A thing that's beginning to annoy me

[giandujakiss]

The pop cultural tendency to demonstrate that one female character is "better" than another female character because she rejects traditional female roles/accoutrements. It feels like putting women in an impossible position.



So last night, we learned that Snow White in this 'verse differs from the "traditional" Snow White in that she became a fighter and a bandit. It's unstated, but fairly clear, that this makes her cooler, better, nicer, more suited to the prince, etc., than his actual fiancee, in large part because the fiancee appears to follow female-traditional modes of behavior and dress (I mean, I think the fiancee is supposed to be evil, as well, but it's basically part and parcel)

And I'm finding this frustrating, the implication that Snow White can only be good and deserving of true love and happiness if she fights traditional concepts female comportment and rebels against the messages about proper femininity. It's like, society tells women they have to act in a certain way in order to be good/find love/find happiness/etc, but then any woman who listens to those messages is portrayed as inferior to those who don't. And since, on a meta level, both messages are coming from the same place - i.e., media portrayals - it's doubly annoying. "Here's what you should do, ladies! Except when you shouldn't and are a bad person for listening to us!"

It's not an uncommon contradiction, but for some reason, it particularly bothered me in this episode of OUAT.

Comments

[sohotrightnow]

The pop cultural tendency to demonstrate that one female character is "better" than another female character because she rejects traditional female roles/accoutrements. It feels like putting women in an impossible position.

Oh do not even get me started. This has been annoying me roughly since I was a small child and every adventure/fantasy book I read seemed to involve female heroines who ~weren't like ordinary girls~, and the girls who were traditionally feminine were boring at best and awful at worst. Yes, I get it, the only way a girl can be interesting or worthwhile is if she's a tomboy, thanks pop culture, thanks. I think this is one of the reasons I latched onto BtVS so hard as a teenager; she was one of the few characters I'd ever encountered who wasn't shamed for caring about traditionally "girly" things and was also a totally ass-kicking superhero. Heaven knows that show has plenty of problems, but I'm still incredibly fond of it for giving me that. Ditto Sailor Moon, actually.

[giandujakiss]

I never thought of Buffy that way, but that's a nice point - she could both girly and kickass :-)

[nicole_anell]

It's funny because I was just watching "Halloween" (before the holiday naturally) which might do a lot of this thing -- contrasting normal Slayer Buffy with Weak 19th Century Buffy in her traditional frilly dress. But they did make it blatant that the problem was her dated views and needing a man to protect her, not just being vaguely 'girly'.

[some_stars]

the thing that really kills me--and I totally second sohotrightnow's comments, even though it wasn't quite as much of a hot button for me growing up, at least not consciously--but the thing that I just can't deal with is that these Cool Awesome Unfeminine women are never too butch, you know? They have short hair and they wear pants and show disdain for femme stuff, but they don't have buzzcuts or wear pants that don't show their figure, they wear makeup (even if we're told they don't it's always really obvious) and they shave their legs, they have nice manicures even if their nails aren't painted, they definitely don't wear sports bras. And so on.

And of course none of these things are wrong, or intrinsically good/bad at all--I do most of them, most of my favorite characters do most of them. But there's virtually no representation of women who actually don't partake of traditional femininity, because that would be threatening, whereas a female character who shows contempt for the silly icky girly parts but adheres to the beauty standards is reassuring. It's the tightest possible double bind--adhere to the patriarchy's rules, but pretend to be rejecting them, and punish women who don't pretend and women who actually reject them.

[giandujakiss]

Oh, that's totally true - because dollars to donuts if she actually does have a haircut or clothes that don't show her off to be pretty in traditionally feminine ways, there will be a makeover before the story's over.

I recall something that horrifying in the Hilary Swank Karate Kid, actually. She was a tomboy and she was taught karate like the male karate kids, but the moment when Mr. Miyagi was his most proud, the moment of greatest triumph? When she showed up all dolled up in a white dress for prom (or homecoming, or whatever it was). And it's not like she was unattractive before - it's just how the trope plays out.

[loligo]

But there's virtually no representation of women who actually don't partake of traditional femininity, because that would be threatening, whereas a female character who shows contempt for the silly icky girly parts but adheres to the beauty standards is reassuring. It's the tightest possible double bind--adhere to the patriarchy's rules, but pretend to be rejecting them, and punish women who don't pretend and women who actually reject them.

Yes, THIS.

[sapote]

Yeah, it's the whole effortless perfection thing again, isn't it? I suspect it's part of the whole deal where women are supposed to collude in concealing that labor goes into feminine self-presentation; people want to genuinely believe that all women are naturally slight and have mostly-hairless bodies, high-contrast lips and eyes, head-hair that is very different from men's head hair, etc. Even media which celebrates women who take on masculine roles or attributes or behaviors is still very invested in presenting men and women as fundamentally entirely different beings. Women who make that labor visible and women who don't do it at all might possibly be the same kind of threat to the idea that This Is Just How Women Are.

[giandujakiss]

That's a great point, actually - women are supposed to look a certain way, but not actually care about any of the things that make looking that way possible.

[rydra_wong]

people want to genuinely believe that all women are naturally slight and have mostly-hairless bodies, high-contrast lips and eyes, head-hair that is very different from men's head hair, etc.

Yep. And the "tomboy" who has all this "naturally" is contrasted with the femme who is putting visible work into appearing feminine (usually presented in terms of obsession with make-up! shopping! frilly dresses!), which makes her "manipulative". She's trying to attract a man, so she must be weak and devious!

Whereas the "tomboy" meets conventional beauty standards without trying, and is attractive without having the intent or active desire to attract a man. This makes her "independent," but also less threatening in certain ways.

[sapote]

Yeah, I guess it preserves that all-important impression of sexual passivity/receptivity/naivete? I tend to get hung up on the level where it's incredibly threatening to the way we view gender to acknowledge that women have to get up in the morning and make feminine happen, though. And the people we tend to base "feminine" on tend to be people who put in two solid hours of work a day. But in general I find that never underestimating how important female sexual naivete is to people tends to lead me in the right direction for getting my head around gender behavior...

[giandujakiss]

I read an article ... somewhere ... and it was about how female actresses, when they're interviewed these days, put on a show about how much they're eating. Like, they'll call attention to their hearty appetites to the interviewer, and eat very high calorie meals. The writer of the article attributed this to some kind of sexual thing - like, the actresses thought that there was a sexual signal in showing their hearty appetites. Whereas for me, it was pretty obvious that the actresses were trying to create the impression that they were effortlessly rail-thin - partly due to the "effortless beauty" myth, and partly (although this is part of the same thing) to defuse general criticisms that standards for female beauty are unrealistic and force girls into starvation diets.

[sapote]

I imagine it's probably all bundled together somehow, yeah? Like, look, my relationship with my body really is unmediated and unregulated! This is just the way I am! I'm totally not faking any of this! This is also my real hair and my real complexion!

I feel genuinely bad for female actresses, because in order to get really well-paid work they have to monitor and regulate their bodies extremely carefully - even though that has nothing to do with their ability to act - and if they're successful then their bodies are subject to constant public scrutiny, but then as part of that scrutiny their bodies are blamed for causing everyone else psychological problems. It's a mess. All of us probably have some degree of getting up and doing feminine that we do in order to be economically and socially successful, but I cannot imagine having to do it at that level.

[rydra_wong]

I have seen mention of that as a dating thing in recent decades: "save up" your calories (because of course you're presumed to be on a diet) for a date, so you can eat a big meal and show that you're effortlessly thin and cool, not one of those girls who obsesses about calories and only eats salad.

With actresses, I imagine there's the extra factor that very thin women (which almost all leading TV/movie actresses are) are often presumed to have eating disorders, and there's the desire to defend yourself against the perception that you have a mental illness (when it isn't true -- and often also when it is).

[brownbetty]

And, I know this is late to the party, the other thing this is contrasted with is the transwoman who makes femme happen, so to speak. This is always constructed as somehow both 'deceptive' and 'unnatural' of her. How dare she acknowledge that femininity isn't a gift given to every girl at birth by a fairy godmother.

[jadelennox]

*nod* It's really common in children's / YA historical fiction and fantasy. Set up a world with uneven gender roles, and you just know the villainous women and girls will be the ones who like hair ribbons. (Nellie Olsen vs Laura Ingalls, which just goes to show how old that trope is!)

[sapote]

It took me years and quite a lot of reading for me to work out that all those medieval women who were presented in YA novels as stupid for sewing all day were a key part of the economy and keeping everyone from dying in the snow. I don't know when everyone decided that the typical economic and social contributions of half the world should be presented as worthless in YA fiction? But that definitely happened somehow. (But then Sir Thomas More's Utopia also suggests - in 1519 - that women have been completely wasting their time in idleness and that in a perfect world they would be doing real work - maybe this says something about the historical situation of people who write books.)

[theheartcameout]

were a key part of the economy and keeping everyone from dying in the snow.

Uh, wow, I had not worked that out. Lightbulb! Thank you.

[sapote]

In fairness I do think books tend to dwell on embellishments like embroidery and tapestry, but, I mean, if a huge part of your role in life is to be the textile industry for your household I think I too would find ways to get some self-expression in there.

[some_stars]

Oh, this just made something click for me--possibly--in those stories, of which I have read so many, the heroine is always contemptuous of the other girls because they want to sew all day, they're content to do it. There's this deep erasure of anything women do as something that needs to be done, of any sense of women having duties and responsibilities. Things women do are frivolous, because women do them, because women enjoy frivolous things. You get something quite similar about those other girls who only want to raise children and cook and clean (the whole idea of the housewife as figure of contempt because she's supposedly satisfied, even thrilled by these things--or else why would she or anyone do them).

I don't know, this probably makes no sense, but it's sort of closing a gap for me between "devaluing things women do" and "general contempt for women who do them." Not just because the things are devalued but because the women clearly only do them because they like those things above all else. And now it's not making sense again, and probably just restating your comment at excessive length. Well, I will post anyway. *g*

[sapote]

Your comment made lots of sense and I enjoyed it :D

I did my undergraduate fieldwork in an area where people still largely practiced subsistence agriculture, and I was amazed at the biases I didn't know I had about women's work. In a subsistence farm setting, it absolutely takes a large fraction of the population working in the house all day long to take plants and turn them into food and achieve some kind of break-even point for cleanliness. Much like if no one farmed, everyone would starve, if no one cooked, everyone would starve. Stephanie Coontz has written about how Americans started treating homemaking as a choice at the point where the replacement value of homemaking was less than many middle-class women's earning potential. I think maybe we do ourselves a disservice in acting like what happened was that ideological conviction made housework unnecessary sometime in the 70s. What happened was that economics made many women added paid work to unpaid work and kept doing the unpaid work...

[sapote]

ugh, please ignore grammar error. Some day I will be able to edit comments again!

[ilthit]

I'd expect that in Nellie Olsen's case it was supposed to be a lesson about how it's bad to be vain. Different times.

[amadi]

Not just vain, but spoiled. The Nellie vs. Laura dichotomy was all about arrogant child of privilege vs. wholesome child of the earth.

[ilthit]

If they'd gone the other way, they would have ended up looking like they think only girls who DO follow the traditional model of femininity are deserving of love/the prince. We certainly have plenty of those stories, too.

[giandujakiss]

The difference in OUAT is that it wasn't simply that Snow was tomboyish - it was that the tomboy was specifically contrasted with the femme to make the point that the femme was inferior. They could have made Snow a tomboy without that extra dig at women for their gender presentation.

[ilthit]

Fantastic commentary in the replies here!

[sasha_feather]

A good movie to watch that does the exact opposite is Legally Blonde. Here is my post about how awesome it is.

[giandujakiss]

Hee, I've always enjoyed Legally Blonde!

[kore]

This is such great commentary I wish I could add something...*cough cough* flu gack. Discussions like these make me so happy LJ/DW is here.

[acari]

Oh yes. There's a German film I have a love/hate relationship with. It's of the girl-disguised-as-boy kind. It's called "Girls are the better boys" but when you step back and look at it the message is actually 'this girl is the better girl because she doesn't act like a girl'.

They do the same with the romance. Boy falls in love with the girl while she is still disguised, he finally decides 'so what, I like him and kisses him/her in front of everyone'. It is all super-adorable and sweet until you step back and look at how the actual gay character in the story is treated. He is a creep. It's okay to be gay (unless you really are gay). On the surface the film is funny and adorable, but the undercurrents are so, so ugly.

[giandujakiss]

Yuck - I have to admit, girl pretends to be boy, boy is confused and decides to embrace what he thinks is his gayness, happens to be a guilty pleasure of mine - but yeah, it's not going to work as well if actual gayness is treated that badly. And certainly not if the suggestion is that the virtuousness of women is assessed according to their gender presentation - whatever that presentation might be.