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Mar. 15th, 2012 11:38 amYesterday in someone else's comment section I remarked that I find Boy's Stories that are absent any women at all to be "more honest" than Boy's Stories with The One Woman welded awkwardly on.
This post says it better than I did:
"When you have only one girl in a sea of boys, she starts being defined by her girl-ness – rather than her intelligence, her fear, her love for chemistry, her musical talents, her combat skills, her anger, her calmness, her motherhood, her choice to be childfree, and all the other things that make her an individual person with individual passions and strengths and failings. And when you have this, you automatically don’t have a diverse range of women/girls. You have The Girl. So you define her by major Girl tropes, rather than writing about individual women."
I'd rather have no women in the story at all than The Girl.
YMMV.
ETA: I say it's more honest b/c a) The Girl is never an honest-to-God person, she's The (token) Girl, and I for one always find her presence and lack of resemblance to any actual human being jarring, and b) the creators, too, would really rather she wasn't there in the first placed, they just think she's required by Story Law. So she sticks out like a sore thumb and they have to shoehorn in scenes for her and it pulls the story out of shape. It would rather be a story for boys, about boys. So many stories out there (and especially movies!) are just like this. At least when there are no women at all I am not being actively offended with a simulacrum of femaleness, and I can pretend the women are off in a separatist universe doing equally cool things elsewhere. It's more honest, in other words, if you don't want women there, to just not write them in. Have the courage of your sexist boy's club convictions and go there already and leave us out of it.
Oops. Hello rantypants.
This post says it better than I did:
"When you have only one girl in a sea of boys, she starts being defined by her girl-ness – rather than her intelligence, her fear, her love for chemistry, her musical talents, her combat skills, her anger, her calmness, her motherhood, her choice to be childfree, and all the other things that make her an individual person with individual passions and strengths and failings. And when you have this, you automatically don’t have a diverse range of women/girls. You have The Girl. So you define her by major Girl tropes, rather than writing about individual women."
I'd rather have no women in the story at all than The Girl.
YMMV.
ETA: I say it's more honest b/c a) The Girl is never an honest-to-God person, she's The (token) Girl, and I for one always find her presence and lack of resemblance to any actual human being jarring, and b) the creators, too, would really rather she wasn't there in the first placed, they just think she's required by Story Law. So she sticks out like a sore thumb and they have to shoehorn in scenes for her and it pulls the story out of shape. It would rather be a story for boys, about boys. So many stories out there (and especially movies!) are just like this. At least when there are no women at all I am not being actively offended with a simulacrum of femaleness, and I can pretend the women are off in a separatist universe doing equally cool things elsewhere. It's more honest, in other words, if you don't want women there, to just not write them in. Have the courage of your sexist boy's club convictions and go there already and leave us out of it.
Oops. Hello rantypants.
