intelligent woman, inferior chick
7 Jan 2011 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouAwhile back I posted about damselfied action girls, and several comments protested my exclusion of non-fighting female characters in the cited animanga. The counter-argument was that although the female characters were not as strong as the male characters (physically, martially), the female characters contributed in other ways. Then, and now, I don't disagree, but I still think such an argument borders on disingenuous if taken in light of a story's embedded standards.
The majority of stories -- in any format, from nearly every culture, at least from what I've seen, read, and researched -- revolve around male characters. It takes a pickax and night goggles to find the exceptions that pass the Bechdel Test, and that's not exactly a really high standard. It's just taken as a given that the center of a story will be the male protagonist. Either he's the hero, right-up, to get the focus, or he's the woman's objective (and therefore becomes the focus) -- even if, in the latter case, the story is predominantly through the woman's point of view. Her perspective is, more likely than not, going to be fixed on the male character/love interest, and that means the male character remains effectively in the center of the viewing screen. Hell, he'll probably be her main topic of conversation even when he's not on-screen.
That's a duh to most women viewers, I think (and if it's not a duh, or comes as a surprise, you may be reading the wrong journal) but it means that the default is to judge secondary/female characters within a framework, or against a standard, of that main male protagonist. Thus while it may be true that women in Naruto or Bleach do contribute in some way to plot, development, or general support, they're still inferior when measured against what makes the hero so great.
If the hero's main qualification (to be declared/considered the hero) is that he's a strong fighter, the women around him may be savvy, sharp, and wildly successful at whatever they do... but they're inferior when measured against the story's criteria for "what makes the main character be the main character". For a story that posits the hero (or love interest) is worthy of this singular attention -- from the narrative or from the main female protagonist -- by virtue of some quality, more likely than not, the female character will have less of that quality in comparison, and in some cases, may even lack it altogether.
I only just realized this as I've begun watching more East Asian dramas, where there is a greater likelihood (especially in Taiwanese, Thai, and Chinese dramas, at least what I've seen so far) that the female lead will have some ass-kicking skills. In some cases, she's actually a better fighter than the male lead. It's when I analyze what's supposed to set the hero apart that I realize: the more a story emphasizes the woman's fighting skills, the more likely it is that what sets the hero apart isn't his fighting prowess but his mental prowess.
Thus, it's the flip side of Naruto and its "smart girls, bad fighters". Where the hero/male prowess is predominantly defined by intelligence, knowledge, or worldly experience, either the narrative or the other characters (possibly including the male lead) considers the female characters as less-intelligent, even outright stupid. The story sets its value-priority on the hero's brain, not his brawn... which means there's plenty of room to be brawny, for the female, but little room to be brainy. The hero's already gotten first and second shares of that quality.
To throw this in a positive light, stories do tend to use opposites or at least contrasts, especially in buddy and romance stories (the similarity often being that it's a story of two characters learning to work, live, or love, as a partnership). If one-half is worldly-wise, the partner is a wide-eyed innocent. If one-half has reams of knowledge in his head (book-smart), the other may be book-dumb. If one is a brilliant problem-solver, s/he will forget to pay the electricity bill, and the partner will probably be the practical one who knows lots of concrete, everyday facts, and does the reminding about regular showers and the need for soap.
These contrasts are subtly (or not so subtly) anti-intellectual, especially in Western media-examples; the audience stand-in is the book-dumb character, whose commonsense (problem-solving skills) often shows up the overly elaborate or excessively complex thought processes of the egghead partner. That's what I've seen used plenty in buddy/male-bonding stories where the underlying assumption is that opposites attract -- and work best together, for offsetting each others' flaws. In romance or romantic sub-plots, though, this anti-intellectual message is twisted away from being a critique of the more-intelligent character. Instead, the female character's mental skills exist solely to complement the male character, to add onto the resources at his command, rather than highlight his lack.
Really, the stupid (read: less or differently intelligent) female character may be a love interest, comedic relief, or cardboard secondary character, but in this aspect, she's little more than a plot device. She's no competition for the hero-role, and sometimes is dumbed-down even further just to make the hero look even more smarted-up. It's when the hero can't solve a problem without making some kind of mind-reading intuitive leap that the author has the stupid girl can step in and provide the clues under the cloak of 'feminine intuition'.
What was anti-intellectual becomes: "girls don't need to be extra-smart; they only need just enough common-sense to help their man". Or, for the positive spin: "girls have that feminine intuition and without them contributing that, men would be lost". Thus, she can otherwise be relatively stupid, and still provide something (for the hero) towards the story-resolution.
In short, the female character's inferior/different intelligence exists for the service of the more intelligent/knowledgeable male character.
Even in stories with the classic dumb chick stereotype (blonde or not), I find it intriguing that (compared to the same stereotype as deployed in the East Asian dramas I've been watching) that the so-called dumb chick still usually contributes at some point. It's probably going to be a Dumbass Has A Point moment, but try to think of some concrete examples. All the ones I can think of, the delivered point is delivered to, and for, the hero (or the main heroine to then relay and/or use with the hero).
[Note: I find it rather odd that nearly all of the examples on the TVTropes page are for instances where a usually-dimwitted male character has a dumbass-has-a-point moment. Are all female instances listed elsewhere? Or is the 'stupid-girl, rare-insight' setup so normalized/accepted, that it's not taken as a television trope but as a reflection of everyday reality and therefore not worth mentioning or noticing? Why is it only worth noting when it's a male stupid character with an occasional brilliance, but not the reverse?]
This is probably totally giving away my generational age, but I recall noticing even as a kid how it worked on Three's Company. The setup was entirely for humor, though I've seen it echoed in more serious dramas. Everyone is facing an apparently unsolvable crisis, and Chrissy (the blonde) suddenly pipes up with an idea. The rest of the cast is skeptical but gives her the floor, whereupon she launches into some convoluted non-linear near-abstract-intuitively explanation either of what's going on, or how to solve what's going on. Naturally, her listeners end up baffled and even more confused, and much of the time Chrissy herself would then get confused (although that seemed to me, as a kid-viewer) because she was assuming that their smartness meant they could follow, and if they couldn't, that this was a sign that her own stupidity had been the cause of the confusion, not their inability to handle idiosyncratic reasoning.
(And this in turn is probably saying a lot about my own brain, because I always found the convoluted, played-for-laughs 'dumb blonde' explanations to make perfect sense. This didn't exactly help my insecurities, to know that stating such reasoning-methods out loud would confuse people -- or worse, get you labeled as stupid.)
There are two things going on, with this kind of set-up. The first is that the information or solution (that Chrissy processes or suggests) is never contributed for her own benefit; the only ones who benefit from her random illogical insights are the active/dominant characters in the sitcom. Like the female protagonist who comes up with an idea and immediately tells the hero so he can deal with it, Chrissy's ideas (which always had insight, if not practical application) were presented as something she was handing over for someone else to implement/use.
The second may count as an unfortunate implication, but possibly only noticeable to viewers with equally idiosyncratic reasoning styles: the message that only linear, deductive/inductive, reasoning is "smart". To use abductive, or just highly intuitive, reasoning gets classed as "dumb", or "ditzy", or some other negative. It's actually pretty common (given that the TVTropes page is barely the iceberg tip when it comes to the trope's age and examples) to have brilliant insights coming out of the mouth of a character otherwise treated as expendable or insignificant in the mental skills category. Partly, I think, it's the irony/humor of stupid suddenly showing signs of smart, and partly it's riffing off the old adage of "out of the mouths of babes": the one with the least knowledge suddenly showing the most wisdom.
Any humor value doesn't change the fact that if the babe is not a literal child, the babe is a fully-grown woman. Putting adult female characters in the same plot-serving category as knee-grabber children strikes me as an uncomfortable -- and massively sexist -- implication. Flipping the trope to make it a male character who suddenly has a brilliant thought... isn't exactly much better. (Especially when such examples are used to justify the continued use in re female 'ditzy' characters.)
Yet at the same time, I can't help but be reminded of something I read recently, in Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media by Susan J. Douglas. The author works her way through media representations of fictional characters, of feminism itself, of feminist leaders, and even gets into some fascinating history as concerns the ERA (for that, and the final chapter, "I'm not a feminist, but...", are alone worth finding the book and reading... very, very enlightening and thought-provoking).
Along the way, Douglas tackles the subversions and messages behind shows like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners and The Burns and Allen Show, the backlash and double standard (between onscreen housewives and viewing housewives) for the era of the Ozzie & Harriet and Leave it to Beaver decade... and then steps forward to admit she, like many of her peers, couldn't help but love to watch Charlie's Angels. That may sound like a bizarre segue, but I think it has application here -- and application in terms of the counter-arguments for my post on damselfied action girls.
I could summarize, but hell, the book's right here, so I'll quote some at you. First, Douglas lays out that there a lot of reasons not to watch Charlie's Angels (let alone actually enjoy it).
If you're not familiar with the premise, the show lays it out in its voiceover before the theme/opening kicks in. Charlie narrates, speaking of three young women had entered the police academy with big dreams, only to end up stuck in the usual dead-end jobs offered to young female rookies. Clerical work, serving coffee to detectives, stints as crossing guards. He's very much a benevolent patriarch, smugly declaring he took them away (read: saved them) from all that, and set them to undercover work.
The show, Douglas comments, was "escapist rot of the first order, combining plots a three-year-old could follow with plenty of cheesecake." Which sounds pretty worthless until you consider the specific, unchanging ingredient in every episode, where the Angels would go undercover to protect a lower-class girl from some kind of exploitation or abuse.
What Douglas argues later -- and for which Charlie's Angels acts as one pop-culturally significant example -- is that women viewers have had plenty of experience (since before the first television or movies, really) in picking and choosing the messages, and values, we take away from any story. Finding positive value in a show like Charlie's Angels proves that women are quite capable of pulling out what they want and leaving the rest behind, in learning to "re-hear" stories into something powerful and empowering. And just because I think this needs stating definitively, more from Douglas:
In this light, Azuma's Database Animals aren't really all that phenomenal, if you set aside the technology. What makes the otaku differ is that combining technology (online databases) with consumerism has allowed the otaku greater influence over the market's supplies and specifics, but the underlying action by the otaku is nearly identical, I think, to what women audiences have been doing all along. Two from column A, one from column B, and ignore that ending in favor of a self-created or self-envisioned ending or premise or whatever.
Cobbling together a more positive/beneficial story out of an existing story may have shades of post-modernism, but I think it predates post-modernism, because it's a trait shared by any oppressed group when trying to adapt the majority/dominant group's stories into something less patronizing and more palatable. In that respect, no, I don't have an issue at all with highlighting or emphasizing Sakura's role as Intelligent Girl in Naruto, or arguing that if you look at this, but retcon this, and downplay that, and maybe also ignore the filler stretch (or whatever), then the female characters in D.Gray-Man or Code Geass or Gundam are actually pretty cool.
That kind of reader on-the-fly revision is a fine old tradition. I just wish the tradition were no longer necessary. Which, really, is ending up far away from where I intended, but that's what drafts are for. I'll just pick back up again in the next post, because I'm not done yet.
The majority of stories -- in any format, from nearly every culture, at least from what I've seen, read, and researched -- revolve around male characters. It takes a pickax and night goggles to find the exceptions that pass the Bechdel Test, and that's not exactly a really high standard. It's just taken as a given that the center of a story will be the male protagonist. Either he's the hero, right-up, to get the focus, or he's the woman's objective (and therefore becomes the focus) -- even if, in the latter case, the story is predominantly through the woman's point of view. Her perspective is, more likely than not, going to be fixed on the male character/love interest, and that means the male character remains effectively in the center of the viewing screen. Hell, he'll probably be her main topic of conversation even when he's not on-screen.
That's a duh to most women viewers, I think (and if it's not a duh, or comes as a surprise, you may be reading the wrong journal) but it means that the default is to judge secondary/female characters within a framework, or against a standard, of that main male protagonist. Thus while it may be true that women in Naruto or Bleach do contribute in some way to plot, development, or general support, they're still inferior when measured against what makes the hero so great.
If the hero's main qualification (to be declared/considered the hero) is that he's a strong fighter, the women around him may be savvy, sharp, and wildly successful at whatever they do... but they're inferior when measured against the story's criteria for "what makes the main character be the main character". For a story that posits the hero (or love interest) is worthy of this singular attention -- from the narrative or from the main female protagonist -- by virtue of some quality, more likely than not, the female character will have less of that quality in comparison, and in some cases, may even lack it altogether.
I only just realized this as I've begun watching more East Asian dramas, where there is a greater likelihood (especially in Taiwanese, Thai, and Chinese dramas, at least what I've seen so far) that the female lead will have some ass-kicking skills. In some cases, she's actually a better fighter than the male lead. It's when I analyze what's supposed to set the hero apart that I realize: the more a story emphasizes the woman's fighting skills, the more likely it is that what sets the hero apart isn't his fighting prowess but his mental prowess.
Thus, it's the flip side of Naruto and its "smart girls, bad fighters". Where the hero/male prowess is predominantly defined by intelligence, knowledge, or worldly experience, either the narrative or the other characters (possibly including the male lead) considers the female characters as less-intelligent, even outright stupid. The story sets its value-priority on the hero's brain, not his brawn... which means there's plenty of room to be brawny, for the female, but little room to be brainy. The hero's already gotten first and second shares of that quality.
To throw this in a positive light, stories do tend to use opposites or at least contrasts, especially in buddy and romance stories (the similarity often being that it's a story of two characters learning to work, live, or love, as a partnership). If one-half is worldly-wise, the partner is a wide-eyed innocent. If one-half has reams of knowledge in his head (book-smart), the other may be book-dumb. If one is a brilliant problem-solver, s/he will forget to pay the electricity bill, and the partner will probably be the practical one who knows lots of concrete, everyday facts, and does the reminding about regular showers and the need for soap.
These contrasts are subtly (or not so subtly) anti-intellectual, especially in Western media-examples; the audience stand-in is the book-dumb character, whose commonsense (problem-solving skills) often shows up the overly elaborate or excessively complex thought processes of the egghead partner. That's what I've seen used plenty in buddy/male-bonding stories where the underlying assumption is that opposites attract -- and work best together, for offsetting each others' flaws. In romance or romantic sub-plots, though, this anti-intellectual message is twisted away from being a critique of the more-intelligent character. Instead, the female character's mental skills exist solely to complement the male character, to add onto the resources at his command, rather than highlight his lack.
Really, the stupid (read: less or differently intelligent) female character may be a love interest, comedic relief, or cardboard secondary character, but in this aspect, she's little more than a plot device. She's no competition for the hero-role, and sometimes is dumbed-down even further just to make the hero look even more smarted-up. It's when the hero can't solve a problem without making some kind of mind-reading intuitive leap that the author has the stupid girl can step in and provide the clues under the cloak of 'feminine intuition'.
What was anti-intellectual becomes: "girls don't need to be extra-smart; they only need just enough common-sense to help their man". Or, for the positive spin: "girls have that feminine intuition and without them contributing that, men would be lost". Thus, she can otherwise be relatively stupid, and still provide something (for the hero) towards the story-resolution.
In short, the female character's inferior/different intelligence exists for the service of the more intelligent/knowledgeable male character.
Even in stories with the classic dumb chick stereotype (blonde or not), I find it intriguing that (compared to the same stereotype as deployed in the East Asian dramas I've been watching) that the so-called dumb chick still usually contributes at some point. It's probably going to be a Dumbass Has A Point moment, but try to think of some concrete examples. All the ones I can think of, the delivered point is delivered to, and for, the hero (or the main heroine to then relay and/or use with the hero).
[Note: I find it rather odd that nearly all of the examples on the TVTropes page are for instances where a usually-dimwitted male character has a dumbass-has-a-point moment. Are all female instances listed elsewhere? Or is the 'stupid-girl, rare-insight' setup so normalized/accepted, that it's not taken as a television trope but as a reflection of everyday reality and therefore not worth mentioning or noticing? Why is it only worth noting when it's a male stupid character with an occasional brilliance, but not the reverse?]
This is probably totally giving away my generational age, but I recall noticing even as a kid how it worked on Three's Company. The setup was entirely for humor, though I've seen it echoed in more serious dramas. Everyone is facing an apparently unsolvable crisis, and Chrissy (the blonde) suddenly pipes up with an idea. The rest of the cast is skeptical but gives her the floor, whereupon she launches into some convoluted non-linear near-abstract-intuitively explanation either of what's going on, or how to solve what's going on. Naturally, her listeners end up baffled and even more confused, and much of the time Chrissy herself would then get confused (although that seemed to me, as a kid-viewer) because she was assuming that their smartness meant they could follow, and if they couldn't, that this was a sign that her own stupidity had been the cause of the confusion, not their inability to handle idiosyncratic reasoning.
(And this in turn is probably saying a lot about my own brain, because I always found the convoluted, played-for-laughs 'dumb blonde' explanations to make perfect sense. This didn't exactly help my insecurities, to know that stating such reasoning-methods out loud would confuse people -- or worse, get you labeled as stupid.)
There are two things going on, with this kind of set-up. The first is that the information or solution (that Chrissy processes or suggests) is never contributed for her own benefit; the only ones who benefit from her random illogical insights are the active/dominant characters in the sitcom. Like the female protagonist who comes up with an idea and immediately tells the hero so he can deal with it, Chrissy's ideas (which always had insight, if not practical application) were presented as something she was handing over for someone else to implement/use.
The second may count as an unfortunate implication, but possibly only noticeable to viewers with equally idiosyncratic reasoning styles: the message that only linear, deductive/inductive, reasoning is "smart". To use abductive, or just highly intuitive, reasoning gets classed as "dumb", or "ditzy", or some other negative. It's actually pretty common (given that the TVTropes page is barely the iceberg tip when it comes to the trope's age and examples) to have brilliant insights coming out of the mouth of a character otherwise treated as expendable or insignificant in the mental skills category. Partly, I think, it's the irony/humor of stupid suddenly showing signs of smart, and partly it's riffing off the old adage of "out of the mouths of babes": the one with the least knowledge suddenly showing the most wisdom.
Any humor value doesn't change the fact that if the babe is not a literal child, the babe is a fully-grown woman. Putting adult female characters in the same plot-serving category as knee-grabber children strikes me as an uncomfortable -- and massively sexist -- implication. Flipping the trope to make it a male character who suddenly has a brilliant thought... isn't exactly much better. (Especially when such examples are used to justify the continued use in re female 'ditzy' characters.)
Yet at the same time, I can't help but be reminded of something I read recently, in Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media by Susan J. Douglas. The author works her way through media representations of fictional characters, of feminism itself, of feminist leaders, and even gets into some fascinating history as concerns the ERA (for that, and the final chapter, "I'm not a feminist, but...", are alone worth finding the book and reading... very, very enlightening and thought-provoking).
Along the way, Douglas tackles the subversions and messages behind shows like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners and The Burns and Allen Show, the backlash and double standard (between onscreen housewives and viewing housewives) for the era of the Ozzie & Harriet and Leave it to Beaver decade... and then steps forward to admit she, like many of her peers, couldn't help but love to watch Charlie's Angels. That may sound like a bizarre segue, but I think it has application here -- and application in terms of the counter-arguments for my post on damselfied action girls.
I could summarize, but hell, the book's right here, so I'll quote some at you. First, Douglas lays out that there a lot of reasons not to watch Charlie's Angels (let alone actually enjoy it).
Judith Coburn, a journalist, called [the show] "one of the most misogynist shows the networks have produced recently. Supposedly about strong women, it perpetuates the myth most damaging to women's struggle to gain professional equality: that women always use sex to get what they want, even on the job." She cast the program as "a version of the pimp and his girls. Charlie dispatches his streetwise girls to use their sexual wiles on the world while he reaps the profits." And feminists weren't alone. Virtually everyone trashed the show as a piece of sexist soft-core porn that drove television to new lows.
If you're not familiar with the premise, the show lays it out in its voiceover before the theme/opening kicks in. Charlie narrates, speaking of three young women had entered the police academy with big dreams, only to end up stuck in the usual dead-end jobs offered to young female rookies. Clerical work, serving coffee to detectives, stints as crossing guards. He's very much a benevolent patriarch, smugly declaring he took them away (read: saved them) from all that, and set them to undercover work.
The show, Douglas comments, was "escapist rot of the first order, combining plots a three-year-old could follow with plenty of cheesecake." Which sounds pretty worthless until you consider the specific, unchanging ingredient in every episode, where the Angels would go undercover to protect a lower-class girl from some kind of exploitation or abuse.
So [the angels] didn't just go undercover into an occupation not theirs, they also went undercover into another class, coming to the aid of a less fortunate sister who didn't have their resources, their training, or their chutzpah. The angels were always extremely sympathetic and helpful to these girls, suggesting a female bond across class barriers that many feminists were trying to achieve in real life....
Once the angels were given the case and their undercover roles, they usually acted independently of Charlie. What we saw, as the case progressed, were three women working together, sharing information, tips, and hunches, using inductive and deductive reasoning to piece together the solution to the crime. They tested their perceptions and ideas against one another, and if one fell too easily for some man's explanation of things, the others razzed her for being too soft. The term male chauvinist pig was a regular part of their vocabulary. They conspired together against bad men, one posing as bait while one or both of the others snuck up behind and nailed the bastard. Unlike Pepper Anderson [of Police Woman, starring Angie Dickerson], who was always getting bailed out by her male compatriots, the angels saved themselves and one another, often with their guns, always with their wits. It was watching this--women working together to solve a problem and capture, and sometimes kill, really awful, sadistic men, while having great hairdos and clothes--that engaged our desire.
Nor did the angels always have to use their sexuality to get what they wanted. It's true, their looks never hurt, and the endless bikinis, decolletage, and wet T-shirts, which prompted libidinous comments from the appreciative male characters, reemphasized to women viewers the importance of looking like a Playboy centerfold if you're really going to get what you want. No doubt this made it more palatable when [the angels] talked back to bad guys, which they did all the time and with plenty of conviction, looking some chunky, menacing beefalo straight in the eye and saying, "I don't believe you. You're a liar."
What Douglas argues later -- and for which Charlie's Angels acts as one pop-culturally significant example -- is that women viewers have had plenty of experience (since before the first television or movies, really) in picking and choosing the messages, and values, we take away from any story. Finding positive value in a show like Charlie's Angels proves that women are quite capable of pulling out what they want and leaving the rest behind, in learning to "re-hear" stories into something powerful and empowering. And just because I think this needs stating definitively, more from Douglas:
Both the news and entertainment media have had enormous power to set the agenda about how people consider, react to, and accept women's changing roles and aspirations. Frequently, and without obvious collusion, the various media have managed to settle on what becomes the prevailing common sense about women's place in the world. Having that common sense repeated and reenacted in sitcoms, movies, and newscasts has a powerful effect on women's self-perceptions and on men's perceptions of them. To point out that these dominant images are perforated with rifts and contradictions that have sometimes emboldened women does not undercut their basic power. The media have helped instigate change for women while using a host of metaphors--women with magical powers, the catfight, the choked-off female voice--to contain and blunt that change.
In this light, Azuma's Database Animals aren't really all that phenomenal, if you set aside the technology. What makes the otaku differ is that combining technology (online databases) with consumerism has allowed the otaku greater influence over the market's supplies and specifics, but the underlying action by the otaku is nearly identical, I think, to what women audiences have been doing all along. Two from column A, one from column B, and ignore that ending in favor of a self-created or self-envisioned ending or premise or whatever.
Cobbling together a more positive/beneficial story out of an existing story may have shades of post-modernism, but I think it predates post-modernism, because it's a trait shared by any oppressed group when trying to adapt the majority/dominant group's stories into something less patronizing and more palatable. In that respect, no, I don't have an issue at all with highlighting or emphasizing Sakura's role as Intelligent Girl in Naruto, or arguing that if you look at this, but retcon this, and downplay that, and maybe also ignore the filler stretch (or whatever), then the female characters in D.Gray-Man or Code Geass or Gundam are actually pretty cool.
That kind of reader on-the-fly revision is a fine old tradition. I just wish the tradition were no longer necessary. Which, really, is ending up far away from where I intended, but that's what drafts are for. I'll just pick back up again in the next post, because I'm not done yet.
no subject
Date: 8 Jan 2011 06:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 8 Jan 2011 07:12 am (UTC)The weird thing is, I think you could apply that to a lot of dramas (eastern and western) -- that the female lead has to be... out-there, in some way. Either that's what attracts the man or maybe I should say makes the man notice her, or it's what's set her apart (and made her believe no one would find her attractive). CP was mentioning tonight that the big trope in jdramas is that the female lead is an absolute klutz, which such incredible awkwardness might be the reverse of a physically capable female character -- so out-of-touch with her own body that she trips just walking across carpet. I guess that, too, could be a 'not like other girls' kind of thing.
Come to think of it, though, for any of my other complaints about the female lead in Hong Gil Dong, I can't recall ever getting the sense that Yi-Nok's fighting ability set her apart. She was tomboyish, and felt awkward about that, but it didn't seem to be tied to her fighting skills. So in that particular case, I got the sense that the two were separate for her, somehow.
But the whole "other girls stare in horror" -- that seems to work in several ways. If it's not staring at her because she's too athletic, they're staring because she's too klutzy/awkward, or because she's so incredibly ditzy/dense, or because she's a career girl and they're all Stepford Wives in the making.
When you take that route, is the message that to attract a man, you have to (in a sense) turn your back on whatever is the stereotypical or accepted path for your gender? Actually, maybe that could be taken as a positive message... if it weren't for the fact that most of the time, it's the ditzy/dense girl, or the non-athletic klutzy girl, who are the leads. (In which case, it's: turn your back on ambition or growing up, if you want to attract a man!)
Given all the genderbenders so beloved in East Asian cinema, it looks like the tomboys are gaining, but the extra-smart ones are still lagging behind. Bleah.
no subject
Date: 8 Jan 2011 04:08 pm (UTC)the big trope in jdramas is that the female lead is an absolute klutz
One which I don't really enjoy and do not find adorable in the least.
no subject
Date: 8 Jan 2011 05:26 pm (UTC)At first I thought, maybe this is because I was a jock, so it's some kind of bias against people who aren't coordinated, except... crew isn't really a sport that requires coordination. Repetition and finesse... coordination, uhm, not really. Not like soccer or lacrosse/field hockey. But then I started trying to think of anyone I know -- at ALL -- who is even half as uncoordinated as these jdrama heroines. AND I CAN'T!
The closest I can think of are friends who admit that as kids they were terribly uncoordinated, but they're some of the most coordinated (or just very careful) people I know now, since they had to put up with "klutz = slow development = stupid" connotations throughout childhood, and got really paranoid about it... and the only reason I even know they thought (or were told) they were klutzes is because I'd complimented them on how graceful and deliberate they are as adults. Well, HELLO, it's because they practiced (or are just still really careful, to this day) to not be that way.
And now that I think all that, I think: I'm sure there's a message in there somewhere about klutzy girls being cute, but I'm not sure I can unpack it when I've only had one cup of tea this morning, and besides, it's probably a pretty ugly anti-woman message anyway, so maybe I should wait until I'm not in such a good mood and thus have less good-mood to lose.
As for the alpha guy: the only time I can think of "other guys staring" is when it's pretty clear all the other guys are wishing they were like, or even were, the alpha hero. Girl = misfit; guy = penultimate.
no subject
Date: 11 Jan 2011 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 9 Jan 2011 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 9 Jan 2011 06:51 pm (UTC)