you know what’s really genuinely unsettling? the degree to which men fucking do not want to sympathize with/be interested in women.
male audiences will happily watch a dozen superhero shows, but then something like Agent Carter or Supergirl turn up and they’re panned from the first trailer and have to struggle for ratings. male audiences will watch countless installments of a franchise as long as it’s about men doing man things but the second a character like Rey or Furiosa or god forbid four entire female Ghostbusters steps up and takes a position of prominence it’s “pandering sjw bullshit”.
it’s not pandering. men just aggressively don’t want to have to be invested in a woman’s narrative and it’s really gross.
anyway re: everyone telling me to “Stop making this a gender thing” or some variation on that
this isn’t like… an opinion I’m pulling out of my ass here? this starts where earlier than tv shows and hollywood blockbusters, when all the kids in a class are reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Eragon o Lord of the Rings or Maze Runner or whatever the hip book is right now. the books like that, the ones that become popular reading, are overwhelmingly about male leads, because male is still considered the default.
there’s a split in YA literature, between books that are “for everyone” and “for girls”, and that’s honestly the entire issue in a tiny little box right there. stories about men are supposed to be accessible for everyone, but stories about girls are seen as 1.) inherently for women and 2.) something that only women will care about.
men grow up in a society that doesn’t make them go out of their way to get into the heads of women and empathize with then. historically it’s been very easy for men to not engage with female-led media if they don’t want to, whereas (like someone else commented on this post) girls and women have had very little choice in the past because everything was about men. we didn’t even question it.
and now the women are arriving in mainstream media in ways that say they’re important and they matter and
small (or sometimes not so small) but loud-enough-to-be-acknowledged groups of men lose. their. shit.
because they think there’s something inherently Not For Them about a woman’s story, and they never learned how to deal with it.
(also once again, because LOT of ya’ll don’t seem to get this here: I’m trying to talk about knee-jerk reactions to female-centered works - often before they even come out. not whether or not you personally thought [x show or movie] was good. ya feel?)
i don’t think i’ve ever read a single post that i’ve agreed with so totally and so immediately and here’s why:
i love books, right? and from the ages of about 11-15 i was insanely invested in teenage/ya fantasy and sci-fi. harry potter, percy jackson, all of the books op listed above- and one of the things that made those books so great was that you could have a conversation about them with anyone! a lot of the guys in my class also loved this type of genre and i’d often talk about books with them (even my own brother has read all of the books listed above) we’d have long, interesting conversations about these books and it was great.
but then i’d mention something about the hunger games, or the divergent series, or uglies, the raven cycle, mara dyer, the mortal instruments, the selection, etc. and the response would always be the same: either ‘i haven’t read it’ or ‘i couldn’t get into it’ or ‘it doesn’t seem like my type of thing’
even outside of the ya genre, looking at something like contemporary fiction or whatever- do you know how many guys will talk endlessly about the great gatsby or catcher in the rye or any other male-centric novel? but when you bring up something as influential as pride and prejudice or jane eyre or practically /anything/ written by/focused around a woman- you get the same responses as before
society has made it so that women have no choice whether to engage with male-centric stories or not: from children, a big portion of the media we consume focuses on the male perspective and like,,, that’s not necessarily a bad thing /in itself/- the bad thing is that it doesn’t work both ways and it’s not an even split. whereas young girls are surrounded by and expected to empathise with films/books/media concerning men, it’s not the same for young boys: they have narratives that either focus entirely or largely around them.
women have no trouble consuming media that focuses on a male narrative because it’s been labelled as the default, the ‘normal’- whereas men struggle to watch/read anything that doesn’t focus around them because they’ve never /had/ to.
This is very much true from a race angle as well. White men are the main characters in nearly every piece of popular media. Because that is the mainstream, nearly all people consume it. All people learn to empathize with white men and see them as fully fleshed out human beings - even internalizing the idea of white men as the default human being.
White men, however, only have to be exposed to narratives about themselves. They have to go out of their way to find something NOT about them. When they’re exposed to any piece of media that’s not about them, they feel left out because they’ve literally never known what it is to be left out of media unless they’ve intentionally sought out narratives about POC/ women. Very few actually seek out those narratives because not being centered is unbearably foreign and uncomfortable to them.
If we want to change this, we need to stop telling boys, “no, this toy/book/show is for girls.” Start giving them books and shows that have diverse characters at a young age. Don’t let your kids reach adulthood without challenging white male supremacy in media by introducing them to things by and about POC/women in general. If you have a white son, this is especially crucial.
A couple weeks ago The Mary Sue announced they weren’t going to cover “Game of Thrones” any more after yet another female character being brutally raped. The thread is still being invaded by trolls periodically, and there are more than 12,000 comments on the article, which is a site record and probably an internet record. (12K comments because a single website said “We’re not going to recap or promote this show any more.” Baffling.)
Tons of trolls have thrown out the “but THINGS WERE JUST LIKE THAT BACK THEN!” argument ad nauseum. Which is total bullshit, of course. Now with the season finale of “Outlander” (which, spoiler, also included rape) the trolls are coming back.
I just want to ask, why is it whenever producers/directors/writers want to demonstrate “gritty historic realism” it’s ALWAYS RAPE? It’s always sexual violence toward women/girls.
You know what would be gritty historic realism? Dysentery. GoT has battles and armies marching all over the place. You want to show “what things were like back then”? Why aren’t we seeing 500 guys by the side of a road puking and shitting their guts out from drinking contaminated water while the rest of the army straggles along trying to keep going? Or a village getting wiped out by cholera? Or typhus, polio or plague epidemics?
You want to show what it was like back then for women? Show a woman dying of sepsis from an infection she caught while giving birth. Show a woman coping with ruptured ovarian cysts with nobody know what it is. Breast cancer that the audience will recognize immediately but the characters think is some mark of the devil or some shit.
But no, it’s always rape. And we all know why that is. Because these douchecanoes that do this, though they’ll deny it, think rape is sexy. Because they can’t make a modern set story where women get raped in every god damned episode without being called monsters. So they use “but but historical realism!” to cover their sexism (see “Mad Men”) and misogyny. Then they tell us “That’s just how it was back then!” with the clear implication “Shut the fuck up bitch, because that could be you and you should be thanking me that it’s not.”
South Asian people using their hand to eat rice is not something abnormal or gross.. It’s our tradition and it’s just as normal as East Asians using chopsticks.
Also if you think the hand is gross or not clean enough for us to pick our food but you think it’s clean enough for you to hold your pizza, burger then just letting you know you are fuckin hypocrite lol
Lmao I wrote this while I was half asleep but damn this blew but yeah keep reblogging and let these bitches know cause people make it looks are we are some type of wild animals using our hand to eat food? In case yll didn’t know.. People used their hand to eat back in the day.. There wasn’t always forks and spoons lol
