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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28353 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Can men respect women as agents?

For all its hypocrisies, there is one aspect of girlboss feminism that continues to seem valid to me, and which makes me frustrated on behalf of women. I am talking about whether men (and women?) can respect or admire or empathize with a woman on the basis of her actions in the world or the way she wields power.

I was recently tickled but these posts on twitter/reddit:

When a man is in the presence of a tender, gentle, trustful, dependent woman, he immediately feels a sublime expansion of his power to protect and shelter this charming, delicate creature. In the presence of such weakness he feels stronger, more competent, bigger, and manlier than ever. This feeling of strength and power is the most enjoyable he can experience. The apparent need of the woman for protection, instead of arousing contempt for her lack of ability, appeals to the very noblest feelings within him.

and

This is not very feminist of me but I think it’s great rizz for a woman to pretend to occasionally need help with stuff she can actually do on her own. Don’t pretend to be a moron or anything but I think even modern men like to be needed

In response to a man's story about "the haunting feeling of fumbling a 10/10":

When I read men’s opinions on women and interactions with women it gives me this disgusting skin crawling feeling all over that makes me want to puke. I wish I was born a lesbian.

I bring these examples up not to harangue men but to explicitly set aside the discourse about romantic relationships, in which most men and women seem happy to accept a certain asymmetry. A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy. As a spergy gay man, I don't have a dog in this fight, if it is a fight, but I do find explicit commentary on the expectations of gendered social interaction helpful (and entertaining).

But outside the romantic context, is there not still a weird asymmetry in attitudes? For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists. I am not here to say that you are sexist if you did not enjoy Captain Marvel. I hate being lectured to in my entertainment as much as anyone and find woke fiction repulsive. But it's generally hard to think of good examples of female characters occupying much mindshare among men. (Skyler White?) Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, popular among both boys and girls (and whose roles and stories do not particularly depend on their masculinity)? And of all feminist talking points, the Bechdel test stands out as one that I actually find revealing.

I am happy to grant or even defend all the usual replies, such as that women are in fact less likely to be out in the world doing extreme, daring, exciting, risky things that make for good stories. Maybe when women attempt to fill traditionally masculine roles, they will be less effective, less capable. Never mind that few women want to be mob bosses or whatever in the first place. But none of that entails that when women are competent actors in the world, men should be uninterested or even annoyed.

On the flip side, one could argue that women actually deserve no "empathy credit" for their interest in male protagonists, or at least no more credit than men deserve for their interest in Princess Leia, if women are only interested in stories about men taking action in the world when that is precisely what makes them eligible mates. But I'm not entirely convinced here.

Of course I don't think it's a moral failing if, say, by some effect of psychology, a man is incapable of admiring a woman for her achievements in the same way he might admire a man. Maybe nothing can be done to change such feelings. But if this is generally true of men, more than the reverse is true of women, then when I see rallying cries of the "nevertheless she persisted" variety, after the cringe has subsided, I must still have some lingering sympathy.

A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy. As a spergy gay man, I don't have a dog in this fight, if it is a fight, but I do find explicit commentary on the expectations of gendered social interaction helpful (and entertaining).

As @Harlequin5942 said, it's a desirable train in any partner. It might be a bit different between the sexes, as women often look for men who are higher achievers than them, and this requires a certain level of natural unhappiness with the order of things, but I've heard about enough couples where a high-achieving woman was happily married to a Monsieur Alphonse, whose ambitions ended at looking good as arm candy.

this requires a certain level of natural unhappiness with the order of things

Does it? Big Five neuroticism is negatively correlated with success in just about every domain of life. It's likely to make people unhappy and it's innate, but it's not useful for being a high achiever.

Big Five disagreeableness, to some degree, is correlated with success in some domains (and it's useful for getting a pay rise etc.) but disagreeableness, to this limited extent, is not correlated with (reported) unhappiness, AFAIK.

Big Five conscientious people might seem less happy, because they tend to spend less time chilling out, but IIRC conscientiousness is correlated with higher variance of happiness (conscientious people feel guilty less often but experience more intense guilt) rather than the level of happiness.

One problem with correlating big five with happiness is that reported happiness flows directly into the neuroticism and extraversion values. The example phrase “I seldom feel blue” counts as low neuroticism. Neuroticism includes withdrawal (tending toward depression and anxiety) . That is not “correlated” with unhappiness, it is unhappiness. Extraversion includes enthusiasm , so if you say you’re happy all the time, that counts as extraversion. If you are low in negative emotion, you’re ¬ neurotic , and if you are high in positive emotion, you're extraverted.

However, it does appear that conscentiousness and agreeableness are correlated with reported happiness, though less than with ¬ neuroticism and extraversion. That is surprising to me, I guess I’ll have to work on that.

A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy.

Nothing is more important in a partner than temperament. Choosing wisely here is one of the most important decisions most of us will ever make.

In general, I find gender wars very dull. Almost all men and women have always been and will always be without any significant power. In the cloistered world of the elite, women’s power has waxed and waned over the centuries, but it has always been and remains less than men’s power (even in the girlboss era, the vast majority of senior politicians, business leaders and culture creators are men of course).

You say women seem more interested in stories about men than vice versa, but what are they actually interested in?

For example, the bulk of the female Sherlock fandom, which you mention, is essentially yaoi shipping of Holmes and Watson in a gay relationship. It’s not about deduction or criminology or the mysteries themselves. Young women’s fascination with gay men (see Manga and to some extent aesthetically Kpop) is complicated but can be summarized as a safe, distanced, jealousy-free outlet for sexuality and sexual exploration. Dragon Age is a female-dominated fandom, but almost all fanfiction is romance fanfiction (either explicitly or less so) related to a handful of romanceable (male) NPCs and either other NPCs or a female player character.

So men and women do have different tastes, but women sometimes find things in masculine stories/franchises that let them tell stories appealing to women in those settings. Men have no need to find masculine narratives in women’s stories, because men (a) read much less than women and (b) have plenty of their own stories to focus upon that are already core parts of the mainstream/popular fiction canon.

For example, the bulk of the female Sherlock fandom, which you mention, is essentially yaoi shipping of Holmes and Watson in a gay relationship. It’s not about deduction or criminology or the mysteries themselves.

Wellllll.... yes and no. Slash fiction is a huge part of any fandom (I contend, with little to no evidence to back me up). But women are interested in the mysteries, too. But yeah, women are interested in the relationships in that world, between all the characters. Whatever happened to Aggie, Milverton's maid? Was she used and abandoned by Holmes? (I say 'no' but others say 'yes' and write those stories).

I read a lot of Holmes pastiche fiction, professionally published as well as fanfiction. And I do judge it in part on how they handle the characterisation, that's true. There's one pro/semi-pro author who drives me nuts with the way he (and it is a male writer) handles the British class system, attempts to write dialect, and general plotting, but I stick with his novellas because he gets the characters right. Some media (and the Holmes and Watson stories have been adapted for radio and movies and TV multiple times as well as in print) have given us comic Holmes, comic Watson, Watson who is too much of a doormat, Holmes who is too much of a jerk, Watson who is resentful of Holmes (pre- and post-Reichenbach Watson is a study in character development), a sentimental Holmes, and so on. We've even had "Watson was really a woman" as part of the Game, by Rex Stout who seems to have loved messing with the Sherlockians as part of good-natured joshing:

And right at the very start, on page 9 of "A Study in Scarlet," I found this:

    • .it was rare for him to be up after ten at night, and he had invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning.

I was indescribably shocked. How had so patent a clue escaped so many millions of readers through the years? That was, that could only be, a woman speaking of a man. Read it over. The true authentic speech of a wife telling of her husband's-- but wait. I was not indulging in idle speculation, but seeking evidence to establish a fact. It was unquestionably a woman speaking of a man, yes, but whether a wife of a husband, or a mistress of a lover, . . . I admit I blushed. I blushed for Sherlock Holmes, and I closed the book.

And it's male writers and male directors who do this! I think BBC Sherlock was a wasted opportunity because Gatiss and Moffat didn't understand the characters and rode off on hobbyhorses (including what they probably thought was fanservice). I pretty much stopped watching after the first season (a whopping three episodes) due to "The Blind Banker" because while I'm not remotely progressive, that was so stuffed to the gills with Orientalist clichés it was dreadful. I could never get into Elementary because it was way too Americanised and updated, and oddly enough though it was all over Tumblr and other social media during its run, I haven't seen a single reference to it since. So maybe it strayed too far from the established canon to be remembered after it made its splash.

I'm one of the few (women as well) who don't think Holmes and Irene Adler were a romantic pairing. Holmes was not in love with Irene, Irene was not in love with Holmes, Geoffrey Norton was not an abusive husband. But male writers and male adapters for movies and TV give us the romantic pairing, presumably on the grounds that "you need a love story" and that they can't think what to do with a main female character if she's not in love with the main male character. Rex Stout mischievously hinted that Nero Wolfe was the love-child of Holmes and Irene, but that isn't meant to be taken seriously (we've also had novels about Mycroft Watson, one series co-written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, yes that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; Mrs Hudson and others all doing their own crime-solving. I'm only going to mention the abominable Mary Russell novels here once, to say that I wish she had gone over Reichenbach Falls in her cradle rather than growing up to be the pest she is).

So yes, while I'll give ground on "women like the stories for the relationships", I contend that is not all we like them for. I haven't clocked up 35 volumes of David Marcum's anthology series just because I'm breathlessly waiting for the moment Holmes and Watson hold hands (Sir Arthur already gave us the hand-holding, anyway) 😁

From "Charles Augustus Milverton":

An instant afterwards he had closed the door behind us, and we had become felons in the eyes of the law. The thick, warm air of the conservatory and the rich, choking fragrance of exotic plants took us by the throat. He seized my hand in the darkness and led me swiftly past banks of shrubs which brushed against our faces. Holmes had remarkable powers, carefully cultivated, of seeing in the dark. Still holding my hand in one of his he opened a door, and I was vaguely conscious that we had entered a large room in which a cigar had been smoked not long before.

...I felt Holmes’s hand steal into mine and give me a reassuring shake, as if to say that the situation was within his powers and that he was easy in his mind. I was not sure whether he had seen what was only too obvious from my position, that the door of the safe was imperfectly closed, and that Milverton might at any moment observe it.

From "The Empty House":

Holmes’s cold, thin fingers closed round my wrist and led me forwards down a long hall, until I dimly saw the murky fanlight over the door. Here Holmes turned suddenly to the right, and we found ourselves in a large, square, empty room, heavily shadowed in the corners, but faintly lit in the centre from the lights of the street beyond. There was no lamp near and the window was thick with dust, so that we could only just discern each other’s figures within. My companion put his hand upon my shoulder and his lips close to my ear. “Do you know where we are?” he whispered.

...Again in the utter silence I heard that thin, sibilant note which spoke of intense suppressed excitement. An instant later he pulled me back into the blackest corner of the room, and I felt his warning hand upon my lips. The fingers which clutched me were quivering. Never had I known my friend more moved, and yet the dark street still stretched lonely and motionless before us

I'm one of the few (women as well) who don't think Holmes and Irene Adler were a romantic pairing. Holmes was not in love with Irene, Irene was not in love with Holmes, Geoffrey Norton was not an abusive husband.

I’m baffled that this is a rare take. Thinking about it, I also really disliked how the BBC show treated Adler…

Thinking about it, I also really disliked how the BBC show treated Adler

Oh, don't get me started on that one! Moffat and Gatiss are clueless, and I was really disappointed with Mark Gatiss because I liked his work on "League of Gentlemen" but clearly he wasn't the main inspiration there if I go by his subsequent solo work. I don't know which of them I should blame more for reducing Irene to literally sex on legs, or mangling the handling of Sherlock's sexuality (or lack of same; I've often felt that there's at least as good an argument that canon Holmes is asexual as any other orientation) and just the whole ugly mess that is insulting to the original characters.

I hope I wasn’t suggesting that women like Sherlock Holmes for the relationships, women do after all like crime fiction (almost all fiction except hard science fiction and some forms of fantasy, really) more than men. I was trying to say that I don’t think women reading more stories about men than men read about women necessarily tells us anything more than that they do so.

The big gap is that most modern literary fiction is written by women and is by far a women-dominated form of creative expression, but few men read it. Men used to read books, but as visual media became cheaper, more plentiful and more widely available they have gravitated more to television, movies and games, while women enjoy those things but have remained readers, too.

Oh, a recommendation for a Holmes move - Without A Clue. From the late 80s, a comedy take, but it redeems itself in the ending. Funny, clever and even touching in parts.

Novel writing and women - that's a large subject to tackle. While most were and are written by men, and men are the main characters, novel writing became female-identified during the 19th century and women readers as the audience for many novels. Women were able (sometimes had to) earn money by writing. And in general I think it's broadly true that women who read/consume media become familiar with how men write men, as well as women, but men don't read/consume media that is specifically for women in the same way, so they don't become familiar with how women write men and women.

There is some mockery of how (some) men write women characters, and mostly it's around physical/sexual elements. Male writers seem to think women are obsessed with their breasts as much as men are obsessed with women's breasts 😁

I'm sure there are comparable examples of women writing men badly, but I find the failure mode (particularly in young writers, particularly in fanfic writers) is writing men as if they're women (often young women). I have often read dialogue where I go "that is not how two men would speak to one another". I don't think I've read women writing men as worrying over is their penis perky enough, though!

A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy.

Insofar as that guy is suggesting that low neuroticism is a desirable trait, he's very understandable. Less neurotic people tend to have happier, more stable, and more lasting relationships. That it's important doesn't imply that it's sufficient and it seems like a strawman of his position to suggest that interpretation.

Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, popular among both boys and girls (and whose roles and stories do not particularly depend on their masculinity)?

Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

Sherlock Holmes isn't particularly popular among boys and girls, as far as I know, but the female counterpart is Miss Marple.

The closest parallel to Harry Potter is Hermione Granger, who is also a character in the Harry Potter series.

I, for some reason, tend to relate to female characters more than male characters. Kusanagi Motoko is legitimately just badass, Youko from Twelve Kingdoms is a relatable character with kingship thrust upon her, the lead women in Dreams of the Red Chamber outshine the ostensible protagonist of the novel. I could go on.

They’re just not recent Anglosphere works.

Oh, definitely in Dream of the Red Chamber, all the men are idiots. There's a competent daughter-in-law trying to hold it all together as the family fortune is declining, but between the family spending money like water because they assume they're rich, and the "keeping up face" that is necessary in order to maintain their position, as well as the court officials and eunuchs 'borrowing' money they're never going to repay, the family is underwater and it's only a matter of time before it all collapses.

The viewpoint character narrating it all is a wealthy young son of the family who has neither the interest nor the capability to manage things or help retrieve their fortunes or cut down spending. It's the inevitable decline of a noble house over several generations, the pattern that we see repeated in all the Gilded Age American fortunes where the head of the dynasty made a huge fortune, then the kids and grandkids divided the inheritance between them, leaving it smaller to each inheritor, and squandered it or were only able to manage to hang on to part of it instead of making huge fortunes in their turn.

I can only say that I wish more people read it.

Male protagonists are often in a sense sex symbols for women. You can't easily write a leading role of a female sex symbol. Competent male leads work for both men and women. James Bond is an obvious example of a character tailored in some ways to female tastes.

As to your question, I have never thought of Major Kusanagi as anything other than incredible.

James Bond is an obvious example of a character tailored in some ways to female tastes.

Ahhh - no. He's definitely a male fantasy figure, the idea that he's irresistible to women is all part of the idealised man of action character. If you're a women reading the novels, he's not that great to the women he encounters. A lot of them are the stock femme fatale types anyway.

The answer here is simple.

Can men respect women passive-actors as agents?

The type of man that's described in traditional media, does not describe that average man. Hell, it doesn't describe 99% of men. It describes a human of initiative. Sacrifice : A human who chooses to set aside their own interests for the greater good. Growth: A human who starts from the bottom, and chooses to put in the work to improve. Moonshots: Someone who chooses to act even when the odds are stacked against them.

The hero is not male or female, the hero is superhuman. Gender doesn't matter. The hero has been portrayed by a man for a long time, but that's arbitrary. It can be a woman. But, girl-boss feminism is incompetent at portraying the hero. Because, the key subversion of a hero is that he seems super-human, but is in fact, a weak person.

Writing an effective 'weak' character needs 2 things.

First: Recognizing the freebies that comes with being an individual of a certain demographic.

Second: Actively depriving them of those freebies; so that the journey appears difficult and relatable to all.

Hollywood writers can't write a relatable girl-boss, because it starts with needing to cast a sexually undesirable woman. It starts with recognizing, that they need to thoroughly deprive their character of the 'women are wonderful' effect. Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 is a properly relatable girl-boss, in part because she is NOT 'Hollywood sexy'. It also helps that all 3 male characters in the movie: John, Arnold & T2 are incapable of sexualizing her. She spent the entire first movie being weak, and she is relatable not because she wins, but rather because she tries against all odds. Linda Hamilton grows, she sacrifices, she shoots for the moon and she is relatable.

Honestly, America in particular seems to be inept at writing relatable women. Vidya Balan has played many a relatable woman. (Kahani, Bhool Bhulayya) in Bollywood. There's a never ending list of manga where you can respect, admire, empathize with the agenthood of the woman. Some examples are Kakukaku Shikajika & Silent Voice (The manga). I have yet to complete The Mother (2009), but it also gives me a similar vibe. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of many post 2000 American films that qualify here. Even British TV has more relatable women. Olivia Coleman played only relatable women before her big break in TheCrown. There is something about the brilliance of Victoria Coren Mitchell or the sharp wit of Jo Brand that makes them girl-bosses of a type that I am kinda jealous of, even as a man.

complete tangent : It is a shame Jo Brand was no on the episode of QI that led to this wonderful moment. Sandi Toksvig is brilliant, but this still takes the cake for the best 1 liner.

one could argue that women actually deserve no "empathy credit" for their interest in male protagonists

This. My favorite movie is Pig (2021). I have shown it to 3 highly empathetic (1 is a licensed therapist) women. The movie is about 3 weak men, grief and the weaknesses of men. All 3 of them reacted with either platonic appreciation or confusion as they watched the movie. They understood the universal themes : grief takes time and death is sad. But they didn't understand where the weaknesses of either men came from. The feeling of abandonment without the warmth of a mother. The level of intense pair-bonding that men undergo and isolation in their grief, the desperate incompetence of a father who has only ever played the role of bad cop. I never cry, but I was bawling my eyes out at the end of this movie. my 'daily weeper' female friends felt nothing more than a general sadness in the air.

Women and men only relate across genders when it is the proverbial 1% superhero, and that's because the superhero has no gender. Women don't relate to the 99% weak men, and men do not relate to the 99% weak women.

Hollywood writers can't write a relatable girl-boss, because it starts with needing to cast a sexually undesirable woman. It starts with recognizing, that they need to thoroughly deprive their character of the 'women are wonderful' effect. Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 is a properly relatable girl-boss, in part because she is NOT 'Hollywood sexy'. It also helps that all 3 male characters in the movie: John, Arnold & T2 are incapable of sexualizing her.

Something similar occurred to me and I’d considered touching on it in my earlier comment, but didn’t want to get bogged down in a potentially crass “is so-and-so fuckable” argument with anybody. The example I was going to give was Sigourney Weaver - who I personally find somewhat mannish and haggard-looking, even when she was in her prime as Ripley - and I would say that some more recent examples would be Michelle Rodriguez and, to some extent, Jennifer Lawrence. (Lawrence has an attractive body, but it’s easy for a director to de-emphasize it, and her face is somewhat plain.) The key tightrope act is that these women aren’t unattractive - there’s nothing obviously off-putting about them that would make men want not to look at them (it’s not like we’re talking about casting Melissa McCarthy or Ruth Buzzi or whatever) - but not so attractive that a man would be unable to turn off his “sexy lady want to bone awooooogah [wolf whistle]” instinct long enough to relate to her on a peer level.

Melissa McCarthy

Perhaps one of my edgiest opinions is that McCarthy and Jason Statham are really funny in ‘Spy’.

There's also a question of realism. I believe that Sigourney Weaver is fairly strong - maybe not as strong as an average American man, but not far off. She's a tall, athletic woman. It's much easier to suspend disbelief with her as Ripley than Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor, or young Linda Hamilton vs. Old Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor firing a machine gun.

young Linda Hamilton vs. Old Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor firing a machine gun.

If you compare the actress in the first versus the second movie, the change is huge. She worked out, she completely lost the softness from the first movie. It's at least as impressive as actors hitting the gym to pile on the muscles when playing superheroes.

Then you get "Rings of Power" and small Morfydd Clark supposedly able to one-shot an ice troll (that was smacking around her entire squad of male Elves up till then) and teaching the Númenorean youth volunteers which end of a sword is the pointy bit, and even without the ludicrous 'acrobatic' stunts it just does not work. It doesn't matter that she's an Elf, she is simply not convincing as tall enough and strong enough to be able to pull off all this Warrior Girlboss routine.

Then you get "Rings of Power" and small Morfydd Clark supposedly able to one-shot an ice troll (that was smacking around her entire squad of male Elves up till then) and teaching the Númenorean youth volunteers which end of a sword is the pointy bit, and even without the ludicrous 'acrobatic' stunts it just does not work. It doesn't matter that she's an Elf, she is simply not convincing as tall enough and strong enough to be able to pull off all this Warrior Girlboss routine.

Yes, there's a reason why Superman is muscular, even though his strength is obviously disconnected from just his muscles: it aids the suspension of disbelief. Chalamet as Superman would not work, unless he put on 40+ pounds of muscle, and also wore platform shoes that were at least 2 inches...

Let's take 4 example films with female protagonists. I really enjoy the protagonists in Alita, Rogue Squadron, Mirrormask, and Spirited Away.

Alita is great because the titular character appears as an underdog in most of her fights (who levels up in badassness multiple times through the film). There are plausible reasons why a 100lb girl can beat giants (they're all cyborgs and she's from a higher tech civilization). She grows in her power through the films and is faced with consequences for her actions both positive and negative.

Jyn is a normal person with PTSD who is only attached to the mission because of her connection to a warlord who isn't a close friend of the republic. She's got a lot of mental fortitude, and she fights and kills but mostly she's doing brave things because they're the right thing to do. The film makes it clear that actions have costs by the end.

Helena in Mirrormask is a clear fish out of water, but who quickly picks up the rules of the surreal place she finds herself relying on her wits to solve the many mysteries required to escape. She's making as little sense of the place she finds herself as the viewer, but persists in making allies, and using the strengths she has eventually overcome and defeat the villain.

Chihiro perseveres through working hard, having pity, and following her people's traditions (not eating the gods' food like her parents, not accepting No Face's gifts, respecting even the humble spirits at the inn). She shows her wisdom early and continues to develop or refine it and it remains her ally in the story.

I can't put myself in their shoes in many ways, but they appeal to my sense of finding a purpose larger than myself, familial loyalty, accepting challenges, hard work, and protecting those weaker than myself. I enjoy all of their stories because each of them struggles and many of them fail especially early in their story.

Rey is a bad enough protagonist that I think the best thing that could have happened in the Last Jedi would have been Kylo questioning his attachment to the dark side and Rey joining Snoke by attacking him during the confrontation in Snoke's throne room. Rey makes an excellent dragon, she's hyper competent, emotionally distant, and ruthless in her commitment to accomplishing her goals, but those qualities make her an awful protagonist. I believe her lack of appeal as a character is a direct result of girlboss instincts not to ever show her as weak or lacking.

Rey makes an excellent dragon, she's hyper competent, emotionally distant, and ruthless in her commitment to accomplishing her goals, but those qualities make her an awful protagonist. I believe her lack of appeal as a character is a direct result of girlboss instincts not to ever show her as weak or lacking.

I legit thought this was going to be the route they went, that Rey beat Kylo in Ep7 by tapping into the dark side, and would keep relying on that and eventually do something that made even Kylo go "what the fuck" and switch sides to stop her, but no... bland and uninteresting to the end.

I felt like Anton Ego there, thinking "surprise me" and hoping there was an interesting film about Kylo to make. It was easily the best 5 minutes of the film, before resuming my utter disappointment.

I feel the same way, there were hints of an interesting story there, but they turned out to be only hints.

Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, popular among both boys and girls (and whose roles and stories do not particularly depend on their masculinity)?

Taylor from Worm fits best. She's competent, dictates events and leads, though the story is somewhat obscure. Annabeth from Percy Jackson and Hermione I guess fit what you're getting at about them not leading or wielding power (though Hermione is essential and does sort of lead in book 7, while Annabeth has a similar sort of quasi-leadership role). Katniss from the Hunger Games never has autonomy, I admit.

Lyra from His Dark Materials?

I think there is something unwomanly about being a great leader who wields power on a huge scale. In history, we have Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Cyrus the Great, Hernan Cortes... The names of these men echo for millennia - khanates, kaiser, czardom, Alexandria. The great prophets were all male. There just aren't female equivalents on that highest tier. There's Elizabeth I and Catherine who were pretty capable but were only on Bismarck's level, perhaps a little lower. They didn't found gigantic empires from nothing, they didn't lead troops in battle. They were all born into their positions as well - they are A-tier as opposed to S-tier. Joan of Arc is a special case of a female leader rising from the bottom but she didn't actually rule anything or wield great power.

Who else? Maria Theresa did decently for Austria but by diplomacy and influence rather than wielding power directly. She still lost Silesia to Frederick and couldn't retake it even when it was her and half of Europe against him alone. She was about marriages, not conquest and glory. Queen Victoria did very little but sit still and be adored. Theodora has a rather dubious track record.

The heroic archetype is someone like Alexander or Genghis Khan who says 'Nothing can stop me, I will rule the world' and goes on to prove the verity of his claims. Or the gigachad Viking who held up the army on Stanford Bridge, until some sneaky Englishman stabbed him from underneath the bridge. Or the other last stands of history.

Queen Victoria did very little but sit still and be adored.

She worked hard on restoring the image of the monarchy and creating, with Alfred, the domestic family view of the queen and consort. She was also constrained by the increasing impotence of the monarch to actually do anything, and a male monarch would have faced the same problems. But as a figurehead of Empire, she was immensely important. People were born and grew up and had children and grandchildren of their own during her reign. She was the public face of the entire project. You weren't fighting and building abroad for a faceless government, you were doing it for Victoria.

She did try and get involved in ruling, but her relationships with her Prime Ministers were the important elements there. By helping in the transformation of the monarchy into a symbolic, ceremonial role this helped preserve the monarchy. Remember, there was a lot of upheaval during the entire period from anarchists to republicans. People were questioning the very notion of a monarch. Victoria became the grandmother of the nation and maintained continuity and handed over a functioning machine to her son. One that managed to last even beyond the turmoil of the First World War, where so many other European monarchies came crashing down:

In the early part of her reign, she was influenced by two men: her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, and then her husband, Prince Albert, whom she married in 1840. Both men taught her much about how to be a ruler in a 'constitutional monarchy', in which the monarch had very few powers but could use much influence.

Until the late 1860s she rarely appeared in public; although she never neglected her official Correspondence, and continued to give audiences to her ministers and official visitors, she was reluctant to resume a full public life.

She was persuaded to open Parliament in person in 1866 and 1867, but she was widely criticised for living in seclusion and quite a strong republican movement developed.

Seven attempts were made on Victoria's life, between 1840 and 1882 - her courageous attitude towards these attacks greatly strengthened her popularity.

With time, the private urgings of her family and the flattering attention of Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880, the Queen gradually resumed her public duties.

Catherine wasn't born into her position, she was a German who married Peter III before he became Tsar. Later she overthrew him (and possibly had him murdered) and made herself Tsarina. It's impressive for a complete outsider who didn't even speak Russian when she arrived.

Good point but she was a princess. A princess of a poor principality but a princess nonetheless. Alexander had a higher starting position but achieved much more.

Alexander had everything laid out for him. It was Philip II who reformed Macedonian army, consolidated power in his hands and who provided Alexander with the best tutoring. And Philip also had good sense to get killed while Alexander was young.

The true self-made men were the likes of Genghis Khan, who literally comes from refugee family that almost all died in harsh Mongolian winter. Napoleon definitely counts as well. Possibly Caesar, but less so since he was born into patrician family.

Alexander might not have been self-made but he did so much! Taming wild horses, winning battles as a teenager before he even became king... He went out and crushed everyone, Illyrians, Greeks, Persians, Indians... Phillip did a good job of institution-building but his star didn't shine so brightly.

If Catherine had done what Alexander did, proportionately, she would've expanded Russia all the way to Portugal in the West, or Vietnam in the East. Even if it disintegrated after her, even if she relied upon her predecessor's hard work, she'd have achieved eternal glory.

India has had 3 strong queens in its time.

  • Jhasi ki rani regained control of her city and held onto it for 5 years in a war against the British East India Company.

  • Ahilyabai Holkar played a big role in the sustained rise of the Maratha Empire as the pre-eminent Indian power sandwiched between the Mughal and British era.

  • More recently, Indira Gandhi girl-bossed in a manner that Hilary can only dream of. She was India's leader during the liberation of Bangladesh, managing the Sikh insurgency and seizing the Congress party despite the old-guard being completely against her.

Who else? Maria Theresa did decently for Austria but by diplomacy and influence rather than wielding power directly. She still lost Silesia to Frederick and couldn't retake it even when it was her and half of Europe against him alone. She was about marriages, not conquest and glory. Queen Victoria did very little but sit still and be adored. Theodora has a rather dubious track record.

I would offer Boudica as an interesting example. Her revolt failed, as so many other revolts against the Romans did, but otherwise her story is genuinely extremely compelling and admirable.

The Trung sisters are national heroes of Vietnam, too. Doubtless we can find more of these if we even looked in a cursory manner.

Compelling and admirable - according to later reinterpretations of the Roman historians who wrote about her after Suetonius obliterated her. It's like if the hero sallies out, massacres a bunch of civilians, wins a single battle and then gets utterly crushed.

Skanderberg is overwhelmingly superior as a rebel and a hero. He won at least one single-combat duel plus there are many tales of his superhuman strength and endurance. We know he fought and won battles against the odds for 25 years. He even fended off the treacherous Venetians and somehow found time to help his friends in Aragon retake Naples. He personally halted Ottoman expansion into Europe!

Or take Mullah Omar. Veteran guerrilla against the Soviets, tank-hunter, lost an eye in battle. Gets a prophetic vision, leads his students off to fight and kill all the warlord rapists and pedophiles in Afghanistan. He does a pretty good job of that, conquers most of the country and gets his own holy item (the Cloak of Muhammed). He bans opium production fairly effectively. He tells Osama Bin Laden to cool it with the jihad but defies another global superpower and refuses to hand over his guest to America. Based on Islamic law and Afghan customs, he cannot betray guests like that so he offers to hand him over to an Islamic court but is rebuffed. If his life were a work of fiction, he would be almost too cliched a hero. How comically villainous can his enemies be?

Reportedly, in early 1994, Omar led 30 men armed with 16 rifles to free two young girls who had been kidnapped and raped by a warlord, hanging him from a tank gun barrel.

Then he hands over the insurgency against NATO to his successor before dying of natural causes, before his followers march on to victory! We made a serious mistake going up against a force led by someone straight out of an Arthurian legend, especially when we side with the pedophile rapists (who infamously filled the ranks of our drug-ridden Afghan National Army). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Army#Ineffectiveness

Oh sure, obviously Boudica isn’t topping anyone’s list of most impressive rebel leaders; her legend is almost certainly inflated by the fact that people want so badly to find any examples, other than Caractacus, of the Celtic Britons mounting a credible defense of their homeland instead of just getting constantly steamrolled. I just think she’s an interesting example of a female war leader who genuinely seems to have demonstrated masculine virtues and achieved some modest measure of real success in doing so.

while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists. I am not here to say that you are sexist if you did not enjoy Captain Marvel.

Didn't they come out and say men weren't their audience? If you write bad male characters (or hire writers that hate men) is it really surprising that (most) men are not interested?

Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes ...

Isn't this looking at a couple outliers (some of the most popular media of all time) and making very broad assumptions? Besides, Harry Potter has some very strong female characters... Are you saying that there are no boys who related to Hermione?

Of course I don't think it's a moral failing if, say, by some effect of psychology, a man is incapable of admiring a woman for her achievements in the same way he might admire a man.

I mean, could it be that men and women tend to have some biological differences? I'm currently mostly dating women in their early 30s... It's kind of amazing to watch them melt at a baby anything (it could be a small chair and it's soooooooooo cute). Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the cuteness of kitten but it's not the same. Is that a moral failing? It seems like you're glossing over the most obvious answer...

I think the real question you need to be asking is can anyone who buys into the theory of external loci control respect anyone as an agent. Not just men or women.

girlboss feminism

respect or admire or empathize with a woman on the basis of her actions in the world or the way she wields power

Only very rarely. Does Phyllis Schlafly count?

More often I find the choices made by girl bossing feminists to only be coherent in the context of girl bossing feminism, which I find to be a poor fit for our consensus reality.

I see it leading to poor outcomes and don't entirely understand why otherwise seemingly intelligent women that take this path fail to see the deep tail 'success' they believe has been promised is rare.

It's my perception of her poor choices that precludes my respect for actions.

You just said 'girlboss feminism bad' in five different ways. "poor choices", "success rare", "poor fit for reality". Not that much was communicated.

  • -11

More effort please. We do not like posts that are nothing more than "I agree," and we do not like posts that are nothing more than "Your post was dumb."

For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists.

In anime and manga there are entire genres, most obviously slice-of-life comedies, where it is typical to have nearly 100% female casts (and a 50% or higher male audience). Female characters are a publishing requirement at plenty of manga magazines, and not for ideological reasons. Here is a relevant extra from the comedy manga/anime D-Frag, which ended up with a main cast that looks like this. The same is true for anime-style videogames, in particular gacha games which have an emphasis on character design. Even aside from the subsets of Japanese/Japanese-inspired media doing their best to tile the universe with cute girls, plenty of stories from times and places unconcerned with feminism have gone out of their way to incorporate female characters into roles like "warrior" which would realistically be all male, from ancient myths to modern fantasy.

If a subset of modern western characters like the female Captain Marvel aren't appealing to men, perhaps it is because none of the people involved with creating them designed them to be. That doesn't mean they can't be "strong" or whatever, female anime/manga characters are varied and include those with nearly every kind of "strength" imaginable, both the kinds of strength primarily associated with men and the kinds that aren't. But it does mean they shouldn't be designed by people who view "making a strong female character" or "making sure not to incorporate misogynistic tropes" as primary goals in character writing, which often takes precedence over concerns like making the character likable or interesting. Indeed, most of those strong female anime/manga characters were written by people who have probably never encountered a phrase like "strong female character" in their lives, let alone having them as important categories shaping how they think about writing fiction.

In anime and manga there are entire genres, most obviously slice-of-life comedies, where it is typical to have nearly 100% female casts (and a 50% or higher male audience).

Many of these are even written by women, with Bocchi the Rock being a recent prime example. Given that, I lean towards ideological distortion in media companies being the big culprit here.

I don't find the new Captain Marvel appealing and I'm a woman, but then again I may be an outlier. The fact that the second Captain Marvel movie had to be turned into The Marvels, with the lead split among three actresses, may indicate that making Ms. Marvel* into Captain Marvel and then making her as unpleasant as humanly possible isn't attracting anyone.

(*Yes, I'm old enough that I remember when Ms. Marvel wasn't a Muslim teen named Kamala Khan).

I think reducing it to sex/gender really hides what's going on, at least in my mind. I can absolutely respect women as agents. What I can't respect is narcissistic attitudes. And of course, not all women. I know plenty of women who are wonderfully good and what they do and maintain a very healthy center. But I will say that I do think that cultural pressures have been creating more "Girlboss" attitudes. And stories that feature those attitudes....no thank you.

while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists

How do you put a female protagonist in a story for men, who occupies a traditional male role? You need a woman who embodies honor/courage/valor/stoicism/risk taking in the face of immediate personal danger and you also need a damn good reason why it’s a woman doing the job.

We don’t see this in modern fiction (targeting men) because the characters are pretty universally terribly written. I imagine it’s at least partially due to the authors being outright inimical to the role and it’s requirements (except as a vehicle for empowerment) and their would be audience alike.

It’s not impressive or engaging when woman does classic man thing better than all of the doubting men, overcoming the inevitably evil male antagonist, but that seems to be the only plot now. I’ll point out it’s the opposite of empowering, too.

Give me more Ripley! She isn’t a paragon of female empowerment who breaks the glass ceiling through a newly learned sense of self worth and boss bitch power. (Disregarding the allegory of the horror of childbirth…) she deliberately faces down a terrifyingly gruesome death to protect a girl from the same because everyone else is already dead.

I’d gladly watch more (T1/2) Sarah Connors, Buffy, Scully, or even Margot Hanson for a contemporary reference.

Buffy

How much agency did Buffy have? She didn't choose to be the slayer, nor was she the 'brains' of the operation.

How do you put a female protagonist in a story

Give her visions from God, Jeanne d’Arc style.

I don’t disagree too much. On the side of agency and moral worth, Buffy embraces her destiny and personal responsibility to her own detriment. She takes on raising her sister, and later fighting a war. I think we should also cut her slack for being a teenager.

Buffy is compelling in the Vonnegut sense of character writing, where the universe continually throws awful stuff at her and she is just going along for the ride.

How much agency did Buffy have? She didn't choose to be the slayer, nor was she the 'brains' of the operation.

By this standard any superhero with innate powers may be said to not have agency?

How much agency can someone called by destiny to save the world from evil with their supernatural powers have?

The universe inhabited by many superheroes with innate powers often don't allow for much agency. That these characters as portrayed also often lack dimension doesn't help.

Non-powered superheroes frequently have more agency, Batman, Ironman. They use their wealth and intellect.

Accurately. Or at least sort of. Superheroes are considered children's entertainment because they fly so close to the Mary Sue, they are simplified down to base archetypes and motivations to tell stories without the additional complications of logic and reality and the like. Buffy was built off the superhero mold, and as a result she lacks the complexity of a more human character. But that is by design, and traits she lacks are made up for by her ensemble, or are used to further the story.

That's just me waffling though, I agree AvocadoPanic is mistaken here. They are making the same mistake a lot of critics have been making over the past two decades, which is sort of like the use mention distinction - yeah Buffy doesn't have any agency, she's a fictional character. Her characteristics were given to her by a man, namely Joss Whedon. But inside the show she has plenty of agency. That's where it matters.

For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists.

The first part doesn't seem true to me, or else why the continual complaining about representation? If they actually are capable of empathising with people unlike them, why should it matter so furiously?

But it's generally hard to think of good examples of female characters occupying much mindshare among men.

The answer to that is that most modern female characters are written absolutely terribly. But go back a bit and there's Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, Samus Aran, Ellen Ripley, Lightning Farron... We used to have good female characters, until they were either ruined or replaced with girlbosses whose only flaw is that they can't see how awesome they are.

The first part doesn't seem true to me, or else why the continual complaining about representation?

Because id-pol (be it of the woke left or dissedent right variety) is about socially atomized urbanites latching onto superficialities precisely because the lack both a proper ethnic religious or cultural identity, and the empathy to feel like part of a community.

until they were either ruined or replaced with girlbosses whose only flaw is that they can't see how awesome they are.

If we're going to speak about failing at cross-sex mind-reading the fact that girlbosses - who are basically an inversion of the male role - come across as more defensive and mean-spirited than the average male hero says something about how these writers think men see their heroes.

I don't think I've ever gone to a Tom Cruise movie to see him upstage some woman (or women as a class) by rescuing her or being the competent hero.

It isn't just one side failing to read the other.

When I read men’s opinions on women and interactions with women it gives me this disgusting skin crawling feeling all over that makes me want to puke. I wish I was born a lesbian.

Ha, this is such a female way to write. If a guy wrote “when I read women’s opinions on men and interactions with men it gives me this disgusting skin crawling feeling all over that makes me want to puke. I wish I was born gay” he’d come across as a histrionic fruit-cake and would get mocked into the shadow realm for being an incel instead of receiving 200 upvotes.

I imagine part of that woman’s dramatic reaction was motivated by OP writing about women like they’re objects that can be fumbled, and not acknowledging women as Wonderful, agentic girl-bosses. However, women are incredibly passive in dating and courtship, especially in the early game, so it’s understandable for men to metaphorise them as inanimate objects that can be fumbled away like a crappy gather or sloppy behind-the-back-pass. Sometimes a man has been James, sometimes he’s been Curry, sometimes he’s been Thompson looking exasperated while a wingman botches a group approach or double date.

Men need to do the approaching, lead the interactions, drive the conversations, perform the monkey-dancing and court-jestering, hold court if necessary, navigate any shit tests, figure out when/how to make the first move, make the first move, and figure out how to seal the deal from there. Women just exist and follow or not. For men, picking-up and/or dating women is like going on job interviews and conducting escort missions; whereas for women getting picked-up and/or dating men is like shopping and going on guided tours.

Online women like to prattle on about emotional labor and so forth, but the efforts of men when it comes to dating and courtship are completely invisible to them. Romance and courtship are things that Just Happen to women like Acts of God. Yet many of them enjoy shaming and mocking men for perceived dating ineptitudes as if they were petty Monday Morning Quarterbacks, just like they’ll pin white feathers on alleged draft-dodgers and laugh at men running to escape the draft. As Norah Vincent remarked in Self Made Man:

Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist... I disliked [women's] superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even successes unbearably humiliating.

Women certainly have ones that got away (cue the Katy Perry song), but they generally don’t have ones that they think of having fumbled away. In contrast, just reading the words "the haunting feeling of fumbling a 10/10" was a cognito-hazard; I got a pit in my stomach while the memories of past fumbles flash-flooded across my mind.

In the romance novels most popular among women, the female protagonists are passive, hypoagentic damsels in distress to be swept off their feet by an active, hyperagentic suitor. Sometimes there are even two such suitors for a Let’s You and Him fight scenario.

I don’t think men are fundamentally disinterested in female protagonists. Ripley in the Alien and Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider franchises come to mind, as female protagonists that are more popular among men than among women. Even brutish, cynical wrong-thinkers like me have contentedly watched the entirety of Love and Death. However, men don’t like getting lectured about #GirlPower in what should be entertainment, from Marvel girl-bosses assembling for a pose-down to an X-Men Mystique walk-off of “by the way, the women are always saving the men around here. You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.” All while the actress has photos floating around of her on her knees getting facialed.

Both men and women are more concerned for the safety and well-being of girls and women in a movie or television series, just as they are for girls and women in real life. It’s no coincidence that popular works like 28 Days Later, World War Z, The Last of Us, Station 11 have the protection of daughters/daughter-figures as plot points to keep the emotional stakes high for the viewer. A girl/young woman dying gruesomely is/would be much more of an ”oh shit” moment than a boy/young man doing so.

Nor do I think men are inherently incapable of admiring women for their achievements. It’s not like Cathie Wood's lacking in simps and fan-boys. Neither is Elizabeth Holmes, for that matter—strong, independent #GirlBoss when winning; damsel in distress when getting charged with fraud. If anything, women garner greater male (and female) admiration for a given level of achievement than men do.

There’s some apex fallacy here. Men don’t generally admire women for their achievements, because they don’t generally admire other men for their achievements either. The Don Draper I-don’t-think-about-you-at-all is the default.

When men admire the achievements of other men, it’s often in the realm of right-tailed achievements in science, mathematics, business, or sports, where women are usually absent. Given greater male variability in interests and ability, there are far fewer female Terence Taos, Elon Musks, or Jeff Bezos’s; the Forbes list of top 10 female billionaires is a who’s who of widows, heiresses, and divorcees (including MacKenzie). It’s even more sensible that men generally don't admire female athletes, as they generally don't admire random high school boys athletes, who are often better than professional women. It’d be weird as hell if grown men admired random high school boys athletes, Foxcatcher vibes but worse (it’s already pretty weird how many grown men admire and have parasocial relationships with their favorite professional athletes/teams, wearing other men’s names on their backs and cheering their performances).

Yet, despite the relative lack of right-tailed female achievement in sciences, mathematics, business—even aided by the tailwind of affirmative action—and female professional athletes being worse than high school boys, men are constantly bombarded by girl-power propaganda in media and entertainment, schools and workplaces. So it’s natural if some annoyance results, especially when men's experiences in romantic contexts suggest that women are not, in fact, strong independent hyperagentic girl-bosses (more like the opposite).

There’s some apex fallacy here. Men don’t generally admire women for their achievements, because they don’t generally admire other men for their achievements either. The Don Draper I-don’t-think-about-you-at-all is the default.

A rare point of agreement. When women do right-tail well (say Margaret Thatcher), they have plenty of men and women admirers. I don’t think this is really a strongly gendered thing, most people just aren’t very impressive.

Ha, this is such a female way to write. If a guy wrote “when I read women’s opinions on men and interactions with men it gives me this disgusting skin crawling feeling all over that makes me want to puke. I wish I was born gay” he’d come across as a histrionic fruit-cake and would get mocked into the shadow realm for being an incel instead of receiving 200 upvotes.

When I read women's opinions on men and interactions with men it makes me see red that makes me want to follow in Ted Bundy's footsteps. I wish I was born gay.

I wish I was born gay.

Somehow I read your nickname as "adjective born noun"

There are two things I miss from Reddit here: comment counts on collapsed threads, and autogenerated throwaway names.

Cordelia Naismith? Almost any woman in the Vorkosigan Saga is well written.

But since right now I am pretty annoyed by the Ironwood part of the GoW Ragnarok - Angrboda is just terrible. She beats Loki in no less than 3 scripted occasions. A scripted race, a scripted stone tossing contest, a scripted moment where she refuses Lokis help to climb a wall and does some parkour, and her main rant is how she disappears from the prophecy ... and 10 minutes later when some of the evilest things in the universe is about to happen - she is trying to stop it not with righteousness but with "I am not sure but I have ignored it for too long and we can't hide forever" and suddenly she is likeable and relatable. It feels as if those two parts are written by different teams with different ideas about the character.

Do women admire one another for their martial achievements?

As others have already mentioned, there are a decent number of examples of female agents from the 90s and early 00s, even up to Rogue One. These tend to be fairly masculine movies, appealing more to men. Women like them about as much as if the protagonist were male. In a certain sense, they might as well be male.

Meanwhile, the prototypical female story by a woman, appealing to women, is Pride and Predjudice. The heroine most uncover the true characters and motivations of the men in the story. It doesn’t matter all that much which men have served in the military and defeated their nations foes. In Persuasion it matters for status, but not who he has killed or under what circumstances. It matters a great deal whether the man will treat his wife well, be faithful, provide a good living, be respectable according to social norms, and so on. She must figure this out, and choose wisely. They are, to some extent, morality plays. Men do read, for instance, Persuasion, and admire it for its subtlety and deep observation.

Female archetypes are different from male, and perhaps should be different, and the current trend of populating action movies with what amount to trans men is silly. The motherly feminine archetypal character is speaking wisdom and weaving cloth, and that is alright. I especially love the great grandmother in The Princess and the Goblins, and would like to see more of that, rather than yet another woman fighter. Civilizations need wisdom and cloth and social norms as much as they need to repel the invaders or solve the mystery or Do Science.

ho are the female counterparts to Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, popular among both boys and girls (and whose roles and stories do not particularly depend on their masculinity)?

Sailor Moon.

rose stabs the ground

It is me, Tuxedo Kamen, coming to remind you that I save Sailor Moon in 99% of the episodes.

This isn't true.

Is that how it works? That’s a bit sad.

I guess maybe Precure is different?

I think a big part of it is how little agency most stories tend to give women, and how little they are shown to struggle and grow. To be blunt, most of them aren’t even written as people at least in genre fiction. Rey makes very few actual decisions in Star Wars. She doesn’t. Poe stands up to the general (I can’t think of her name), willing to be put in the brig to challenge a poor leader. Rey more or less was carried along by the plot, and was simply gifted the powers she’d need exactly when she’d need them. Even in Hunger Games, Katniss makes no real decisions, they simply don’t come up. She makes no special efforts to win hearts of the audience before the games. Her people did that for her. They tell her what to say and do, and she follows directions. She doesn’t decide not to kill, she just sort of never has it come up where she’s in a position to kill somebody except in self defense. Even Hermione it’s more of a case where she happens to have just read a book and the book tells her what to do so she does it.

Male characters are written with challenges to overcome and often must work very hard to learn to overcome them. They’re allowed to not know, they’re forced to figure it out on their own, and they absolutely are deciding on what to to and how to do it.

Rey more or less was carried along by the plot, and was simply gifted the powers she’d need exactly when she’d need them...Male characters are written with challenges to overcome and often must work very hard to learn to overcome them. They’re allowed to not know, they’re forced to figure it out on their own, and they absolutely are deciding on what to to and how to do it.

You say that like it isn't the result of the girlboss trend? It is girlboss feminist characters who start with all of the tools, based on the idea that the only thing really wrong with women is that men are holding them back (see Captain Marvel for the most prominent recent example).

So they can't just be flawed, it has to be everyone else's fault.

Even in Hunger Games, Katniss makes no real decisions, they simply don’t come up.

I've only seen the movies, but Katniss' role as a symbol for a rebellion much greater than herself always seemed to be the point. She makes choices (especially in the final movie where she has to act on her own or turn against supposed allies) but the entire point is that her choices are constrained by the tyrannical system she's in.

Even when she is acting as a lightning rod for the resistance she's sort of forced into a particular mold and one of the plot points is how constricting it is (it's actually a pretty funny and interesting look at manufacturing propaganda and the use of symbols and celebrities)

And she does do things, and they do matter. Deciding to (pretend) kill herself and Peta- the fact that this is the closest thing to rebellion she can manage is again just reinforcing the point above - not only wins them the games but makes her into said symbol of resistance despite her wishes cause she knows it puts everyone she loves at risk.

Even Hermione it’s more of a case where she happens to have just read a book and the book tells her what to do so she does it.

I'm sorry. This just seems like grasping for straws now. Hermione, especially in the films, does a lot that others can't do even though they have access to the same books. You've basically been presented with a genius female character and are writing her off cause...she reads before making her plans?

Another way to put it is: Hermione is the most studious and skilled member of the group and is basically the required support for most of their schemes coming close to succeeding - from independently figuring out the Basilisk's nature, to making polyjuice potion to setting up Dumbledore's Army (including her spiteful little revenge on anyone who tattled about it). She also goes into business for herself on crusades that the rest of the cast don't care for (e.g. freedom for house elves).

At worst, she's Q. At best, she's Tony Stark.

I could come up with a much less flattering description of say...Ron's contributions to the group. But no one denies he has agency.

For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists.

I find this to be quite the opposite, personally. I'm always reading books with female protagonists with my wife (most recently mistborn and the Alanna books) that she read when she was younger, and getting into deep conversations with her about them. I grow to really like those books. My wife will consume media with me with male protagonists, but she rarely grows to really internalize it and love it. The only time she ever likes something enough to rewatch it is if it has a female protagonist. I personally blame the feminist movement for putting this mind worm in her to believe that there's something inherently better about female led media.

Misborn is weird. SAnderson does seem to write characters in a manner that is almost entirely devoid of their sexuality. Nothing wrong with that, but Vin could be guy, a girl or an amorphous 4 limbed entity.......and my mistborn experience would have been exactly the same.

Who are the female counterparts to Harry Potter

Harry is totally average, aside that he has -accidentally- a piece of Voldemorts soul. But he is not the best wizard in the world or is the coolest guy ever. It is Longbottom in the end who wielded the sword of Gryffindor, it is Hermione who is most clever, the Weasley family who harbors the resistance.

This is a large exaggeration. Harry is more gifted than Hermione at defense against the dark arts, even after Voldy's soul is gone, as he goes on to become Wizard FBI.

Harry is totally average, aside that he has -accidentally- a piece of Voldemorts soul.

Harry has the most usual quality you'll find in a hero, and the most valued quality in the real world: leadership.

He’s not really a leader though, he’s naturally popular for the same reason, say, the child of an A-list celebrity might be very popular at their school. He’s rich and famous and everyone knows it from the minute he arrives at school. His leadership ability is minimal and until almost the end of the story it’s the adults who are in charge and who order the main characters around.

I think that a lot of this comes down to the fact that modern men living in many European/Anglosphere countries have lived for a decade+ under a system in which women wield a massive amount of power over citizens’ lives, and men can see very clearly the failure modes inherent in the way that women’s psychology interacts with access to power. (A recent and revealing example of which is this brief clip of an interview with Biden’s new pick for Director of the CDC, a textbook demonstration of the catty and supercilious nature of a woman given far more power than she should ever have tasted.)

It may at some point have been possible to believe that women given power under the right circumstances, if thrust into power and forced to perform, might do as well as men. Certainly history contains salient examples of exceptional women - Elizabeth I of England, Boudica, etc. - ably wielding power even under extraordinary pressure. (For a fictional example, many would point to Ellen Ripley from the Alien film series.) However, now that so many men are living under the direct consequences of a feminized power structure - in which even most male officials have to cater to and navigate around female preferences and sensibilities - it’s extremely natural for men to bristle against a regime that is always going to feel on some level like an unnatural imposition.

I will say that young boys, for whom sexual ideation has not yet come to totally dominate their interactions with females, might have an easier time connecting with fictional female characters. I might be shredding some of my already-scarce Dissident Right credibility by admitting that I was a massive Harry Potter fan up into adulthood, and I always found Hermione Granger extremely relatable. She’s exactly the sort of spergy, fastidious, precocious pedant that so many of the commenters on this forum almost certainly were as kids. Of course, now we are confronted with the consequences of living under a political regime controlled by Hermione Grangers - the great majority of whom don’t even have the courtesy to look like Emma Watson while crushing us under the might of the longhouse - and reading the series over again with that life experience makes it far more difficult in hindsight to feel any warmth or empathy toward the character.

A world in which a precocious and hyper-intelligent girl could have her energies directed in a positive direction is certainly desirable; I don’t want Hermione forced to be a housewife, her prodigious mental faculties dulled by menial drudgery. Female scholars and researchers have done wonderful work in the past - see Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin - as have great female artists and writers. What I don’t want is a world where those same women’s political sensibilities come to dominate the cultural production, and consequently the political priorities, of our society. (This is leaving aside discussions of hypergamy, and whether or not by opening up more avenues for women to accrue significant power, resources, and status, we throw reproductive/romantic relations between the sexes into chaos.)

Are societies still ruled predominantly by men much more competent than those ruled (in part) by women? Most of the more disastrous decisions in 20th century western politics (eg. mass immigration) were made by parliaments that were 90%+ men.

So, obviously societies rules by men have their own catastrophic failure modes. History is littered not only with incompetent male rulers, but also men who very competently and effectively executed their vision for society, to the immense detriment of everyone involved because their philosophical premises were rotten. The masculine virtues of course have their corrupted forms, and I would dread living under a regime run by men who embodied those corrupted virtues. (Being sent off to get butchered in some pointless war waged merely to satisfy some red-blooded moron’s bloodlust and pig-headed sense of honor would be a nightmare scenario for me personally.)

Now, when we’re talking about the 20th century, it’s a complicated discussion because in most of the nations you’re talking about, women could vote, and even in the ones where they couldn’t, they were certainly far more emancipated, and their preferences taken far more seriously, than in any previous time in history. That arguably had a massive effect on the political trajectory of the 20th century, even if the people actually tasked with implementing those political preferences were still overwhelmingly male. But, of course, you’re right to point out that it wasn’t female leaders who drove most of the disastrous decisions we’re living under today.

Those are in the past, though, and most men living today didn’t experience life under those regimes firsthand. They have experienced life under the gynocracy, though, so its failure modes and frustrations loom heavily in their minds. And even if male-dominated societies suck in their own ways, female-dominated societies are always going to feel more unnatural, more like an imposition, more difficult to live under, for men, which is whose perspective I was talking about.

Now, when we’re talking about the 20th century, it’s a complicated discussion because in most of the nations you’re talking about, women could vote, and even in the ones where they couldn’t, they were certainly far more emancipated, and their preferences taken far more seriously, than in any previous time in history. That arguably had a massive effect on the political trajectory of the 20th century, even if the people actually tasked with implementing those political preferences were still overwhelmingly male.

Right wing movements came to power without any women voting at all in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia, etc. The notable country that went from being a democracy with full women’s suffrage is Germany (and even there women mostly voted along with the male head of the household), and the NSDAP was the only party to not run female candidates because of their open stance that politics was the domain of men; women’s representation dropped from 37 MPs to 0 under them.

In which country did a fascist party come to power with majority support from women, or really any major attempt to cater to women’s preferences? Most mid-twentieth century right wing parties were pretty explicit about wanting to roll back women’s rights and restore traditional gender roles.

Why are you assuming that fascism was one of the things I had in mind when discussing the disastrous political decisions of the 20th century?

Is that not what you’re referring to with this passage?

History is littered not only with incompetent male rulers, but also men who very competently and effectively executed their vision for society, to the immense detriment of everyone involved because their philosophical premises were rotten. The masculine virtues of course have their corrupted forms, and I would dread living under a regime run by men who embodied those corrupted virtues. (Being sent off to get butchered in some pointless war waged merely to satisfy some red-blooded moron’s bloodlust and pig-headed sense of honor would be a nightmare scenario for me personally.)

A discussion of “the more disastrous decisions in the 20th century” and “pointless wars caused by masculine leaders” that didn’t include fascism would be an odd one indeed. We could certainly add other countries, but ie the Soviet Union of course was no more reliant on women’s support than any other dictatorship from that era.

It seems there are two separate arguments happening at the same time.

I acknowledged that masculine governments have well-documented failure modes, probably the most obvious of which is a cavalier attitude toward war. I even think that it’s fair to point to the one-two punch of the World Wars - one of which it’s reasonable (although more contentious than you might think) to blame primarily on fascism, the other of which has causes so multifarious that it’s impossible to persuasively pin the blame on any one factor or ideology - as the thing which finally totally discredited the old masculine virtues in the minds of many subsequent generations. I don’t know how long it will take, if ever, for the classic God-and-country martial virtues to re-assert themselves in European/Anglosphere countries; certainly the “specter of fascism” cannot continue to look over our national psyches in perpetuity, but it might take a very long time before people’s mental barriers against unadulterated traditional masculine governance erode.

Still, you haven’t yet offered an affirmative defense of feminine governance models. My contention is that most men would be more psychologically comfortable under a macho fascist-adjacent government - even one that led them to fruitless slaughter - than under the soft gynocratic model of governance under which they live now. If your argument is that those same men are stupid to feel that way, and that they ought to be far more willing to give women an honest go at governance for a while, since men fucked it up so badly a century ago, then it’s an argument we can have.

It seems there are two separate arguments happening at the same time.

Yeah, I likely blended the two together through reading rushedly both of your comments.

Still, you haven’t yet offered an affirmative defense of feminine governance models. My contention is that most men would be more psychologically comfortable under a macho fascist-adjacent government - even one that led them to fruitless slaughter - than under the soft gynocratic model of governance under which they live now

Imo it's more than enough to argue that modernity (if you consider it to be run by women, which I don't actually) is a lot better than many of the previous societies we can pick from among. All the women-dominant world needs to be is not demonstrably worse than the alternatives for us to take pause before we assume that rolling back women's political representation would improve things. I'm skeptical of the argument that men would be psychologically healthier under a more masculine, authoritarian government, largely because I've lived in a country like that and can't say particularly that men were thriving more than anyone else. I think that kind of thing sounds a lot cooler in theory than in practice. Even assuming it were true, there are lots of things I don't like about society that I consider a fair trade off for overall modern peace and prosperity. I don't much like the psychological experience of going to work and taking orders from my boss either, but I still conclude the modern economy is probably a net win - others are free to disagree.

To loop back though and address broader left wing changes, I'm also skeptical these can be laid at the feet of women either. To take OP's example of mass immigration, America's most restrictive modern anti-immigration bill was passed shortly after all women in America gained the right to vote, and was only reversed in the 60s by Emmanuel Celler, who was many things but not a feminist, and rather than cater to women's preferences ultimately lost re-election because he explicitly did not do so (ie by loudly and publicly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment).

In fact, it's an oft repeated talking point that one of the longest lasting arguments against women's suffrage was that women were on net considered more conservative than men. This held true in the West till pretty recently, with American women more likely to identify Republican than men until the 60s, only noticeably voting significantly more for Democrats by the 80s and the present day gap being a historical anomaly. And keep in mind that crude party preference also obscures things like high women's support for Bill Clinton in the 90s, a candidate who slashed welfare and regulations, passed the strongest anti-crime legislation in a generation and banned federal recognition of same sex couples. Likewise, European women voted for conservative parties more than men until the 70s and in some places later. To take one salient example from our cousin country across the pond, Thatcher would have lost her election if only men were voting, and English women supported conservatives over labor until 2005.

Women are more left wing than men in the past few decades, but a glance at the recent historical record indicates this is in no way fixed. Today's rightist are skeptical of woman's suffrage making everything woke; a century ago liberals were skeptical of women's suffrage because they thought women would restore the Bourbons to the throne.

If your argument is that those same men are stupid to feel that way, and that they ought to be far more willing to give women an honest go at governance for a while, since men fucked it up so badly a century ago, then it’s an argument we can have.

I don't blame all of the world's problems on men either, nor am I really interested in balancing out past wrongs or whatever; I just need an active argument to draw a line from anyone's liberties to societies' problems. My position is that gender just isn't that important till proven otherwise. There are societies both bad and good, liberal and conservative, across all varying degrees of women's enfranchisement, and their ills or successes usually come from elsewhere.

More comments

Female scholars and researchers have done wonderful work in the past - see Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin

Given the obvious genetic advantages and resulting scientific performance of Pierre and Marie Curie's descendents (only one Nobel prize, but several eminent careers in the third generation despite having only two daughters, one of whom spent her child-bearing years nursing her sick mother and then writing the "authorised" biography after her death), my most heretical opinion about women in STEM is that Marie would have contributed even more to physics if Pierre had managed to keep her barefoot, pregnant and above all not irradiated. WW2 makes it hard to work out the counterfactuals in detail, but I don't see how three of four Curie sons wouldn't change the history of science.

There seems to be a distinction here between individual women and feminine structures. Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, etc were all women, but they operated in structures organized along masculine norms. As such, I don’t think it’s necessary to exclude the Hermione’s from the levers of power, but to require masculine norms in their operation.

I may be naive in thinking the maintenance of such a precarious balance is possible. The referenced women existed in environments where they were a fraction of a percent of the total population. Effective Altruism, despite selecting for women with the most masculine of norms, is succumbing to feminization with only a quarter of survey-takers being women. LessWrong and ACX survey-takers are about 12% female.

Of course, very little of this is actionable, but it’d be interesting to identify the threshold at which it snowballs. As a side note, I agree with Helen Andrews that feminization will be disastrous for the rule of law, so we have that to look forward to. While the influence is already clear, it will do nothing but strengthen.

succumbing to feminism

To save you all the read, there is exactly one example of support this claim: Open Philanthropy publicly expressing concern about sexual harassment after a bad PR incident.

This is both false and uncharitable. The linked article references:

  1. The widespread admonishment of Nick Bostrom among EAs after his comment on factual group differences was leaked

  2. TIME article from disillusioned women in EA making questionable claims of sexual assault (to which the CEO of Open Phil replied, not the organization itself, as you suggest)

  3. Open Phil making donations towards criminal justice causes without any evidential basis for their effectiveness

  4. A highly upvoted post on the EA forum titled “I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.” This post then goes on to critique EA for placing too much emphasis on rationality and not enough on emotion.

  5. Highlights two cause areas (global dysgenic trends and the power laws of crime) that are ignored by EA as taboo.

There are more instances outside the article’s scope that I could list, but figured that captured the main body of issues, and further examples would just be further evidence of these specific trends.

2. TIME article from disillusioned women in EA making questionable claims of sexual assault (to which the CEO of Open Phil replied, not the organization itself, as you suggest)

I didn't really see much of a difference, but I guess I can see how some people could.

1. The widespread admonishment of Nick Bostrom among EAs after his comment on factual group differences was leaked

5. Highlights two cause areas (global dysgenic trends and the power laws of crime) that are ignored by EA as taboo.

A social taboo against talking about HBD is not feminization. It was the de facto state of society well before the rise of modern feminism and woke culture. Take a random sample of men at the gym or in an MMO and start talking about how Black people are genetically inferior and let me know how it goes. HBD is not something all men secretly believe and want to talk about (if not for those pesky women!).

Though while we're on the topic, imo the general state of HBD has been the same since at least 2013 (when I started reading about it) -- basically: "Some of EAs believe in HBD and some EAs are uncomfortable with talking about it, and some EAs support strong social norms against talking about it", which should already seem strikingly different from how its talked about in the normal population.

3. Open Phil making donations towards criminal justice causes without any evidential basis for their effectiveness

Open Philanthropy's funding for criminal justice reform has been significant since at least 2016, went down in 2020 (when George Floyd died), and then separated from OpenPhil in 2021 because they weren't as effective as global health.

As we wrote in 2019, we think the top global aid charities recommended by GiveWell (which we used to be part of and remain closely affiliated with) present an opportunity to give away large amounts of money at higher cost-effectiveness than we can achieve in many programs, including CJR, that seek to benefit citizens of wealthy countries. Accordingly we’re shifting the focus of future grantmaking from our Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio (which CJR has been part of) further towards the types of opportunities outlined in that post — specifically, efforts to improve and save the lives of people internationally (including things like distributing insecticide-treated bednets to prevent the spread of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, and fighting air pollution in South Asia).

-- OpenPhil

Those don't seem like the actions of an ideologically compromised organization.

4. A highly upvoted post on the EA forum titled “I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.” This post then goes on to critique EA for placing too much emphasis on rationality and not enough on emotion.

I'll admit I missed this (my mistake for posting while at the gym). While I don't think "highly upvoted post on a forum" is great evidence (or I'd prove that EA is okay with Bostrom), it should certainly qualify to be included in a "summary of evidence".

To be fair, not all of that is specifically feminism.

I think the requirements for being an interesting and beloved protagonist are actually narrower than those for being respected and admired, and more uniquely at odds with the typical (or stereotypical?) disposition of females of the human species than the latter. For example, I know plenty of female scientists in my field who I respect a great deal for their academic contributions (as teachers, discoverers and systematizers), but a fictional account of their life would be soul-crushingly boring, because they did not primarily get where they are by fighting and winning a well-delineated conflict "fair and square" by force of will and effort. In fact there are, and have always been, beloved female protagonists, whose stories do not force us to suspend our understanding of the human condition: think Joan of Arc, Erin Brockovich or Madoka (the magical girl). I think these are all distinguished by their struggle having a prominent moral dimension, of the kind that I wouldn't go so far as to call unpopular nowadays but certainly outnumbered by easier-to-write "protagonist wants resource, antagonist wants the same resource, only one of them can have it" stories.

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