The endless alienation of media.: seanan

The endless alienation of media.

I love the SyFy Channel Saturday night movies. The goofy effects, the giant monsters, the sometimes wooden acting, it's all a delicious cheese sandwich to help me relax into the one night of the week where I don't feel rushed to accomplish ALL THE THINGS before I go to bed. I try to judge them by what they are, and not by what I want them to be: silly, shitty movies that accomplish what they set out to accomplish, no more, and no less. Sometimes they're even pretty good.

This past week, the Saturday night movie was The End of the World. It was about a group of geeks who owned/worked at a video store specializing in disaster movies, the judgmental SO of the geek who actually owned the store, the faintly evil cousin of the geek who actually owned the store, the disapproving parent of one of the geeks who worked at the store, the disaster guru idol of all the geeks, and a bunch of extras. The extras fell into three categories: evil looters who wanted to take stuff from our heroic geeks, assholes at the mental hospital where the disaster guru had been committed, and people at the military base.

Now. Looking only at what I've written above, how many of these characters were female? If you guessed "judgmental SO" and "disapproving parent," then ding ding ding! We have a winner!

None of the geeks were women. The SO even knowing what the Death Star was called was treated as a virtual miracle, and something so hot as to make the alpha geek temporarily forget about saving the planet, because she was speaking Forbidden Knowledge, yo. She was saying things that implied girls could be geeks too, and man, that was so impossible it was like she was demonstrating super powers! The mother figure was literally introduced calling one of the secondary geeks at work and asking him how the job search was going, because it was time for him to get a real job, in the real world, amirite girls? (The SO had a similar speech.) That's how we should interact with geeks! We should drag them kicking and screaming into respectability, because no one can ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be happy and fulfilled just being a professional fan of things. And women can't even start being fans of things. It's not allowed.

None of the extras were female. None of the secondary characters, apart from the two listed above, were female. One of the female characters was there to nag and be a burden; the other was there to be a prize and to be enlightened about how Geek Things = Man Things and Man Things = Awesome.

And here's the thing. None of these characters—not a single fucking one—had such a gendered role that their character could not have been played by a member of the opposite sex. Testosterone did not unlock the key to saving the world. Estrogen did not cause the cataclysm. You could have literally flipped a fucking coin for every single role, and cast accordingly. "Whoops, female lead, male antagonist, female love interest..." Better yet, make it a d10, and if you roll a ten, roll again for assigned birth gender, and then go from there. "Female lead, male antagonist, ftm love interest..." It would have been the same damn movie.

But they didn't do that. They went with boys and boys and boys, and an exclusionist narrative that had me saying sadly "I like disaster movies. I exist, too."

I wound up stopping the movie halfway through because the lack of female voices had become so alienating to me that I needed to wait a while before I came back and finished watching. It was an okay movie. I won't be watching it again. There's no one for me there.

Men can identify with women, and should. Women can identify with men, and should. But there's a big difference between saying "Seanan, you should have been able to identify with the struggles of the protagonist, regardless of gender," and saying "Seanan, you should have been able to accept a world that cast your gender into the role of harpy and martinet, and not felt objectified or rejected by this setting." I did identify with Owen. I did care about his story.

It was everything around him that lost me. And honestly, I'm still lost, and I've been lost too many times.

Sometimes it would be nice to be found.

maladaptive

February 26 2013, 00:53:19 UTC 4 years ago Edited: February 26 2013, 00:53:43 UTC

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I'm tired of being told, again and again, that I should identify with men, but when I dare ask for the opposite, for men to identify with women, I'm a hysterical social justice warrior. When men identify with women it creates this huge stir, like how everyone was gaspshockawed by Bronies.

It makes me think that maybe I don't identify with men, because they're actually all secret aliens who don't understand 50% of their own species. That's what they're always telling me, anyway.

seanan_mcguire

February 26 2013, 00:58:15 UTC 4 years ago

For seriously.

February 26 2013, 00:59:41 UTC 4 years ago

All that "women are so confusing" shiz, like they're space monsters trying to suss out Earthlings.

saoba

February 26 2013, 01:50:06 UTC 4 years ago

but when I dare ask for the opposite, for men to identify with women, I'm a hysterical social justice warrior

Oh hells yes.

I'm closing on 60. It would be nice for the TV and movie industries to admit that I'm not some rare and mystical creature. I'm a fan. I'm a con-goer. I'm a gamer. I buy movie tickets. I pay for cable. I buy books! I can quote Star Trek TOS, Monty Python and the Lord of the Ring. I know the difference between a Cyberman, Robbie the Robot and C3PO.

I'm a woman. I look around at my friends. We're fans. We have disposable income. But evidently SYFY and their advertisers don't want our money. Which, you know, strikes me as an odd choice in today's marketplace.

branna

February 26 2013, 02:20:58 UTC 4 years ago

Word.

Slightly off-topic, I adore the story a male friend told us over dinner a while ago, of how he got out of a parking ticket because he was a Brony and so was the cop and they bonded...

February 26 2013, 02:21:08 UTC 4 years ago

And yes, the cop was also a guy.

rhoda_rants

February 26 2013, 03:33:46 UTC 4 years ago

When men identify with women it creates this huge stir, like how everyone was gaspshockawed by Bronies.
Ugh... Don't even get me started on the Bronies, man. I don't mind dudes being fans of the show, but this huge dudebro culture that's sprung up around it is just...ugh. It shouldn't be a Thing, y'know?

February 26 2013, 15:54:21 UTC 4 years ago

The first time I saw a "Bronies Before Honies" shirt, I literally saw red with rage.

February 26 2013, 16:24:37 UTC 4 years ago Edited: February 26 2013, 16:51:52 UTC

Ew. I didn't even know such things existed. I'm starting to think the Bronies might overtake Twimoms as Most Batshit Fandom On Earth.

February 26 2013, 16:46:55 UTC 4 years ago

I'm in a lot of fandoms with dude culture but something about bronies just feels so much worse-- I mean, bronies have been grosser to me than other players in 7+ years of WoW. I'm not sure if they actually ARE worse because they're overcompensating for liking "girly" things, or if it feels worse because it's about a little girl's magical ponies show. Join the fandom, dudebros, but take it in the spirit of MLP.

muddlewait

February 27 2013, 03:48:33 UTC 4 years ago

At its best, the brony thing is about a boy realizing that he can choose to join the forces that actively oppose dominance, reject the forces that establish it, and know that there are other boys like him doing the same thing. Sadly, it's turned out that the bronies' failure mode is dominance, taking over and selfishly using and shouting down the harmony -- which existed just fine before they got there, thank you -- that they were so excited to join in the first place.

My fear is that the groups of bronies doing this damage are going to discredit something that I know is doing good work elsewhere, outside of the fandom itself. The sons of both my best friends like My Little Pony:FiM. They aren't pushy dickheads. They don't crow about it. They're just boys who've decided that it's okay to like stories where magical girl ponies use friendship to solve problems. And they feel like they can stand up for it because they know they're not the only boys who think so. Maybe, because of that, in a few years, if they see some young woman (or man) wearing a unicorn necklace, they'll be that much more likely to think of it not as some alien sign of fragility and purity waiting to be possessed or exploited, but as a symbol of cleverness and power -- power that doesn't involve domination or hierarchy, but power that deserves respect and emulation because it doesn't involve those things.

So, while I don't personally identify as a brony, I get a little heartbroken every time I hear about some pushy dickhead self-described brony intimidating people, especially when it results in broad condemnation of the very idea of bronyhood. I don't want to see us boys totally wreck this. I think it can still do some good.

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The endless alienation of media.

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