic value. I believe it is okay to tell flawed stories as art. I do not believe that all stories should be flawed, they should be an exception not the rule.
This is where we are likely strongly aligned versus any potential for difference. I believe telling better stories is the failure of the entertainment industry. There are plenty of better stories to tell. The real prejudice is happening by the cowardice of choosing misogynistic stories to tell. Really, there is not enough value placed on the big picture abstract overview. People are playing with the trees when they should be managing the forest. Old familiar stories with foundations built in an era of a lack of diversity are ripe to abandon for a new era of better stories.
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You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.
Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had students read the scripts with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers, and try to determine the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the script.
Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long the believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0%-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.
Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking ~30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the actors’ roles and had the female actor performing the “male” part (determined by the earlier script reads) of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination... But it’s not the entire reason.
It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.
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Thanks for the site
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Because -isms exist in a binary world (sexism, racism, etc...)
Any increase in visibility for whatever minority they happen to hate, is a decrease in visibility for them (in their feeble transactional little minds) and it drives them bonkers.
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Haha I meant for WWW forums.
Dunno how many people here remember BBS or having to look up stuff in the library.
That being said damn it's been 25 years already
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I think its just that people don't like shoe horned female empowerment, idk what percentage of female lead content is that but it does detract a lot from the experience.
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Insecurity.
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I think the doctor regenerating into a woman for no reason is fine-- timelords change when they regenerate, after all. There shouldn't need to be a reason to regenerate into a woman, like there shouldn't need to be a reason to regenerate into someone with different types of hair.
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Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.
Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that's just about people living live in an imaginary situation so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren't white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.
(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)
This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of "suspension of disbelief" going on.
If you want a neutral metaphor, it's like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that's there just feels natural.
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Why do men complain?
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Must not be an anime fan.
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100% factually accurate and yet still devastating to hear.
25 years...I can almost hear the modem whining like it was yesterday.
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Being a woman is "marked" while being a man is just the default, so anything that strays from the "default" sticks out and it seems reasonable that it requires justification. This goes in reverse in some cases, like the need to refer to someone as a "male nurse" - why do we feel we need to say this? Because the default nurse is assumed to be female.
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It's more explicit in the directors cut when you learn of her own daughter's fate.
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Because they are assholes.
Because they are so privileged they REALLY believe that they should see themselves in all stories.
Because they were taught from a young age that empathy is not manly.
Because, at the end of the day they were failed by their parents and society as a whole.
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It was a change to satisfy something outside of the world they were in--to satisfy a check box in our world. It is just an example of badly handled "add women" to a plot.
I do agree many genres are under represented by women as main role or important roles, and I totally enjoy stuff that is different that the Hollywood Schlock that gets produced. But it should be true women characters and stories not just a cut and paste role.
