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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)

This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.

The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character

In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).

Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":

Hannah is the best structural engineer at the firm, and the character pays for it. She's lonely, or her marriage failed, or there's a paragraph somewhere in chapter 3 where she wonders what she gave up for her career. Her competence arrives with an invoice billed to her personal life. Now, go find the man in your book who's simply good at his job, and find me the part of the story that details how much he pays for it. Most often, there isn't one. Tony is good at what he does and the book lets that be simple and straightforward.
[...]
Once the book has established that her skill costs her something, the skill stops being a pleasure and turns into a wound and readers stop enjoying her being good at things and start worrying for her, which contradicts why anybody wanted a competent FMC leading the book to begin with.

"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.

Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?

Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.

To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.

The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:

Insufferable Hedging: "Sorry, I just, I think maybe we should wait?" "Sorry", "just", "I think", "maybe", and a question mark sitting on a sentence that isn't a question. That's five softeners in nine words. This is a slightly less common issue I see in manuscripts, but it's worth discussing here. This is also nuanced because some real women do speak this way and inspire these characters in our books. That's ok. But make sure it's really an integral part of the character you're writing and that you're not overdoing it.

I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)

Every 'Want' Has Another Person's Name In It: This one is an audit at the book level. List every named woman in your manuscript. For each one, write a single sentence saying what she wants [you think "what a person wants" can be reduced to a single sentence?? - ed.]. Then look at how many of those sentences have another character's name in them. Here's what it usually looks like. Kate wants Adam to forgive her. Taylor wants to protect her sister. Nicole wants her mother to finally admit something. And then the men. Jake wants the promotion. Tony wants to get out of town. Riley wants to save the world. Every one of those is a real want or goal, and none of them are bad desires, but it's a pattern only visible when the list is sitting in front of you. What this does over the whole book is leave the reader feeling like the men are driving the plot and the women are responding to or serving the cast as a whole.

None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.

At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).

Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.

This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.

Does the FMC want anything when the MMC isn't in the room? If the answer is "nothing at all", then she exists to fall in love, and readers feel that flatness in the character.

Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.

Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.

What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.

Writing female characters seems to be a minefield, ok maybe, but it doesn’t have to be. The OG strong female character is… Inana from the epic of Gilgamesh. Literally.

There is a contingent of people who will complain loudly about any and every flaw in any female character, ever. The solution is to just ignore them; thé ancient Greeks wrote strong female characters all the time and they were patriarchal as all get out. They weren’t necessarily Mary Sues there to show the boys how it’s done.

Every 'Want' Has Another Person's Name In It

To me, this sounds like an attempted variation on the Bechdel test, or the stuffed into the fridge complaint: essentially, that the female characters only exist in terms of how they relate to male characters. When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad. But if the goal of every female character in your book involves a male character in some way (but not vice versa), it suggests that maybe your female characters aren't as fleshed-out and three-dimensional as they could be.

But then, she's still complaining when the female characters' goals involve other female characters. So I don't really know what she's looking for tbh.

I'm having a hard time even picturing how to write a story with characters whose goals don't involve other characters. All the classic male characters of literature and pop culture have goals involving other characters. John Rambo, Huck Finn, Frodo, the A Team. In the X-Files, Mulder's motivation involves his sister while Scully is more abstractly motivated.

I hate any and all discussion of the bechdel test from feminists, I think it's all in bad faith. But if I think about the bechdel test myself and try to separate the concept from the pop feminist application if the concept, I think it really is interesting and intriguing. I really don't understand why there are so few movies that pass the bechdel test, and I feel like something may be wrong about the formulation of the question, but I can't put my finger on it.

I would say that the bechdel test should also include the converse (a movie only fails the test if 1. there's no two women who have a conversation about something other than a man and 2. There's also two men who have a conversation about something other then a woman). But even so, I don't think that actually ends up changing much in terms of which movies pass. For whatever reason, there really do seem to be a lot of movies that feature men talking about things other than women, but don't feature woman talking about anything other then a man. I really really don't know why that is, and it kind of bugs me that I can't justify it. Is it simply that there's fewer female characters in movies? Is it something to do with the nature of femininity in our culture, that we don't expect it's interesting to see women talk about things together? I think it should be possible to have a blameless analysis of that question... but not with a feminist. So I'm interested in people's thoughts here.

Also, one thing that bothers me so much is that movies from 2014 onward started explicitly putting scenes on to try to pass that test, like the The Force Awakens scene with Mas Canata and Rey. It feels forced as a scene, but made feminists happy.

I wonder to what extent the Bechdel test has an inherent difficulty due to psychological differences between men and women. That is, if men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people, then male-male conversations are more likely to be about things, while female-female conversations are more likely to be about people.

Ie, suppose we have a story with a main cast of four: 2 men and 2 women. And we have 6 conflicts during the story. If during each conflict one pairing of our characters steps up to solve it together (there are 6 combinatorial pairings, one for each conflict), first of all, only one pairing is female-female, one is male-male, and the other four are some combination of male-female. And if each conflict is on some spectrum of "thing-oriented" to "people-oriented", then it makes the most logical sense for the male-male pair to handle the most object oriented conflict, which involves talking about the thing that isn't people. And if one conflict is mostly people oriented then it makes the most sense for the female-female pair to handle it, which involves talking about lots of people (half of whom are male). If the women solve a meaningful problem where the group is not getting along, that involves talking about men. If the women solve a problem of how to convince the population of a village to band together and fight off the threat, half of the village are men. Now granted, people can have conversations outside of direct plot solving, but those conversations are still likely to be people oriented because, statistically, women are more likely to care about people, think about people, and talk about people. And half of the people they could talk about are men, so especially conversations about multiple people are likely to include at least one man in the topic of conversation.

This doesn't apply if you have a more masculine character who doesn't think about or talk about people or feelings as much. Which can happen naturally if done well. But not if you artificially just write a male character and then gender swap them or try to shoehorn in a bunch of stupid alpha male asshole energy into a woman and call her a girlboss.

I hate any and all discussion of the bechdel test from feminists, I think it's all in bad faith. But if I think about the bechdel test myself and try to separate the concept from the pop feminist application if the concept, I think it really is interesting and intriguing. I really don't understand why there are so few movies that pass the bechdel test, and I feel like something may be wrong about the formulation of the question, but I can't put my finger on it.

Here's a hypothesis:

Generally speaking, most movies center on a single main character. And that character is either a man or a woman. Male-centered movies tend to fall in the genres of action, adventure, etc. Stuff that men like. For example Conan the Barbarian (1982) or Die Hard (1988). In such a movie, most of the dialogue is going to involve the central male character and his conflict with the Bad Guy, quest for the Macguffin, etc. In terms of advancing the plot, there's not much need for female characters to speak to each other and if they do, there's not much to discuss other than the male character.

On the other hand, female-centered movies tend to be romantic comedies, family dramas, etc. chick stuff. In those movies, people are mainly talking about their relationships with other people. So if two female characters are talking, there's a good chance their discussion will touch on a male character. (And discussions between male characters will touch on a female character. Nobody is talking about how to sneak in to the enemy's fortress and liberate the MacGuffin.)

What about a female-centered action movie, e.g. Kill Bill? It's been a while since I've seen it, but I would be pretty surprised if it didn't pass the Bechdel test. If it fails, then I'll definitely have to rethink my hypothesis.

Kill Bill definitely passes. The bride talks with 3 of her female victims about things other than Bill. Mostly that she wants to kill them and she hates them.

Kill Bill definitely passes. The bride talks with 3 of her female victims about things other than Bill. Mostly that she wanted to kill them and she hates them.

Ok, and I doubt that Quentin Tarantino was setting out to try to pass the Bechdel test. Arguably, he just made a female-centered action movie and as a natural result of that there was dialogue between women which wasn't about men.

I'm still just spitballing here, but I think what it comes down to is that at some fundamental level, (1) men are not that interested in discussions about relationships and are more interested in discussions about the villain's plan to steal a nuclear bomb or whatever; and (2) women are very interested in discussions about relationships and how the female lead got a text message from her ex and she doesn't know whether to meet up or not.

Another interesting thing about Kill Bill:

By far the most memorable conversation in the movie between two men was about Beatrix -- the scene where Bill goes to warn Bud that Beatrix was coming to kill him. So the movie kind of fails a reverse Bechdel test. In fact, off the top of my head I can't remember any scenes in which two men were talking and it wasn't about Beatrix. Maybe the scene in the Okinawa bar? But Beatrix was present and the argument was related to her order.

Anyway, the point is that Quentin Tarantino is not some kind of misandrist. He just made a female-centered action movie and as a natural consequence, a lot of the dialogue in the movie for which Beatrix was not present was about Beatrix. Which makes sense. The whole plot revolved around her and her quest for revenge.

Bill and Bud talk a little bit about how Bud says he sold his sword. But that's also in the middle of the context of him warning him about the bride.

Bill and Bud talk a little bit about how Bud says he sold his sword. But that's also in the middle of the context of him warning him about the bride.

Right, for the most part the conversation is about Beatrix. Certainly if the genders were all reversed, feminists would count it as a conversation between two women about a man.

I really don't understand why there are so few movies that pass the bechdel test

Movie that passes and always amuses me that it does: Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (when two girls have a shitting competition, which ties neatly into the concurrent conversation on that topic).

When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad.

You should. They will claim otherwise, but that's in-between paragraphs applying those tests in exactly that way (and often enough, wrongly).

it suggests that maybe your female characters aren't as fleshed-out and three-dimensional as they could be.

Take a wild guess in a group of women in their 20s how much of the conversations revolve around dating and looks upkeep. My observation is that when it is not about girly stuff - there is very strong preference in women to discuss it with the opposite sex then intersex.

Yeah, real life generally fails the expanded Bechdel test, where the expanded test includes stereotypically girly stuff like dating, gossip, and thotmaxxing.

Though in real life women talk with women more about other women than about men

When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad

Whereas the only times I ever saw it used was to imply or outright state that the book/show/game was bad and wrong.

One thing that frustrates me about media criticism is how interesting and nuanced concepts get abused and boiled down to lowest-common-denominator imitations over time, and how the people who should know better aren't rigorous enough about gatekeeping these concepts.

Take the "male gaze". Anyone who's studied film at an academic level would understand that it's an observation about camera perspective in visual media: that, while movies and TV shows often act as though they are presenting the characters within their works from an objective and disinterested perspective (a "view from nowhere"), in practice, the camera is often positioned in an implicitly heterosexual male posture, and female characters are shot and framed in a systematically different manner than male characters. This is an interesting observation! Once it's pointed out to you, you can't unsee it, and in Western cinema it's damn near omnipresent, to the point that it still feels surprising and fresh when movies go out of their way to turn it on its head (depicting female nudity in a deliberately unsexy fashion, or lusting over the male characters and not the female e.g. Magic Mike).

But decades since the term was coined, it's become corrupted from "the ostensibly objective and disinterested (but implicitly male and heterosexual) camera perspective used in Western movies and TV shows" to "something about the way men look at women, which is bad". I saw a post somewhere in which a young lesbian said she felt guilty about looking at other women she thought were attractive, and someone consoled her saying that she shouldn't worry, because sapphic sexuality isn't aggressive like male heterosexuality and she "didn't have the male gaze". No one "has" the male gaze. The male gaze is a property of cameras, not of people. While I have little doubt that Laura Mulvey, the academic who coined the term "male gaze", would understand that men sometimes leer at women in a manner which is sexually intimidating, that wasn't what the term "male gaze" referred to.

But in any case

Whereas the only times I ever saw it used was to imply or outright state that the book/show/game was bad and wrong.

As ever, stated vs. revealed preferences. It's easy to say that a movie is good because it passes the Bechdel test, or that a movie is bad because it fails it. But I'd hazard a guess that if you were to look at these feminists' favourite movies, they'd include a lot more movies that fail the Bechdel test than that pass it. I think this would actually be an effective rebuttal to this line of argument – just ask someone to name their top five movies. Better still, consult their Netflix history to see which movies they've watched most. Back when it was still good, The Onion had a great article about the gulf between the media feminists claim to enjoy and the media they actually enjoy.

I think Jiro has the right of it here, and further, the academics often specifically pick terms that would obviously be "misinterpreted" in the pejorative way ("toxic masculinity" perhaps being the worst offender, or "symbolic racism").

Further, I don't find the "male gaze" of the camera to be all that interesting, because when the directors or cinematographers specified that the camera moved up from the walking woman's legs, lingered on her ass, and only then continued slowly up to her face as she turned (revealing her prominent breasts)... they always knew damned well what they were doing. And so did most of the audience. The feminist critic just put a name on the practice so it could be denigrated (and equivocated upon).

One thing that frustrates me about media criticism is how interesting and nuanced concepts get abused and boiled down to lowest-common-denominator imitations over time, and how the people who should know better aren't rigorous enough about gatekeeping these concepts.

Either that, or it's a motte and bailey, where the "nuanced academic" version that isn't necessarily wrong is the motte, and the "you put this in so you're a horrible sexist" version is the bailey. And if it wasn't originally meant as a motte and bailey, it's clearly working as one.

That's definitely part of it. The difference in this case is that I think a lot of the people saying "men have the male gaze and women don't" would be unable to define the original meaning of the term "male gaze" if put on the spot. They literally think that "male gaze" refers to the way men look at women and have absolutely no idea what this term means in the context of cinema and TV.

I'm guessing the expression is mainly used in the context of video games nowadays.

One thing that frustrates me about media criticism is how interesting and nuanced concepts get abused and boiled down to lowest-common-denominator imitations over time

Most people don't know the half of it!

The term "gaze" that would go on to inspire the film/media studies concept of the "male gaze" was originally introduced by Lacan in his Seminar XI. Lacan was interested in exploring the way in which there's always a reciprocal interplay between observer and observed: you distort the image you receive (unconsciously), and the image in turn distorts you. The street goes both ways. There's no "I'm the Subject and I'm looking at you like an Object so haha I win" because that way of thinking is thoroughly un-psychoanalytic.

In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constiuted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it — that is what we call the gaze.
[...]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty points this out, that we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi. Is there no satisfaction in being under that gaze of which, following Merleau-Ponty, I spoke just now, that gaze that circumscribes us, and which in the first instance makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing this?

The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seing. This is the phantasy to be found in the Platonic perspective of an absolute being to whom is transferred the quality of being all-seeing. At the very level of the phenomenal experience of contemplation, this all-seing aspect is to be found in the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows that she knows.

The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic — it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.

Any originality or nuance that may have once existed in the concept was excised by the Studies crew so that it could be turned into a political cudgel.

But decades since the term was coined, it's become corrupted from "the ostensibly objective and disinterested (but implicitly male and heterosexual) camera perspective used in Western movies and TV shows" to "something about the way men look at women, which is bad".

I'm pretty sure there was a mainstream journo somewhere who is responsible for first popularizing the dumbed-down interpretation.

Interesting, any idea who it was? Sounds like the kind of thing Jessica Valenti would do.

That seems likely. Or Marcotte, or Lindy West. Who knows.

It's not specific to media criticism (though I suppose media criticism is a particularly low-barrier job). Every discussion about intersectionality is prefaced with a claim that a certain conception of it (essentially: video game maluses) is not what Crenshaw meant, but it's what the average person almost always means.

it still feels surprising and fresh when movies go out of their way to turn it on its head (depicting female nudity in a deliberately unsexy fashion, or lusting over the male characters and not the female e.g. Magic Mike).

I've always thought that the one redeeming feature of the horrible Charlie's Angels reboot is the contrast it provides between how male McG shot very attractive women in the early 2000s vs how Elizabeth Banks did it (YMMV on whether Banks casts people as hot as the 2000 cast).

(YMMV on whether Banks casts people as hot as the 2000 cast).

Cameron Diaz is gorgeous, as is Lucy Liu (but then, I would say that about an Asian woman wouldn't I?). Frankly, I never understood the appeal of Drew Barrymore: I've legitimately never found her a talented actress or sexy. She's even in one of my favourite movies, Donnie Darko, but every scene she's in grates and her line-readings sound so forced and uncomfortable.

As to the reboot, Kristen Stewart was gorgeous in the Twilight films, but in more recent movies she's received a succession of unflattering haircuts, each more butch than the one preceding it, and Charlie's Angels was no exception. (It's amazing the difference a good or bad haircut can make.) Ella Balinska is pretty hot. I thought the name Naomi Scott sounded familiar, and it turns out she played Jasmine in the live-action Aladdin remake. When I saw clips from that film I thought she looked absolutely stunning, but in photos from Charlie's Angels she looks hardly recognisable and nowhere near as good-looking. I'm calling it a wash.

I never understood the appeal of Drew Barrymore:

She used scab writers on her show during the 2023 WGA strike. On this forum, I would expect that to appeal to at least some people.

I meant appeal as in sex appeal. But yeah, based.

Frankly, I never understood the appeal of Drew Barrymore

She's the nepobaby, Hollywood royalty. But I'd also mark her as the weakest link.

I never understood the appeal of Drew Barrymore: I've legitimately never found her a talented actress or sexy.

IIRC she was a child star and came from an acting family, that carries some inertia.

I'm becoming concerned that our culture is losing basic media literacy. It used to be common knowledge that good characters need to have flaws, not just be perfect all the time. So Achilles had his heel as a literal weakness, but he was also full of moral flaws. If he had just been a good soldier who followed orders without pride, the story of the Iliad would have been boring.

Flawless main characters are such an obvious problem that the original "Mary Sue" short story was just making fun of all the crappy fan fiction where people used characters like that. Usually as self-inserts. It's mind-boggling to me that we've reached a point where professional literary critics not only defend that sort of thing, but they actually criticize anyone who dares write in some flaws for their female characters!

It was bad enough when Star Wars did it. But I thought, "fine, whatever, they're not looking for deep literary characters there, they just want someone to look cool on a green screen and sell toys." But now it seems there's a disturbing number of media following this trend.

All I could think reading this:

Hannah is the best structural engineer at the firm, and the character pays for it. She's lonely, or her marriage failed, or there's a paragraph somewhere in chapter 3 where she wonders what she gave up for her career. Her competence arrives with an invoice billed to her personal life. Now, go find the man in your book who's simply good at his job, and find me the part of the story that details how much he pays for it. Most often, there isn't one. Tony is good at what he does and the book lets that be simple and straightforward. [...] Once the book has established that her skill costs her something, the skill stops being a pleasure and turns into a wound and readers stop enjoying her being good at things and start worrying for her, which contradicts why anybody wanted a competent FMC leading the book to begin with.

Was "does anyone think House is incompetent?". Does it take away from the fun of the show because he has flaws?

I've been rewatching that show recently and "best X in the business but pays for it" is a perfect description of him. The tortured male genius isn't new. I don't stop thinking House is competent because House has a limp or a drug addiction or is, frankly, a cunt. If anything these weaknesses are what make him tolerable as a character. You can't both be an all-knowing genius and get away with being a cunt unless you have an excuse.

Gregory House is obviously a bag of flaws. We start out seeing that he's an asshole. He's also crippled, but that's the least of his flaws. We quickly learn he's also a drug addict. Ethics rules aren't so much guidelines as a checklist of things to violate. He deliberately pretends to be a racist to get one of his subordinate's goat, and deliberately pretends to be more sexist than he is to do the same to his boss, a subordinate, patients, relatives, etc. He's lazy about seeing 'boring' patients (who he insults all the time) and doing his paperwork. He's utterly reckless -- it's typical of him to nearly kill a patient in the process of diagnosing them. How does he keep his job? He's the best in the world... and, as he obnoxiously asserts constantly and is eventually proven right, his boss is attracted to him.

Little of this, however, is actually the cost of his skills. Except maybe the recklessness and ethics violations. You could have a show about a less-flawed House, but it wouldn't be as good.

Little of this, however, is actually the cost of his skills. Except maybe the recklessness and ethics violations. You could have a show about a less-flawed House, but it wouldn't be as good.

But to me the interesting question is where are the female versions of this type of character? I can't think of any off the top of my head, and I suspect a big part of the issue is that people (including feminists) think that Women are Wonderful and would be very uncomfortable with a female protagonist who is so deeply flawed. I suspect that even giving the woman a limp (when there are male colleagues around who walk perfectly fine) would bother feminists quite a bit. The upshot of this is that it would be difficult to prevent a female House from being a Mary Sue type who is extremely annoying outside of the narrative. (Of course the actual House is annoying within the narrative but it's entertaining for viewers.)

where are the female versions of this type of character?

I haven't watched all of it, but Bones comes to mind: it ran contemporaneously, and the title character is an autistic-coded female pathologist forensic anthropologist who often rubs the other characters the wrong way. I don't think she was a Mary Sue type, but had to be paired with a cop archetype for the actual "dealing with violent criminals" parts.

I haven't watched all of it, but Bones comes to mind: it ran contemporaneously, and the title character is an autistic-coded female pathologist who often rubs the other characters the wrong way.

So you would say her main flaws are that she is autistic (or at least somewhat autistic) and that she is a difficult person?

From what I remember of the first few seasons, yes. But it has been a while.

Jessica Fletcher? OK, maybe it's only me who'd want to punch her at least three times an episode.

Black Widow from the Avengers. Any number of "La Femme Nikita" type characters would work. They all do tend to be portrayed more sympathetically than House, though House is an extreme among male characters. So it probably can be done, but it's harder to do.

Jessica Fletcher? OK, maybe it's only me who'd want to punch her at least three times an episode.

I never watched Murder She Wrote, not even once. However out of curiosity I just watched a couple clips on YouTube, and I would say that based on this limited sample, she is more annoying to viewers than she is narratively annoying. By contrast, Dr. House is narratively annoying but entertaining to viewers.

Black Widow from the Avengers.

I watched a couple clips of her as well, and I'm not seeing it there either.

To be sure, I am going by very limited samples . . maybe link to a couple clips?

does anyone think House is incompetent?

Isn't it a semi-recurring theme in the show that he can't get (some) people to take him seriously? The audience isn't shown him that way, though, from what I remember. The conflict is often "mad genius vs. The System".

It's the opposite. The conflict is that everyone knows House is a genius and he gets special privileges because of it, including getting to be an asshole to people.

His direct boss is shockingly tolerant of his bs on the grounds that he's irreplaceable, other people are not.

I've been rewatching that show recently and "best X in the business but pays for it" is a perfect description of him. The tortured male genius isn't new. I don't stop thinking House is competent because House has a limp or a drug addiction or is, frankly, a cunt. If anything these weaknesses are what make him tolerable as a character. You can't both be an all-knowing genius and get away with being a cunt unless you have an excuse.

It's an interesting thought experiment: What would happen if somebody made a television show or movie with an equivalent female character. An extremely capable professional but a very difficult person with a drug addiction and a limp. I don't think people would go for it, even feminists. Because women are supposed to be Wonderful.

I think that if the networks tried to make a gender-swapped version of House, it would be difficult to resist the temptation to (1) soften her difficult personality and make her more sympathetic; and (2) take away the drug addiction since it's a red flag of poor character. In short, it would be difficult not to make her something of a Mary Sue.

There's no need to detail how much a man pays for it in his personal life: the societal standard is that men are deficient in their personal lives so it is assumed by default even without being spelled out. It is only detailed for Hannah because it is exceptional in her case.

There's no need to detail how much a man pays for it in his personal life: the societal standard is that men are deficient in their personal lives so it is assumed by default even without being spelled out.

Yeah, I think this is part of what's going on. In television, movies, etc. when men suffer it's not really noticed. Not the way it's noticed if women suffer. People (including feminists) have blinders to men "paying the price." So to feminists, it seems like only women "pay the price."

It reminds me of the criticisms of early James Bond movies. People (including feminists) were outraged that the movies depicted women getting killed. Even though far more men got killed than women.

Umm... Luke got his friends tortured and lost his arm and Anakin literally fell into evil (and lava)

Luke got his friends tortured and lost his arm

Yes, but it wasn't only that. At the beginning, he's portrayed as kind of a whiny brat. And immediately encounters men (Ben and Han) who are superior to him in various ways. Even at the end of the movie, Luke needs Han's help to blow up the Death Star. At the beginning of the next movie, Han rescues Luke who has been stranded in the middle of nowhere on the ice planet. Probably there are other examples as well.

Feminists don't only object to female characters being flawed, they object to female characters being seriously harmed; defeated; outsmarted; humiliated; made to look immature; and so on.

So that's how you end up with really annoying Mary Sue type characters. It's not only that they have little or nothing in the way of flaws. They are also annoyingly superior to everyone around them. They undermine the opportunities of other characters to shine.

I was just thinking of the sequels (Ray). I guess I should have said that explicitly.

Funny that you go for the anime examples, because Japanese media (for what I figure are deeper cultural reasons than one might naively assume) is actually fairly liberal with flawed or outright despicable female characters. The same Evangelion (original, not rebuild!) has Asuka, who is essentially a prideful narcissist driven by unresolved mommy issues and still considered one of the protagonists. The whole point of Suzumiya Haruhi is that the titular character is a morally solipsistic obnoxious teenager with main character syndrome who by cosmic irony may actually be the main character/Dread Solipsist of the universe, and it is not suggested that she has any sort of valid excuse for this (even as her backstory of "just wanting to be different" is fleshed out to a fair degree). Girlfailure comedy like Bocchi the Rock is popular with both genders. I mentioned Girls' Last Tour just recently in the context of melancholic slice-of-life, but one of its two protagonists is also implied to be so amoral as to be the human equivalent of a cat that would eat its owner's corpse if he/she died first.

(To the point of "deeper cultural reasons", it's actually quite jarring to the Western eye how often in serious Japanese literature, the female characters are morally deficient and the male characters are openly misogynistic. At times it very nearly feels like the familiar women-are-wonderful moral compass is upside down.)

The same Evangelion (original, not rebuild!) has Asuka, who is essentially a prideful narcissist driven by unresolved mommy issues and still considered one of the protagonists.

Are you implying that Asuka in the Rebuild films is somehow flawless in your view?

No, but (from what I saw, since I have only watched the first two) significantly less unsympathetic.

Good post, and doubly good for inspiring the linking of the "Galbrush Paradox" below--which I had never encountered, but which I love both because it is absolutely correct and because Guybrush Threepwood is one of the greatest video game characters of all time. (Heh. Rubber tree.)

What your post mostly made me think, though, was--yeah, as it turns out, people don't usually identify and discuss problems because they are interested in obviously relevant solutions. They identify and discuss "problems" as a negotiating tactic for getting whatever it is they actually want--usually, greater leverage or control over whoever it is they're complaining to.

To give a very simple example, I was subjected to this once as part of a hiring committee. We were going over god-only-knows how many resumes from grossly underqualified applicants, and I would say "let's toss this one out because X." And someone would respond, "wait, though, X isn't necessarily the problem you're making it out to be." Then we'd come to another application with X, and that very same someone would say "let's toss this one out because X." Then I would say, "I thought you didn't think X was a problem though" and I would get kind of a nasty look, followed by vague irrelevant platitudes--not even hair splitting, just straight up gobbledygook. This is from fellow tenured faculty, by the way, PhDs the lot of them, but it became quickly clear that for at least two members of the committee, there were no real standards of evaluation in play--just "say negative things about the ones I don't like, and positive things about the ones I do." Pointing out their inconsistencies was met with dirty looks or accusations of being unnecessarily aggressive about the process.

Actually I once got a similar criticism from a law professor when I was involved in a mock appeal. I threw everything I had into giving the most thorough arguments I could, and my peers were clearly frustrated by the amount of work that created for them. The professor had to step in and give us all a "remember this is just an exercise, we're not actually deciding a case here, no need to put so much into it..." Decades later, I'm still kind of cross about it!

This is like maybe the original sin from the perspective of the contemporary Rationalist movement, which Scott Alexander has done a lot of good work articulating with his culture war writings on social signaling. Most people are not making arguments, because most people are not usually reasoning at all. They're playing a hierarchy game, and complaining is a way of subordinating others. Their arguments are trash qua arguments, but it's a category error to even evaluate them that way. It's like watching someone flip a chessboard and then patiently explaining to them that flipping the chessboard isn't a legitimate move.

I apologize that this is pretty meta but the disconnect I see in so many people between identifying a problem and considering actual solutions is something I think about a lot. There is of course a gender stereotype here ("men, stop trying to solve our problems, that's not why we share them"--"if you don't want me to solve your problem, there's not really any point in listening to you talk about it"--"I'm just talking to show that I care!"--"I'm solving to show that I care!"--"if you really cared then you would stop trying to fix things!"--"okay, I guess I can't fix this relationship then, we're done"--"not like that!"). But while men and women often approach it from different angles, I've had just as many problems with men doing this sort of thing, as women. Most recently, I had a colleague come down with a serious case of AI psychosis (we should definitely start calling it cyberpsychosis) and completely lost his ability to engage with me on substance. Every disagreement we have now turns into him burying me under reams of ChatGPT-generated bullshit; when I pick it apart on substance, he says "okay I'll get back to you" and then ghosts me long enough for the discussion to go stale.

(To avoid having it suggested that I'm doing exactly what I'm complaining about, here, I will respond more directly to the substance of your post with an observation: possibly I don't hang out with the "right" kind of men, or maybe I hang out with the "wrong" kind of women, but in real life I have heard many, many women talk about their own breasts using descriptors like "perky" (or "tight" or "saggy" or "flat")--and almost never heard men speak of women's breasts that way outside of movies. I feel like "real women don't examine, describe, sexualize, or even notice their own breasts, that's something only thirsty lecherous male authors make badly-written female characters do" is the kind of egocentric misconception a teenage boy might have about the virginal purity of women. Women are of course not a monolith, probably not all women do this, but most of the women I've known in my life have been pretty casual/unconcerned/vaguely raunchy when discussing their "boobs" (the word I hear deployed most often, though maybe that is a generational thing). Sure, it's not always handled well in literature, but in reality the only people I know who are more obsessed with female breasts than young men, is young women.)

In my experience, when filtering large numbers of applicants, the best process is to have each member of the committee bring some shortlist of candidates they like (using whatever method they wish) to the first discussion then proceed to discuss the merits of any candidate who makes everyone or a certain number of people's short list and ranking those candidates for progression.

Then we'd come to another application with X, and that very same someone would say "let's toss this one out because X." Then I would say, "I thought you didn't think X was a problem though" and I would get kind of a nasty look, followed by vague irrelevant platitudes--not even hair splitting, just straight up gobbledygook.

This sort of thing endlessly frustrates me, and I guess I'm glad I'm not the only one. If we're gonna be like that, why do we have to waste so much time pretending that words have meanings, or that we have reasons for doing things other than "I like it because I like it, because I said so"? I believe Nietzsche complains about this also.

What your post mostly made me think, though, was--yeah, as it turns out, people don't usually identify and discuss problems because they are interested in obviously relevant solutions. They identify and discuss "problems" as a negotiating tactic for getting whatever it is they actually want--usually, greater leverage or control over whoever it is they're complaining to.

For the most part, I agree. At some level, everything is about signalling; playing status games; etc. Probably this very post is just an echo of a successful point made by some hunter-gatherer ancestor sitting around the campfire on the plains of Africa.

Most recently, I had a colleague come down with a serious case of AI psychosis (we should definitely start calling it cyberpsychosis)

"Cyberpsychosis" sounds much broader than AI psychosis to me. It could just as easily refer to people getting radicalised by lunatic conspiracy theories shared by human actors.

It's actually the term for when you've had so much cyberware installed that you experience severe psychological symptoms.

I feel really lucky to have been disabused of female purity early on.

I had a younger sister on the highschool varsity volleyball team. I was a senior, I was classmates with many of the very attractive and tall senior players. My sister was one of two sophmores on the varsity team. They won states that year, it was not a shitty team. But boy did they love to talk about shit. Any juvenile male thought of 'huh i wonder what the hot girls are talking about, maybe its how they really want some good dick or something' got so disabused that year. No, they weren't talking about dicks, they were talking about their shits. The big ones, the liquid ones, the frequent ones, the smelly ones, etc. I had to beg my sister to stop talking about her team gossip. One of the best parts of going to her games was looking at all the beautiful buts in spandex. But it was completely ruined. All I could think about was them talking about their latest dumps on the ivory throne.

No, it wasn't some psyops to get me not interested in her teammates. Sister would have set it up if it was viable. She told me when her classmates her age had crushes on me. A real caring sibling. I still get along great with her.

Nowadays I have three daughters. They stink, they shit, they pee, I've changed so many diapers, and wiped poop out of a vagina so many times. Sorry if that is graphic for people without female daughters. It just becomes this weird fact of life. Once they get past one the shits get real gnarly and you want them getting potty trained asap. Of course my daughters fought it until 4.

Sorry why am I talking about shit so much? Its a default human experience. And its also like the first thing any self conscious female will want covered up in their characters. I think we should have a shit test for female characters. Can they talk about taking a shit for a few sentences, even just as an internal monologue. If yes, they are a real person. If no, they are fake barbie dolls.

wiped poop out of a vagina so many times

Dear Sir, if you are wiping excrement out of your infant daughters' vaginas, I heartily and urgently recommend you take them to a doctor because that is not where excrement is supposed to exit - think possible fistulas!

If, on the other hand, you mean "small babies are very messy when evacuating their bowels and excrement gets into places you would not think possible", then yes. But that applies to boy babies as well.

The specific baby issue he's talking about is much less of a thing for boys. Their secondary orifice that you really want to make sure isn't getting feces in it is much smaller and more removed from the primary expulsion orifice.

Ya I don't know how it gets up in there so often. Had to deal with diarrhea the other day and it was like a spray on shit bikini.

And ya it applies to boy babies as well, but the post is about a female literary shit test. I'm not doubting that many male characters can think and or talk about shit.

There are plenty of works in which the male characters could not plausibly talk about taking a shit. Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?

Ultimately, fiction more often than not wants to show humans as they would like to be, not as they are. If humanity could reinvent itself according to its ideals, it would probably not poop.

(It's often downright jarring when fiction that otherwise has no pretense to cynical realism does involve defecation. I remember being jarred when Soukou Akki Muramasa's protagonist made sure to take a dump before getting in his robot armour.)

I don't have my copy with me, but the (hilarious and highly recommended even to non-writers) How Not to Write a Novel does indeed have a discussion about why characters in novels don't go to the toilet, why this isn't a problem, and why your character should not go to the toilet in front of the reader either.

A Palme d'Or-winning movie features some plot-critical bowel movements, tbh.

Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?

That specifically would be silly, but I can imagine Fellowship with an aside about how discomfited the hobbits are (or aren't? Bywater to Frogmorton looks to be an 18 mile stretch with no rest stops...) to be "roughing it" in this sense too. I even think some of Fellowship and the Two Towers might actually be improved by a brief mention of how careful the fellowship tries to be after they realize they're being hunted and tracked, or of how much easier orcs' disgusting habits make tracking those.

Two Towers might actually be improved by a brief mention of [...] how much easier orcs' disgusting habits make tracking those.

I don't see that it would add anything: the Three Hunters have no issues tracking the orcs; Aragorn even comments that they seem to be going out of their way to hack things to the ground for no reason other than enjoying destruction and that the trail is clear.

Characters in novels do sometimes make reference to going to the bathroom, but the scene isn't typically described. And characters mentioning shitting their pants after some terrifying event happens too. The Orc thing you mention would be comic relief, so might fit in somewhere.

but the scene isn't typically described

Oh, sure. I'm not wanting to know how Tolkien would have described defecation, just whether it should have logically had some impact on the story that was ignored because not intending to describe it led to not even considering it. Off the top of my head: Is the mood turning even more dour because after the Black Riders nobody wants to risk wandering far enough away to get some privacy? Is Frodo's departure in the Breaking of the Fellowship considered unremarkable because they have been in the habit of wandering far enough away for privacy?

The Orc thing you mention would be comic relief, so might fit in somewhere.

I'd say that's the problem. They're tracking the orcs because of Merry and Pippin's capture; it's a horrible time for comic relief (or bathos, if it comes off as comic accidentally) to ruin the tension. There's no safe place to comment until like half a dozen chapters later when the characters are safe and getting each other caught up, and at that point there's no reason for more detail than a quick euphemism about "the smell" or maybe at most "leavings".

The mountain wind carried the cold breath of Mordor, and the two travelers crouched in the lee of a broken stone, their cloaks drawn tight against the gathering dark. Before them, far across the ashen plain, the Eye of the Dark Lord burned like a wound in the sky.

"Do you know, Master Samwise," said Frodo, his voice low and grave, "in all the long leagues since the Shire, I have never once felt the weight of our burden so keenly."

Sam laid a hand upon his master's shoulder. "I know it, Mr. Frodo. The Ring is a terrible thing to bear."

"No, Sam, I meant my bowels. Three weeks of lembas and nothing else. I haven't gone since the Emyn Muil."

A silence fell, deep as the roots of the mountains. "Well," said Sam at last, "that'd be the waybread. Very binding. My gaffer always said a body wants a bit of cabbage."

"There is no cabbage in Mordor, Sam."

"No, sir. Nor a proper privy, neither." Sam gazed solemnly across the blasted land. "I've been meaning to say, I walked off behind that rock yesterday, and I tell you, the whole world was dark and full of terrors, and I still felt watched."

"By the Eye?"

"By Gollum, Mr. Frodo. He was right there."

Frodo closed his eyes. Somewhere upon the plain, the Nazgûl screamed, and neither hobbit could say, in that moment, whether the sound had been in the sky or in the quiet, unhappy rumblings of his own gut.

"We must press on," he said heavily. "The fate of Middle-earth depends upon it."

"Aye," said Sam, rising. "But sir, as they say in Bree, if you're to climb a mountain, it's best to relieve yourself before you go up."

And the Quest, which had endured the Barrow-wights, the Mines of Moria, and the Pass of Cirith Ungol, paused as the most perilous errand of all came to pass

Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?

Apparently GRRM made up for all the lack of Tolkien talking about going to the latrine where there is no latrine. Yet another reason I am heartily glad I gave up on reading the SOIAF with the first volume, back in the before days when it was first published.

Yet another reason I am heartily glad I gave up on reading the SOIAF with the first volume

Unprecedented foresight and wisdom.

After getting burned by the Wheel of Time series, my "never start a fantasy series unless it's finished" rule has spared me from several much-hyped series that look like they will never be finished (GRRM and Rothfuss immediately come to mind).

You and a lot of other people. Larry Correia often rants about how badly this has ruined the market for new epic fantasy authors, though for some reason he blames GRRM rather than Jordan.

Jordan died from a rare disease. That's very different from GRRM and Rothfuss who are alive and well, but appear to have gotten terminal writer's block and/or lost interest in completing the series.

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To be fair, Jordan was well aware he might not be able to finish the series himself, and planned it carefully and left all his notes so another writer could do the job. ( @RoyGBivensAction ).

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I have male peers who got freaked out by the mere mention of periods. Growing up with two sisters within six years of my age, it quickly becomes just a fact of life.

Funnily enough, back in the halcyon days of 2007-12 when Advice Animals were all the rage, many lulz were had at Foul Bachelor Frog, which chronicled the disgusting things single men when they're at home by themselves. When the distaff counterpart Foul Bachelorette Frog came out, I actually found it weirdly heartening to learn that single women can be exactly as disgusting as single men, which is not at all the impression you'd get from how women are portrayed in most pop culture.

when discussing their "boobs" (the word I hear deployed most often, though maybe that is a generational thing)

This is something I've thought about a lot and talked about it with my wife. I'm very surprised how every woman I've been with has always talked about their "boobs". And my wife even refers to them primarily as boobs when talking about anatomy with my daughter. The first time I heard her say this to my daughter, I said, "please, let's use the correct term: gazongas".

Prior to dating my first real girlfriend and hearing her always refer to them as boobs, I thought that the "correct" thing to call them were breasts. I thought of boobs in the exact same category as tits, melons, and funbags.

But every woman I've been with has basically always called them boobs, and never breasts, unless they're talking to a doctor - they consider breasts to just be a clinical term. Personally, though, I see no real reason why tits should be considered crass, but boobs should be considered the correct casual language.

As for generational effects, at least my wife claims that her mom always said boobs, too.

Personally, though, I see no real reason why tits should be considered crass, but boobs should be considered the correct casual language.

Bouba(booba?)/kiki effect. "Tits" sounds harsh and therefore rude in a way that "boobs" does not.

(Generally, euphonics seems to be one of those elements of language taboos that divide people harshly: some find it obvious that some words are intrinsically offensive due to how they sound, while some find the idea to be insane and suspect the former must be arguing in bad faith. I remember having an argument here long ago about whether "troon" should be considered a neutral term for the trans, with my interlocutor insisting that the it's only disapproved because leftists don't want to let their enemies have words for things.)

whether "troon" should be considered a neutral term for the trans

It is deliberately an insult, right? Not a neutral alternative pronunciation of "trans".

Generally I'd say that in English, the more germanic/Old-English something sounds, the earthier and rawer the tone. The more Romantic, the more austere and polite.

Thus troons/trans, cunt/vagina, shit/excrete, fuck/copulate, etc. Nigger/negro have the same root I know, but at least in the modern day the Latin niger is usually pronounced with i-as-in-eye, and a soft g. That may be to stop it sounding less like the slur, of course.

Generally I'd say that in English, the more germanic/Old-English something sounds, the earthier and rawer the tone. The more Romantic, the more austere and polite

How much of that is due to the romance influence being concentrated in the upper classes thanks to the Norman invasion?

Much of it, and of course because for 400 years classical education has been an indicator of the upper classes. I was being descriptive, not prescriptive.

Isn't cunt Latinate too? I think it's really more about the the sound itself; out of my quick-and-dirty list of similar slurs, few are actually Germanic (what words with that pattern even are, apart from moon?).

You would know better than I, I'm afraid, but I'm interested to learn.

I think it's really more about the the sound itself

I considered that but assumed that the association was Germanic/Anglo -> short and harsh (German tends to sound harsh to English ears) not the other way round. It's quite possible I was mistaken, and the 'nigger' pair backs up your hypothesis since obviously they are both latinate.

but at least in the modern day the Latin niger is usually pronounced with i-as-in-eye, and a soft g.

Who pronounces it this way? The classical way is /niger/, the Vatican way is /nidʒer/, if I'm not mistaken.

Perhaps nobody. I am a poor linguist. I was thinking of e.g. Nigerian.

Ah, I was thinking of Gaius Pescennius Niger.

“Troon” simply is a slur, I don’t think there’s any ambiguity there. Has nothing to do with phonetics. It’s just… that’s what it is. I don’t have a complete theory of how a word becomes a slur or what makes a word a slur, but, we can recognize them when we see them.

“Trans person” seems to work perfectly fine to me as a neutral term.

I generally say "transexual" since I think it's stupid that transgender replaced it for no real reason other than (IMO) to create more hoops for people to jump through.

I don't think you need a complete theory to recognise patterns and the effect they have on listeners. Troon works as a slur for the same reasons coon, goon and loon do, octoroon got its ending, and why the boon part of baboon is such a staple in racist terminology (the only other one that probably comes close is "chimp", with gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, gibbons and all the other well-known primates basically being unheard of), and the long tubular-mouth oo in the middle might well be a human universal gesture of mockery.

(Even the memey zoomer-coomer-doomer series of neologisms is generally at least somewhat mocking. Noob also established itself globally with that particular pronunciation, in defiance of the normal English -oo-/-yoo- distribution.)

FWIW I've heard black women called "sheboons" on 4chan for years now and my dumb brain didn't piece together thst it was derived from baboon until reading your post.

I see no real reason why tits should be considered crass

Tits/teats are animal parts. (So are 'breasts' with a side of medical textbook; men already understand this re: 'penis'.)

Tits are for cows (and before you say 'but it's not meant like that', consider what 'cowtits' means).
Chickens have breasts.

Humans have boobs. Uniquely, the word 'looks like' the object.

(For the others, 'melons' is ambiguous and bears a mandate on size; 'funbags' does that and is fundamentally unserious, as are 'gazongas' [and 'vajayjay']. 'Boobs' and 'tits' have diminutives these words lack.)

Tits/teats are animal parts.

Tits are a type of bird.

As is the booby.

So are boobies.

I enjoy bird watching over a drink in my local bar. I am particularly pleased to see great tits.

Tits was a serious mathematician.

I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with the term cowtits.

Every 'Want' Has Another Person's Name In It: This one is an audit at the book level. List every named woman in your manuscript. For each one, write a single sentence saying what she wants [you think "what a person wants" can be reduced to a single sentence?? - ed.]. Then look at how many of those sentences have another character's name in them.

Funnily enough, in The Stars My Destination, the male lead fails this test. What does Gully Foyle want? Until the very very end, only two things, really: To kill Vorga (which he then has to be taught (by a woman) means "the people behind/crewing her, not the hunk of metal ship itself"), and to have Olivia Presteign. I mean, there's also a point where he wants to escape, and a point where he wants to not be on fire, but that's a temporary situation which I assume doesn't count. I guess the film "Taken" also falls into the gender reversed category, huh?

I can't actually think of a single book I've read where the pattern is as she describes it, I must say.

The issue with every single one of these types of social critiques is that they never seem to correspond to anything in reality: it's all vibes, and anyone who dares question the vibes is a misogynist.

What concrete evidence do we have that male authors use "perky tits" to create (ahem) flat female characters? The influencer's bare assertion. But I've never once seen that phrase in my reading; searching Google books for it, it seems fairly balanced between male and female authors who use it, leaning toward female if anything.

All of this seems to me to be giving woke influencers too much credit: it's pretty much all made up, never actually supported with anything even approaching rigorous, quantitative analysis.

I don't know if it's so much in modern fiction, but I've been reading a ton of Golden Age crime/detective fiction from the period roughly 1900-30s and boy howdy, the women in it are only there to be:

(1) Widowed elderly mother who is concerned about family scandal
(2) Striving society hostess spending her rich husband's money on throwing elaborate country house parties
(3) Young daughters of same husband-hunting and doing nothing else all day (I'll come back to this one)
(4) Young daughters of same going through a rebellious phase, which means being a flapper
(5) Scheming adventuresses whose entire point is to be the Femme Fatale whom the detective outwits
(6) Wholesome lasses the detective/hero may or may not consider a love interest/possible wife/help during the investigation who then doubles up as love interest
(7) Servants and persons of the lower classes who work in shops or tearooms, but they don't really count as women, they're just the background characters needed

Regarding (3), they literally do nothing all day. Some of this may be to do with the lack of education and career opportunities, but it's extremely noticeable when the son of the house is going to university or talking about his profession or business in regard to his life plans, and his sister is "oh I think I'll call on Dolly for tea tomorrow" as the equivalent.

It's really a lot better in modern fiction, though the "hot chick whom I wanna bang and indeed may do so on pages 16, 85, and 130 described in detail" is new (6) for a lot of books.

EDIT: This is why, when Dorothy Parker gave us Harriet Vane who did not immediately want to marry Lord Peter, it was rather novel. Though Agatha Christie was able to do the same with Miss Marple, and to be fair there were Victorian/Edwardian lady detectives as well. But the main female characters in books were either unmarried daughters waiting for a husband, or unmarried daughters/nieces doing the housekeeping for their father/uncle/brother. A male character who spent all his time in the same kind of idleness was a clear indicator that he was a Bad 'Un, but for women there was nothing else (if they were of a certain social class, and such novels were indeed all about ladies and not young persons).

I've been reading a ton of Golden Age crime/detective fiction from the period roughly 1900-30s and boy howdy, the women in it are only there to be

Those sound like archetypes, in a genre where (to my understanding) everyone is an archteype. Are the male characters really so rich and multifaceted?

Well, they are described as "rough around the edges", and if they have edges they must have facets bounded by them.

Oh sure tropes, but the contrast is really striking to me now: average male background character - has life; average female background character - is there to be pretty.

There is a brilliant Soviet joke that ends with Чукча не читатель, чукча писатель.

Same is with the feminist wave that is hell bent on destroying all and everything fun inside mass media. Feminist not reader, feminist writer. While it seems many woman of specific beliefs have very strong opinion on how female characters should be written they seem to forget the other part - the reading. And so far the market has spoken that they just don't want what is pushed on them. This is very similar to the USSR economy - where even the people producing the goods refused to consume them.

Take a recent film i enjoyed - Mortal Kombat II - not that is was some masterpiece, but was relatively free from the woke smell.

Only the men were allowed to lose fights, and the only woman that lost was also beaten up by a woman (and she was from the bad guys' team anyway). Which means that all that involved them was just weaker than the rest - because the plot shield was not from the inside world, but from the outside.

The fact that even romantasy books and chicklit - that are totally dominated by women authors and readers - full with her types of characters tells us a lot.

If Taylor Sheridan's over sexualized one dimensional creatures are more believable and likable than the girl bosses - you have serious issues with audience relatability.

And the answer why something is not written in a specific way - the answer is always because it doesn't sell. You can't force people to consume - and this is why more and more people tune out of the mainstream.

Hypercompetence is generally uninteresting and - even when it’s interesting - it’s mainly interesting to men. Not because men are more competent, but I think because men like examining very complex and well functioning machines; men will watch hours-long YouTube videos on steam engines and industrial machinery and pore over complex diagrams and cross sections and so on. The ‘hypercompetent man’ is essentially just another one of these machines, the man who reads about these famous generals or whatever is seeing them less as characters or even as human beings and more as versions of those videos where the railroad track connector perfectly switches between the different rails so that trains can go in different directions or something.

If I imagine a hypercompetent woman, like my mother, who held down a very demanding job, had three children, cooked dinner most nights, would pick us up from school on the way back from meetings and then often go back to work, was always working on like 17 different side projects on the weekend, baked sourdough bread, taught yoga for fun twice a week and still attended absolutely everything, her life isn’t actually very interesting. Impressive? Certainly, but these kinds rarely have the tragedy or the strife to be compelling protagonists.

I find that hyper competent characters are definitely boring and frankly they aren’t real characters to me. I’ll agree with her up to a point. Making someone constantly whine about having given something up is annoying. Though to me it doesn’t turn the competence into a curse so much as it it reveals that the character is actually immature and whiney. Most people, if they choose to give up on something to pursue their career do so with some thought to the costs. If a person chooses to try to be a D1 quarterback, he’s obviously going to not have time for other things like making art or music or dating or other sports. He’s also the one who decided that was what he damned well wanted and isn’t likely to spend a lot of time rehashing that decision in his head unless he either failed or doesn’t like the outcome. Patrick Mahomes is not sitting on the sidelines wondering about the life he gave up to play football. His career is awesome. Some alternate universe Mahomes who snapped his ACL before the NFL draft and works as a truck driver might regret the decision because that decision made his life kinda suck.

Hypercompetent characters probably aren't fun to watch going to the grocery store, but Apollo 13 is a great film because all the people involved are the best of the best at what they do, and they barely survive by using all of it.

Right, it takes much greater writing chops to do things like make a good horror movie where the characters don't make the stupid horror movie mistakes.

Competency is hard.

Right, it takes much greater writing chops to do things like make a good horror movie where the characters don't make the stupid horror movie mistakes.

The Cabin in the Woods works, but it cheats as it's a pastiche.

There are plenty of interesting stories to tell that aren't really about the characters. Often more exploring the limits (as in "as x goes to infinity") of principles. Science fiction often does this, but it's not alone in doing so.

While I thought "dark, gritty" characters were interesting two decades ago, the idea won so heavily that no popular writing I've seen today demonstrates strong principles and I think we've lost something civilizationally aspirational in doing so. We've seemingly decided not to transcend the human condition, but to wallow in it.

But that's just, like, my opinion.

Great heroes need great villains, or at least great obstacles to overcome. The stakes and challenges have to be aligned to the abilities of the characters.

“Perky tits”- this is one of the greatest examples of lying to yourself I have ever seen. Girls think about their breast constantly probably more than men do.

? Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Your right was suppose to be to the main comment

I can at least be a counter example. I spend far far more time obsessing over my wife's breasts then she does.

Well, yes, now. Because she's not worrying about attracting someone.

That might be the case for many women. But not my wife. Perhaps she is an outlier. She cares that people thinks she looks good, to some degree, but she doesn't ever wear makeup (and never has). That probably does make her an outlier, in that she simply doesn't obsess over her appearance the way many women do (or so I'm told).

I was debating who thinks about it more to myself. Date last night I think took 1-1.5 hours getting ready last night after Pilates. Did I spend more time looking at them or did she spend more time thinking about the right outfit to put them on a platter. I have no idea.

But I do believe almost every girl 15-45 thinks about their breasts.

Eh, I think men and women think about them differently. How much thinking about their knees do men do, before it gets to the 'creaky joints' stage of life? Certainly for young girls, they're as worried about "am I developing normally?" as young boys are about their penises. But once past that, breasts (or boobs) are just a body part. They can be inconvenient, they can be a health concern, but they're there and you deal with them like the rest of your body.

Women maximising their looks for money (e.g. OnlyFans) are going to think about their boobs in the male type of way, but for the same reason an athlete is going to be thinking about his knees: money making area of concern that needs to be looked after and maximised for earning potential.

Well, it’s perhaps not interesting in the way that we expect “literary” characters to be interesting, but it’s still an interesting phenomenon in its own right. (I’m also not surprised to hear that she was like that. I feel that it shows in your own writing/thinking style.)

As I alluded to with my comments about “complexity”, something I often wonder about is how many people are actually “normal” vs “interesting”. Normal in the sense of, no significant mental disturbances, no real hidden corridors in the psyche to speak of, just… livin’ life and doin’ fine. I know such people exist, I’m acquainted with some. Hypercompetent people are strictly speaking not normal because most people are not hypercompetent, but they’re at least normal in the sense that they probably don’t have significant mental baggage weighing them down (otherwise, it would probably show in their behavior and outlook).

I have no concept of what it would be like to live a life that’s not wracked by anxiety and excessive self-reflection, so people who simply take action as their default mode of being are fascinating specimens to me.

but I think because men like examining very complex and well functioning machines; men will watch hours-long YouTube videos on steam engines and industrial machinery and pore over complex diagrams and cross sections and so on

Or, as in the case of the Motte, examining a very complex machine that only barely functions, which means it was either not engineered at all, or engineered absolutely perfectly, and the most interesting questions come down to figuring out which category which component falls into (and what happens to the machine when it encounters stressors it can't handle without ripping itself apart, and how to tell that from normal operation).

her life isn’t actually very interesting

If it was- mainly, having significant amounts of authority such that those things were done automatically at her command rather than her having to do it herself (correct me if I'm wrong but that's what I think you mean here, for giving orders to other men is the mechanism by which average men accomplish something that makes them Great Men) it'd be discarded as "obvious men writing women, how boring".

What's worse is that that condition gives rise to a particular meme about women who are aggressive/oriented enough to do that; if you possess an instinctive understanding of gender roles (and correspondingly label "the one that gives orders" as "the male gender role"), the response and attitude towards that (by both genders) is, by that definition of 'gender', so casually anti-transgender that even the caricatures of it don't capture it.

And it's not like it's that great either for the "not supposed to be the protagonist" gender in the general case, since as you've described it's difficult to make that interesting, willingness to look for the interesting parts, and appreciate the difficulty of them -> the power of those who do them is nowhere near as universal a skill as it needs to be (especially when a society puts zero effort into that), and once devotion to "the protagonists" does start degrading you...

Ironically, the "men should never be permitted to act as if they were entitled to be attracted to us" comment by that sector comes from this specific sector; unfortunately, the women who weren't quite smart enough to figure out that advice was not applicable to them heard it and the social conditions at the time let them reify it. Which is the OP's point, right down to the disclaimer that it wasn't about trans people, because the common definition of what that actually looks like on the FTM side grates on the instinct about as much as the appearance of the stereotypical MTF does.

The disclaimer about trans people was mostly because we just had like 3 other threads about trans people lol.

The Galbrush Paradox proven right once again.

Years ago, Cracked had an article pointing out the curious commonality that the female leads in every disposable 2000s romcom were all clumsy. Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson, Drew Barrymore et al. constantly spilling coffee on themselves, doing pratfalls, knocking things off bookshelves.

The author's thinking was that these films were largely written by male screenwriters, who feared being accused of sexism if they wrote these characters to have actual human flaws. Instead, they erred on the side of caution by having the characters be essentially flawless: gorgeous, sexy, funny, smart, ambitious, caring etc. But they still needed to technically have a flaw, so they independently converged on the same character-flaw-that-isn't-really-a-character-flaw: being clumsy.

Well, also, it's a _rom_com. If you make the character ugly, that's going to spoil that part. If you make them unpleasant, it's a different genre (e.g. The Taming of The Shrew). You need the flaw to be something the male character will find endearing or at least tolerable. The clumsiness also makes it easy to set up the meet-cute.

Part of it is that audiences consider female characters with major flaws to be unsympathetic. For example, there are many widely liked male main characters who cheat on their loving wives (Don Draper etc). This isn’t necessarily portrayed positively, but it doesn’t detract from their masculine appeal really.

How many female protagonists regularly cheat on their loving husbands? It’s almost unheard of. When it happens, they’re universally decried by men and women as a total bitch unless EXTREME extenuating factors apply (like the husband is very abusive or disappears for 20 years).

How many female protagonists regularly cheat on their loving husbands?

Only one that comes to mind is Shiv Roy from Succession and the entire structure of the show is such that it doesn't stand out (it's a black comedy and they're all supposed to be awful)

And people still complain she's judged unfairly compared to her male counterparts. YMMV though.

Yeah, and I’d say while she isn’t ’judged unfairly’ she’s both not really the protagonist and ends the show in a very unfavorable position.

Part of it is that audiences consider female characters with major flaws to be unsympathetic. For example, there are many widely liked male main characters who cheat on their loving wives (Don Draper etc). This isn’t necessarily portrayed positively, but it doesn’t detract from their masculine appeal really.

I think you may have a point when it comes to sexual promiscuity. People naturally see sex as something that women give and men receive. So that a female main character who sleeps around isn't going to be seen as positively as a male main character who does so. Even in Sex and the City, the Samantha character was nowhere nearly as promiscuous as your typical male womanizer character in network television.

But when it comes to other issues, I'm skeptical. Here's an example of what I mean: In the all-girls Ocean's 11 movie, there's a sequence where Julia Roberts' character runs a return scam on a department store. How would audiences have perceived this if George Clooney's character had done something similar in the original Ocean's 11 movie? I'm pretty sure it would not have been received more sympathetically and I would guess it would have been received less sympathetically.

Perhaps those aren't good examples since Oceans 11 movies are heist movies which glorify crime. But even so, I think there is a rather straightforward explanation: People, including feminists, think that Women are Wonderful and don't like portrayals of women with significant flaws.

Just so.

That post expresses my thoughts perfectly, yes.

There is no level of feminist takeover of the publishing industry where they'll stop complaining.

Literary agents and publishing houses can publicly brag about rejecting male authors for being male, and still you'll get this kind of bullshit.

It's just noise. There's no intellectual content here.

It's just noise. There's no intellectual content here.

Exactly. I have no idea who this woman is or why I should give a single shit about her complaints (and I don't mean this as a dig at OP). Some woman on the internet is mad about books? Oh, no. Whatever shall I do.

It makes me think of this meme. I can enjoy all kinds of books if I ignore the nagging about why I shouldn't enjoy them.

It sounds like she's some sort of professional editor or manuscript reader. So, unfortunately, if you ever want to publish something through mainstream channels, this is the sort of person you need to convince. So maybe most of us can ignore her, but it does tend to influence the culture over time when every single published books has the same sort of feminist spin to it.

That's true, and I imagine it's a big factor on why modern big publishing has gone to crap. But as someone who is happy to read old problematic books or self-published new problematic books and has no desire to publish anything outside of an anonymous racist substack (it's a joke, see Donald Boat tweet), her complaints are just noise on the internet that I don't have to care about.

Every author and publisher could be feminist and every problem with the industry would still be men's fault.

Every author and publisher could be feminist and every problem with the industry would still be men's fault.

Sure, if nothing else they could blame men for not buying, reading, and gushing about their books. But that's the nature of hate ideologies. The out-group is blamed for essentially everything.

Now, go find the man in your book who's simply good at his job, and find me the part of the story that details how much he pays for it. Most often, there isn't one.

I'm really curious for examples here. I asked Claude for examples, and it gave me a bunch of mystery protagonists, like Holmes and Poirot. And then it generalized to "action heroes", which I quickly pointed out isn't even true, as Bond suffers immensely for his competence.

Thinking now about other competent characters, I can't think of specific ones. Star Trek, which is clearly competence porn, has Picard, who has the job of being the loneliest man in the universe, and Spock who repeatedly denies his feelings only to then rediscover them and be hurt by them. I haven't thought through every TOS and TNG character though, so maybe some of the other men may not apply.

I think it may have a point for "mystery protagonists", but I can't confirm since I haven't read too many. But of course, the whole point of a Holmes-style mystery is that he's investigating other people's lives, meaning the focus is not about his life.

But does anyone have any examples where the original video is correct? Where are the thousands of immensely popular books with competent men who don't pay the tax? It seems to be that the male characters like that are what RedLetterMedia would call "black tank top" protagonists, and even then, they usually have a dead wife.

I do think there is the trope of the modern crime novel police detective who has given his all to the job and this has cost him his marriage, family, friendships, etc. (excessive drinking and smoking may or may not be part of the package). Modern female police in the same role often have the same costs. I am not sure if this is viewed the same way for both sexes in such works, I feel women may be judged in-universe a little more harshly for abandoning traditional roles of wife and mother in favour of career, but this is not necessarily the case (any more?)

I think, though, for the maverick loner male detective, casual girlfriends are a lot easier to come by (and discard/they leave him) than for his distaff equivalent. Spenser is one of the very few who has a stable, settled, long-term relationship and back in the 70s there were a couple of books where the late Robert Parker broke up Spenser and Susan (mostly due to Susan's insecurity) and that didn't go well so they got back together. Jonathan Kellermann tried it with the Alex Delaware character where both Dr. Delaware and his lover split up and got new partners, but they got back together (I think but don't know if that was partly due to readers not liking breaking up the band, and partly that Kellermann couldn't make the casual dating with new partner work for Delaware).

But does anyone have any examples where the original video is correct? Where are the thousands of immensely popular books with competent men who don't pay the tax?

Here's a possibility: Lazarus Long in Heinlein's Time Enough for Love. Basically a male Mary Sue.

But I think few critics would try to argue that Time Enough for Love is serious literature or that Lazarus Long is a complex character. He's basically just a Mary Sue who is always smarter and better and more competent than anyone around him.

I enjoyed Time Enough for Love and I also enjoyed the Honor Harrington series (which has a female Mary Sue as the lead character) but you have to approach both with the right attitude. Typically, science fiction is more about world-building and plot than it is about characters.

Anyway, I suspect what's going on is that in general people are a lot more sensitive to female suffering than male suffering. So if there is a story where a man "pays the price" or otherwise suffers, it's just not as noticeable or memorable. Thus the idea that only women "pay the price."

I remember that some of the early James Bond movies were criticized by feminists on the ground that they depicted women getting killed. But that if you did an actual count, far more men get killed than do women.

Of Star Trek protagonists, Kirk perhaps pays the least, but he does pay over and over again. (Despite his reputation, he hardly every gets the girl, and he loses them all the time)

Holmes is canonically kind of a miserable guy who, when he doesn't have crimes or writing of monographs to keep him occupied, gets strung out on cocaine. He's asexual by nature and appears to enjoy none of the other pleasures of life except smoking. Watson is actually quite successful, married (though eventually widowed, and without issue), and often happy, but he's the chronicler, not the protagonist.

Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is another Holmesian character; he has one pleasure besides solving mysteries, which is eating himself to obesity. His Watsonian sidekick is Archie Goodwin, who gets beat up and arrested a lot. Unlike Watson, Goodwin never marries.

Mike Hammer is the archetype of the noir detective; if you think they don't pay, you don't know the genre (not GETTING paid, now, that happens on the regular)

Yeah, Archie never marries, but he does have Lily Rowan as his long-term companion (conveniently there to go dancing with and off on trips, but never demanding 'put a ring on it' and rich enough to pay her own way and never be dependent on him) and plenty of casual female interest throughout the series of books. Archie is the one Wolfe sends out to seduce female characters for information and this is made quite explicit in one novel. I think some of that was the view (before Sexual Liberation) that being the gay bachelor playing the field was the male fantasy instead of being tied down from an early age with the ol' ball and chain and a couple of kids, and possibly Stout's own character traits as well.

Wolfe also likes beer and orchids, don't reduce him to just being a gourmet! (as well as a gourmand, there's even a cook book)!

Holmes is an addict and a loner, he isn’t married and is officially a lifelong bachelor. He has lost the one thing that gives a man (or anyone) a true legacy. For Poirot the latter is true, I’d say he’s even more asexual than Holmes, he’s a fastidious neurotic, he’s highly flawed, and many people hate him and even those who don’t often only tolerate him because he is useful or well-connected (on account of his usefulness).

In general, universally hypercompetent main characters are rare.

I would make the argument in those cases that they would have those same problems regardless of their career. Holmes is easily bored and would be an addict whether he was a detective or not. If anything, solving interesting cases (which he only gets to do due to his success) is the only thing keeping him from being constantly comatose.

Poirot appears to be, as you said, asexual. He is not foregoing romance to pursue excellence in his field. He just has little interest in women in the first place.

This is Countess Vera Rossakoff erasure and I will not stand for it! 😁

Yeah, but that goes back to the original argument where the woman was suggesting that men writing these woman characters will have them be hypercompetent in some ways and then be, say, a terrible mother or give them crippling neuroses. That doesn’t seem too different to Holmes being a hypercompetent detective but also an addict or Poirot being a hypercompetent detective but also a neurotic asshole

True. Flaws tend to humanize characters and make them interesting. She is missing the point in so many ways.

Where are the thousands of immensely popular books with competent men who don't pay the tax?

I don't know about thousands, but it certainly happens. In many hero's journey stories, the protagonist suffers on their way to success, but not because of it. You can absolutely find examples where there is no question as to whether the protagonist did the right thing or if the sacrifices made along the way were worth it. Mystery protagonists are a bit of gray area, since they often don't pay the tax directly, but they do suffer because of certain aspects of their personalities. Whether those aspects are key to their success is somewhat up for interpretation. Sherlock's substance abuse comes to mind as an extreme example of this.

More pertinent to the books she may be reading is the male love interests in women's romance stories. They certainly tend to benefit from their position and don't have real problems to speak of. Perhaps aside from a wild side that only the protagonist can tame.

There are all kinds of stories out there. By including some in your data and excluding others, you can find any kind of pattern that you want. It's just that those patterns don't actually say anything about writing as a whole, and counterexamples are at this point very abundant.

You can absolutely find examples where there is no question as to whether the protagonist did the right thing or if the sacrifices made along the way were worth it.

So are we talking about a protagonist like Frodo, then? She wants a female Frodo?

The first thing that comes to my mind for a female Frodo is Dorothy.

So are we talking about a protagonist like Frodo, then? She wants a female Frodo?

I think it's worth noting that Frodo was regularly surrounded by characters who were clearly superior to him in many ways. I think it's pretty likely that modern feminists would not be happy with a female character who needed guidance and support from male characters who were superior to her.

Or a female Christian Grey, or Doctor Who, or some career woman who has risen to the top of her field and lives a fulfilling life due to the choices she made.

Well, realistically she would probably prefer that none of those existed so her complaints would carry more weight and improve her reach on social media. Having real grievances would be a better look than making up claims that aren't true.

Interesting. I can't comment on Grey or Dr who directly since I've never seen Grey's anatomy, and I've only seen very very few dr who episodes. Do they really not suffer? If so, where does the drama come from in those shows? What is a typical episode (or season, if seasons carry the narrative weight)? They just keep having more people coming to them, and they help them without any particular cost to themselves?

I feel like I've seen softcore porn about women sex therapists who go and help client after client live better lives. Though that probably wouldn't (or would, if your hypothesis about them wanting to complain is correct) make a feminist happy. And it's also not anything anyone watches for the plot.

But these instances of hyper competent masculine characters who simply help others without cost to themselves seem to be so rare. It seems strange for feminists to go calling this out as a great inequity, when there don't seem to be very many.

Grey's anatomy

Christian Grey is the title character of Fifty Shades of Grey, not Anatomy.

Oops. In my defense, I think @Bombadil might have edited the post, originally saying just Grey. Not sure though.

I did edit it to clarify, but I did so before you posted your comment. I try to avoid substantial edits after people reply. It was definitely ambigous.

Regarding Grey's anatomy, while I have never seen the show, I believe it focuses mostly on the interpersonal drama that goes on in the hospital. So his professional skills don't really factor in all that much.

If so, where does the drama come from in those shows?

In dr. Who, The Doctor has human companions who he deeply cares about and a strict moral compass which severely limits his available actions. He also often has to solve problems under severe constraints and without access to his full arsenal of tools. The few episodes where The Doctor does get to show off are reserved for season finales or as payoffs to darker arcs. Christian Grey of fifty shades is a sadist (which is supposedly hot in the context of the story) and not the main character of the story he is a part of.

The premise that female characters are not allowed to be interesting or competent is wrong, and I doubt it has ever been true. Certainly, it has not been the case for more than a hundred years.

Dracula has a competent female POV character who is smart and solves problems. Jane Austen's romance novels have main characters that are interesting for other reasons and competent within their caste in society. Agatha Cristie has written novels and short stories with female main and side characters who can be competent murderers, investigators, socialites, and informants.

Lord of the Rings, progenitor of the modern fantasy genre has Galadriel and the "I am no man" scene. Narnia has female characters every bit as competent as the boys. Detective novels, comic books, novels. Take your pick. Female characters can be found in every flavor. The heroes of the past thirty years include the genius Hermione Granger, media personality Katniss Everdeen, Vin the Mistborn, and half the Marvel roster. Many stories follow the plotlines that mostly appeal to boys but with a female lead playing the role of hero no differently than normal. You really do just have to look for it.

Sure, some women are written to be sexy and that is fine. Other stories have flat out boring characters. But if you are not into those, don't read them. Simply read something else written for a person like you.

Maybe she is talking specifically about modern romance novels, in which case I kind of get it. I could see how it would be difficult to find women's romance not about a hapless lady stuck in a boring life who gets swept off her feet by a rich and competent suitor. But I am sure it exists. As for why those stories eclipse everything in their field, that has little to do with men and everything to do with what the majority of customers want to read. She can take her problems up with women, evolution, or God. Her choice.

I could see how it would be difficult to find women's romance not about a hapless lady stuck in a boring life who gets swept off her feet by a rich and competent suitor

The prototypical Hallmark movie has a female protagonist who is very competent in her high-powered city job before she moves back to her hometown for plot-convenient reasons.

Of course, the city life and her jerk city boyfriend make her miserable, which is why she'd much rather move back and hook up with the handsome widowed lumberjack.

Although you're basically right. The Hallmark movies are just as gender-normative as the billionaire werewolf romance novels.

The premise that female characters are not allowed to be interesting or competent is wrong, and I doubt it has ever been true. Certainly, it has not been the case for more than a hundred years.

The premise is that it is modern feminists that won't allow it. Many of your examples predate modern feminism. Even Hermione and Marvel characters are, while not as old as Dracula, adapted from sources that predated online feminism.

Also, there's always been an exception for "character I personally like".

Brandon Sanderson still writes competent female protagonists, as does Marvel. Women like this one will keep complaining no matter what happens.

Sanderson's characters all have flaws, weaknesses and pay for their competence/agency. At least all I remember right now do.

Simply read something else

You don't understand- I must crusade against anything offensive to what I deem my Privilege to be, what the proletariat prefers (i.e. "vampired billionarely") be damned.

I will submit that it's very difficult for cross-gender writing to occur properly, not because of a shortage of those who are able/willing to understand how the other works, but because its audience is generally limited to the people who are willing and able to find that kind of writing interesting.[1]

The people that cause the most trouble to this group- by definition those with the most Privilege to stop it from being written- are those who are technically able but unwilling because it would require them to think about someone other than themselves for more than 5 seconds. And note that they aren't actively tearing down works where female characters are interesting- Harry Potter being a good example of that (as far as the books themselves are concerned), but Hunger Games as well.

They'll complain about the late '80s version of this (or the others, actually) mostly because they're concerned that men will find a woman who gets along with/doesn't actively hate men preferable to themselves (i.e. it's a complaint from Privilege [to be maximally mercenary/bad-faith in dealings with the opposite sex]).

When there exists a thinkpiece against those works, that is what it is about (the Terminator franchise is this in microcosm- bookended by 'Sarah Connor gives birth to John more or less without question' to 'literally screaming at a genocidal computer about how important it is for it to respect her vagina').

[1] Sorry, @Primaprimaprima, I haven't finished writing the reply to your other thread yet; if you were wondering why people who are very high-openness tend to cluster around Japanese media, I assert this is a significant contributor to why. Less Privilege to disrupt that expression there, so you get more of these works and more capable writers putting them to paper.

No rush! But if you do have a reply to the other thread I would love to read it.

You don't understand- I must crusade against anything offensive to what I deem my Privilege to be, what the proletariat prefers (i.e. "vampired billionarely") be damned.

The world would be a better place if more people had the integrity to not make up problems where none exist. But then i guess that would be the end of her career, and besides there clearly is an audience willing to uncritically lap it up. Good for those like her, bad for gender relations.

The world would be a better place if more people had the integrity to not make up problems where none exist.

I see where you're going, but most, maybe even all human progress seems a function of rejecting the status quo because of its maybe-not-yet-evident problems. Most technology exists to solve problems we previously just accepted, or didn't even consider to exist (problem: I can't fly like a bird). Not sure where I'd draw the line, though.

"I can't fly like a bird" is objectively true, especially in an age without planes. "Females characters are not allowed to be interesting or competent" is just not. Not even within her own framework.

"I can't fly like a bird" is objectively true, especially in an age without planes. "Females characters are not allowed to be interesting or competent" is just not

I agree, but I think a more charitable interpretation of her claim is that female characters are not allowed to be interesting or competent in every last way that male characters are allowed to be interesting or competent.

And I think that so stated, the claim is true. But a big part of the difference is that it's far more acceptable (both to feminists and society in general) for male characters to be humiliated; seriously harmed; made to look foolish; defeated; outsmarted; mocked; helped by other characters; and so on. Which is why so many female hero-type characters end up being extremely annoying Mary Sue types.

Good for those like her, bad for gender relations.

I see no distinction between "making up problems where none exist" and "shooting women and children".

This is going to come off as much more flippant than I intend it, especially given the brevity, but: I really think part of growing up is learning to ignore spurious female complaining. While they can and do have real problems, shit-tests are endemic.

I don't know how much is even a shit test. I frequently see women get upset about thing A, then go on to complain about unrelated thing B (which is actually fine). The most self aware of them will apologize to me days later and tell me this explicitly. The majority do not.

This is going to come off as much more flippant than I intend it, especially given the brevity, but: I really think part of growing up is learning to ignore spurious female complaining.

It's interesting that in many traditional cultures, there is a norm against public female complaining. Grievances are supposed to be filtered through the woman's husband/father/male guardian. (Both traditional cultures and modern western culture have norms against public male complaining, in the sense that if a man does it too much he will be accused of being a whiny and/or effeminate.)

Not that complaining is inherently wrong, of course. But it does seem that women have a tendency to go overboard and to make complaints which are logically contradictory.

Yeah, I remember this discourse about Buffy the Vampire Slayer being 'performatively feminist' as a piece of media and how there were all these secret ways it was actually demeaning to women... and no that wasn't true. It was just feminist. There was a girl power speech in it that Buffy gives and the central premise is basically girl power.

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