lierdumoa:
ikkinthekitsune:
lierdumoa:
ikkinthekitsune:
lierdumoa:
It occurs to me that there aren’t very many genuine power fantasies for women out there in the media. There are perfection fantasies.
The girl every boy wants to be with vs. the boy who can convince any girl to be with him
The girl who withstands terrible trauma and emerges stronger and largely unscathed vs the man who lost everything and now devotes his grim existence to successfully meeting out destructive vengeance
The girl who’s brilliant at everything and also modest and gracious and well liked vs. insufferable genius with amazing skills so indispensable he can’t be fired even though no on can stand him
The girl who can achieve anything vs. the boy who can get away with anything
And I think the whole perfection fantasy is perpetuated by the role model message. Girls need characters they can aspire towards! Strong!Female!Characters! with admirable qualities!
So we sell girls the message that they can maybe have the life they want, (assuming their desires fit within acceptable parameters) if they manage to be significantly better/stronger/more resilient/more beautiful/more intelligent/more forgiving/ more generous people than they are, or probably will ever be.
Meanwhile we sell boys the message that one single marketable skill will blot out all their failings and heap glory at their feet.
I wrote some meta earlier on Grey’s Anatomy character Christina Yang and how important she is to me. She’s an asshole. She considers people less intelligent/skilled than her to be inferior. And she mocks them. Both to their faces and behind their backs. She’s also profoundly loyal. She also saves lives, sometimes on a twice daily basis. She’s also brave to the point of insanity. She’s also an amazing teacher, because she wants her students to reflect well on her, and because she wants a legacy. And every good thing she does, she does both out of kindness and out of selfishness. Her motivations are never pure.
And gifs of her will never feature the word “flawless” in sparkly text. Because “flawless” to Christina would be an insult. Because the entire point of Christina’s existence is proving that you don’t need to be flawless to win.
Women don’t need to be flawless to win.
The perfection fantasy vs. power fantasy thing kind of reminds me of this:
Girls, and later women, tend to believe their abilities are innate, owing to a natural talent. Boys, in contrast, believe they can make themselves better through effort and practice.
Psychologists believe this has much to do with how children are praised growing up: Girls, who are generally better behaved, are praised and rewarded for following the rules. They grow up believing that accolades are earned for who you are, more than what you do. Boys, though, are more natural rule breakers. When they receive praise, it’s more often a result of a conscious decision to act better—that is, what they do. And what they do—how they act—is, of course, changeable.
[Source]
Perfection fantasies are designed to make “who you are” as awesome as possible, at least vicariously. And, because of that, characters meant to offer that kind of fantasy can’t be shown putting in too much effort or learning from mistakes, which makes them a completely unattainable ideal. They can’t really function as a role model, because it’s not really possible to model oneself after innate traits. If you’re not able to put yourself in their shoes as you are (or in the shoes of the character whose love interest they are, depending), there really isn’t much for them to offer you.
And, in contrast, power fantasies are all about “what you do,” which is much more possible to imagine achieving through hard work and effort, especially when everything outside of a narrow area of focus is effectively irrelevant. Characters meant to offer that kind of fantasy don’t have to be good, they just have to do good, and that’s a much more appealing prospect.
Wow. No. I’m not having this. Everything ikkinthekitsune has just said is not only incorrect, but deeply sexist.
Uh, what exactly are you on about? Because it has almost nothing to do with my post. o_0;
[] “Perfection fantasies are […] a completely unattainable ideal.”
[] “Power fantasies are […] much more possible to imagine achieving through hard work and effort.”
ikkinthekitsune is basically arguing that perfection fantasies (girl fantasies) are shallow and fake whereas power fantasies (boy fantasies) are moral and genuine.
What?!
This is not even remotely close to the message I hoped to convey with my original post. It horrifies me to see my meta vandalized in such a manner.
I could say the same thing about your own bizarre misrepresentation of my response.
Where in the world did you pull “perfection fantasies (girl fantasies) are shallow and fake whereas power fantasies (boy fantasies) are moral and genuine” from? Not only was I not making any claims about the value of either type of fantasy when held by an individual, I certainly wasn’t operating under the assumption that perfection fantasies are “girl fantasies” and power fantasies are “boy fantasies” in the sense that there’s some sort of gender-essentialist tendency for girls to prefer the former and boys to prefer the latter.
Everything I said was written with this in mind:
So we sell girls the message that they can maybe have the life they want, (assuming their desires fit within acceptable parameters) if they manage to be significantly better/stronger/more resilient/more beautiful/more intelligent/more forgiving/ more generous people than they are, or probably will ever be.
Meanwhile we sell boys the message that one single marketable skill will blot out all their failings and heap glory at their feet.
In other words, I was talking about dominant narratives, not individual preferences, because that’s what the conversation declared itself to be about.
My point was that it wasn’t fair to girls to sell them only perfection fantasies, because perfection fantasies are based in traits that are innate and unchangeable, and teaching girls that positive traits are innate and unchangeable tends to make it more difficult for them to feel confident in their own flawed human self. The sorts of fantasies that girls would chose if they had a choice between the two never really factored into the equation.
First off, let’s get something straight here — male power fantasies do not reward men for good behavior. Male power fantasies reward men for being men.
Male power fantasies convey the message that there’s nothing more righteous, or more heroic than a privileged, entitled white man doing whatever the fuck he wants. These stories are odes to male entitlement. They’re not more realistic than perfection fantasies. They’re certainly not more ethical.
I think you’re conflating the implications of the cultural trend in which nearly all characters like Batman and Sherlock Holmes are male with the nature of the characters in question.
Batman and Sherlock Holmes are not righteous and heroic because they’re entitled, privileged, and male – there are plenty of entitled, privileged male characters who are treated as the scum of the earth by their narratives for those very traits (see: the stereotypical rich snob who looks down on the country bumpkin/small town hero). Being entitled, privileged, and male makes it more likely for people to justify characters’ less savory traits, but that almost never happens if there isn’t something to latch onto initially. And, in the case of vigilantes, the “something to latch onto” is the satisfaction of seeing someone work outside of a structure that people find frustrating and ineffective to bring the bad guys to justice.
The justification is part of the fantasy, of course… but that’s not really limited to male characters except insofar as the audience tends to expect more out of non-male characters in order to like them. Female characters are sometimes offered a limited version of this – it’s not uncommon for audiences to justify female characters doing awful stuff to generic baddies, for instance – even if they usually get saddled with an unfair double-standard as soon as interpersonal relationships come into play.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with girls saying, “Hey, I’d like to imagine being so awesome that I can break the rules, too!” I kind of thought that’s what you wanted to see, actually.
Secondly, let’s get something else straight — female perfection fantasies do not reward innate traits. True, the protagonists in female perfection fantasies are presented as innately good, and innately talented, but they are not actually rewarded for having these qualities.
They are rewarded for their sacrifices.
There’s definitely a perfection problem when it comes to female characters, but I’m not sure it’s related to perfection fantasies in the way you’re implying.
For one thing, two out of the four examples of yours that I’m familiar with (I know nothing about Fifth Element) aren’t perfection fantasies to begin with, and a third turns only turns its “ordinary” main character into a perfection fantasy through magic at the very end. The Little Mermaid is a story about the main character messing up and having to fix things, not a story about perfection (Ariel makes an almost literal deal with the devil). The Hunger Games is a story about the horrors of war rather than a fantasy of any kind (loss of agency is a huge theme there, to the point that Katniss spends much of Mockingjay in a bunker/suffering from PTSD). And Twilight’s whole thing is that Bella is a completely unremarkable placeholder protagonist who self-conscious audience members can imagine being, who gains the love of the perfect vampires for no good reason and ends up as a perfect vampire herself because of it.
For another, I don’t think it really makes sense to discuss characters giving up things that they wanted to give up all along – life in the ocean for Ariel, life as a human for Bella – as sacrifices. (Ariel’s voice was, again, part of a literal deal with the devil, and she got it back anyway.)
And even in the one case you offered that’s unquestionably a perfection fantasy, Cinderella’s sacrifice in working for years without complaint is less something that reflects on her agency and more something that reflects on her innate traits (and offers her the chance for a happy ending because someone with magic thinks she deserves it, rather than because that’s the logical result of her actions).
Meanwhile, even female characters who do have flaws and the corresponding agency in their characterization tend to be pushed to learn sacrifice, as if that’s the natural ideal for female characters. Perfection fantasies are largely about being perfect in the eyes of others (beauty, musical talent, niceness, willingness to sacrifice), but even female characters who aren’t other-focused by default are expected to become so at their own expense.
Now you’ll notice that my original post was criticizing perfection fantasies not for being bad role models, but for trying to be role models in the first place.
I don’t want characters to be role models.
Of course I want characters that have admirable qualities, but the moment you call a character a role model you’re forcing that character to be their admirable qualities. You’re putting them on a pedestal.
I want characters who feel real, in stories that feel real.
I prefer characters and stories that feel real, too. The role model thing was more taking the perfection fantasy character on its own terms and saying why it wouldn’t even work as what it was intended to be.
I don’t know why ikkinthekitsune thinks characters who are rewarded for doing good are “a much more appealing prospect.” I find that prospect decidedly unappealing. The last thing I want is for people to start writing preachy stories that revolve around rewarding characters for good behavior and punishing characters for bad behavior. Reality doesn’t always reward people for “doing good” and pretending otherwise only perpetuates the bootstrap myth.
Because I was talking in the context of fantasies, and the world being fair is a huge part of what many if not most people want to see in their comfort reading/viewing/playing.
Stories where the world isn’t fair are often more interesting and compelling, sure. But “the good guys win and the bad guys are brought to justice” doesn’t have to feel preachy depending on the execution, and a lot of people really enjoy fictional worlds that don’t stink as much as ours does. Eucatastrophe is effective for a reason. =P
As for that article ikkinthekitsune cites — it contradicts itself multiple times. First it says that women are out-performing men, then it says girls give up more easily than boys. First it says boys are “natural” rule breakers, then it chalks up differences in boys’ and girls’ behavior to how their parents raise them.
I’d take everything it says with a grain of salt.
There’s nothing contradictory about people with more natural talent giving up easier – it happens all the time, especially since giving up easier doesn’t necessarily mean giving up so much that people with less natural talent surpass you.
And I think the “natural rule-breaker” thing is meant to reflect the general tendency of boys to be less mature and less capable of sitting still for long periods of time than girls… and while that could easily have some nurture-based reasons of its own (parents generally expect less from boys in that regard and punish them less for acting that way), it’s unlikely to change the general proposition that boys generally need to put in more conscious effort to following the rules in school.
I specifically created the term perfection fantasy to define stories that hold women to unfairly restrictive moral standards. I specifically highlighted Christina Yang as a contradiction to the typical perfection fantasy because she is one of the few female protagonists whom the narrative allows to be selfish, and arrogant.
I’d argue that you could have been more clear about specifying that you’re referring to moral standards rather than general ones, but I fail to see how that alters my point about female characters generally being valued for innate traits.
My argument is that the restrictive moral standards in question don’t really allow for characters to struggle to do the right thing. And, without that sort of struggle, the implication is that the characters are meant to be seen as paragons of morality to their core rather than as flawed human beings trying their best.
(I’d also argue that you didn’t do a great job of picking characters to reflect the standards you’re looking to criticize – I don’t understand how you think deal-with-the-devil Ariel, shot-a-civilian Katniss, or needs-Edward-as-moral-babysitter Bella can plausibly be viewed as perfect moral paragons).
Male characters are allowed to be boastful (assuming they can back it up) but a female character who behaves in the same manner is considered “stuck up.” Female characters who make morally dubious choices are immediately relegated to villain status. Male characters, in contrast, are given the freedom and opportunity to redeem themselves, over and over again. You want to talk about dominant narratives — “Redemption Arc” is right up there next to “Power Fantasy” on the list of most popular narrative devices.
I think things are a bit more complicated than this, if only because certain female characters like Toph Beifong – self-proclaimed greatest earthbender in the world – can be as boastful as they want while still being beloved.
My guess is that boasting about skill is more acceptable than boasting about appearance or virtue in general, and its rarity in female characters has less to do with it being seen as unacceptable and more to do with female characters generally not being allowed the skill necessary to back it up. (“Stuck up,” I find, implies more that a female character thinks they’re too good for someone else than that they’re proud up their abilities.)
Likewise, I think there’s some room for female characters to mess up without instantly being cast as villains, even if the narrative tends to require a much greater and less pleasant penance for their comparatively minor mistakes.
I don’t think you’re wrong about there being a double standard, in other words, but I think you’re missing a lot of nuance in how it plays out.
You mentioned The Hunger Games is an allegory about war. That’s true. Katniss Everdeen, the main character in The Hunger Games, is a perfection fantasy. That’s also true. These things are not mutually exclusive. Stories can be about more than one thing. Power fantasies and perfection fantasies can exist in the same story. Allegories and symbolism can coincide with archetypes and stereotypes — in fact it’s rare that you see one without the other.
Katniss Everdeen is exactly the kind of character I created the term perfection fantasy for. She’s morally irreproachable. She always does the right thing. She always does the selfless thing. She puts the emotional needs of her loved ones above her own emotional needs. She volunteers, again and again.
Female protagonists are expected to be paragons of virtue. This is the impossible standard I chose to criticize at the very beginning of this discussion, when I wrote my original post.
The Perfect Paragon. The Immaculate Mary.
I have no idea how you could possibly misread Katniss’ character so badly. I find the idea that she’s a paragon of moral perfection to be completely baffling. Sure, she’s willing to risk a lot for the people she cares about… but her dedication to the people close to her over everything else is not what modern morality tends to dictate.
Particularly for women, being generally warm and personable is part of the ideal that’s reflected by moral perfection fantasies. And Katniss is… not that. Using only words attributed to her in her Hunger Games wiki article, she’s hard, cold, blunt, cynical, and misanthropic, caring far more about her family’s survival than about what others think of her.
Beyond that, of course, she’s a killer, and not everyone she kills deserves it (including a civilian who just had the misfortune to be in her way). She’s not good at following rules, but she tends to break them for herself and those close to her; she didn’t question that every stranger would have to die in the Hunger Games for her and/or Peeta to survive until other options revealed themselves.
Speaking of which, Katniss intended to do everything she could to survive the first time she was in the Games. Her choice to volunteer was more risk than sacrifice (as was her poison berries gambit), much like her male equivalent, Theseus. And while I think that could reflect a questionable trope – that heroines who take risks are more likely to suffer painful consequences than heroes tend to suffer – risking one’s life for others has never been about being a perfect moral paragon as far as fictional characters are concerned (and, in fact, is often used to gain sympathy for characters who are otherwise terrible people).
Now if you actually approve of stories about female characters who are moral paragons, who always choose to do the right (selfless) thing, who never take the cowards way out, and who achieve happiness by being so good, and so kind, and so studious, and so industrious, and so pure of heart that their virtue is un-besmirchable, than you don’t actually have a problem with perfection fantasies, the way I have defined them.
You, in fact, want more of them.
If you disapprove of certain stories, not because of the impossible moral standards imposed on the lead protagonists, but rather because you feel they are “too pretty” and “too good at stuff that I’m not good at” and “make things look too easy” — well then I suggest you make up your own term for these kinds of narratives and stop misusing mine.
And by the way, if those are the kind of characters you think the world needs less of — than I’m afraid to ask what you think of people in real life who are better looking and more accomplished than you.
Your train of logic appears to have derailed somewhere – I have no clue why you’re implying that I only disapprove of perfection fantasy characters because they’re “too pretty” and “too good at stuff that I’m not good at” and “make things look too easy.”
My initial post operated under the assumption that the standard you were criticizing is unfair, then proceeded to note that the standard was unfair in other ways you hadn’t mentioned.
Saying that female characters tend to be designed to reflect the fantasy of winning the innate trait lottery (as opposed to the fantasy of doing great things) says nothing about how I feel about characters who are pretty (they need to decrease in proportion because they’re basically 90-something percent of the female characters out there, and there needs to be a greater range of appearances represented within the subset that remains, but that’s a cultural issue that has little to do with individual characters), or how I feel about characters who are good at stuff I’m not good at (they’re awesome, as long as they’re allowed to be imperfect in other ways), or how I feel about characters who make things look easy (again, awesome as long as they experience other meaningful struggles).
Now, you claim that you are interested in discussing dominant narratives, not individual preferences.
I assume when you say “dominant narratives” you mean “narratives that dominate our cultural landscape” and not “narratives about dominating characters.”
Of course I am. Narratives about dominating characters would, grammatically-speaking, be far better described as “domination narratives” than dominant ones. =P
The irony here is that power fantasies are, in fact, a (culturally) dominant narrative about dominating characters. Power fantasies are are fantasies about power. You’ve been very insistent that /real/ power fantasies are about “fighting injustice” and “rewarding hard work and effort.” You seem determined to debate the subject.
But this subject is not up for debate.
The definition of the term power fantasy is already well-established within the fannish community.
Here is the TV Tropes article on power fantasy: [link]
It defines power fantasy as a story in which the fantasizer imagines themselves being powerful, particularly in situations where the fantasizer feels powerless in real life.
I consider the TV Tropes website a particularly reputable source for defining fictional tropes, but I’m sure if you google the term “power fantasy” you’ll find it defined similarly no matter which website you go to.
Now it is possible for the protagonist of a power fantasy to be a good, hardworking person who helps people. It is also possible for the protagonist of a power fantasy to be a violent misogynist. It is also possible for the protagonist of a power fantasy to be a narcissist and a sociopath. As long as the protagonist wields power, and the plot revolves around them wielding power (for good or for evil) the story is a power fantasy.
I’ve never said anything about “real power fantasies” or the types of stories that could plausibly be described as such. The point I was trying to make was that both of the characters you mentioned fell into a particular sub-trope of power fantasy in which the justification for the hero demonstrating agency through violence is crucial to the audience’s acceptance of the hero as a hero.
Batman is not seen as a hero simply because he is a power fantasy. Rather, he’s accepted as a power fantasy by an audience that balks at Might Makes Right because his actions are justified into heroism through sympathetic motivations and results that satisfy the audience’s desire for justice.
Obviously, the protagonist of a power fantasy could be a narcissistic sociopath. But that protagonist is going to be of limited appeal (often to the point that his author designed him as a deconstruction of toxic masculinity, only to find that certain portions of the audience took him as a power fantasy anyway – see: Rorschach, Walter White, possibly the guy from Fight Club), and is only going to be seen as heroic by an audience that’s disinclined to care about morality in the first place.
You claim that I am “conflating the implications of the cultural trend in which nearly all characters like Batman and Sherlock Holmes are male with the nature of the characters in question.”
This is bullshit.
Power fantasies are cultural narratives. The entire point of this conversation is to examine the how power and perfection fantasies influence people on a cultural scale. In order to do that, I have to take culture into account.
While it’s true that culture affects narratives and that affect needs to be examined, I think it’s important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
The fact that Batman and Sherlock Holmes’ actions are justified with sympathetic motivations and/or morally satisfactory results says something about the audience. Treating their stories as one and the same as the relatively unusual case of power fantasies starring wholly unlikeable and immoral characters simply because both tend to star male characters who act as power fantasies for the audience does no favors for your overarching claims about there being “nothing more righteous, or more heroic than a privileged, entitled white man doing whatever the fuck he wants,” because it makes it seem like you’re failing to take into account why those stories connect with the audience in the first place.
Superhero/super detective power fantasies tendency to rely on a clear moral framework cannot be ignored just because it’s not a universal requirement in the power fantasy super-trope. Exploring cultural trends is no excuse to ignore core dynamics that affect the culture’s relationship with sub-tropes or even individual works.
The fact that most power fantasies revolve around white straight intelligent alpha males is not some inconsequential side issue. The fact that most power fantasies reinforce patriarchal norms is not some irrelevant fluke. You want to talk about dominant narratives?
White patriarchy is the dominant narrative. This is why Disney (the dominant animation studio) keeps churning out villains who embody racist and queer phobic stereotypes (the dominant message). This is why power fantasies (the dominant narrative) romanticize and glorify white supremacy and masculinity (the dominant race and gender).
Justifications for white patriarchy are the dominant narratives of Western culture.
I didn’t say it was an inconsequential side issue.
What I said was that there was nothing inherent in the concept of the power fantasy itself that required it to star a (white) male character. According to your own definition, a power fantasy is “a story in which the fantasizer imagines themselves being powerful, particularly in situations where the fantasizer feels powerless in real life” – there’s absolutely no reason why such a story couldn’t star a woman or a member of a minority group.
Even in practice, it’s possible to make female power fantasy characters without making the characters themselves unlikeable… and the double-standard that makes it more difficult to do so has very little to do with the way audiences see power fantasies and a whole lot to do with how they see women in general.
Furthermore,
To say that I’m conflating “the nature of the characters in question” with “the implications of the cultural trend they follow” implies that these characters have a nature, independent of the fictional narratives in which they exist.
I hate to break this to you but:
Batman is not real. He’s a construct. He doesn’t exist outside of his cultural context. His appearance and his gender and his sexual orientation and his social position and his talents and his skills and his actions and his motivations are all choices his writer made for him, based on that writer’s own cultural biases and, to use your term, individual preferences.
Or maybe you’re just being pedantically literal.
“The nature of the characters in question” is an issue of how the audience reacts to those characters as individuals, not some kind of bizarre straw claim that the characters have an individual existence outside of the context of fiction.
In other words, the specific choices that went into creating Batman need to be taken into account when determining whether or not he ought to be used as evidence for a particular understanding of a cultural trend. The choice to offer moral justification for Batman’s actions within the text is a meaningful choice. Stuffing Batman into an interpretation that insists that maleness trumps morality in spite of that is disingenuous at best, not because it’s not fair to Batman, but because ignoring inconvenient data makes for a poor analysis of cultural trends.
If you really want to have a conversation about nature, vs. culture – consider John Smith.
John Smith was a real person. He was a European imperialist. He was a colonizer. He was a subjugator. He was a rapist.
John Smith is also a fictional character, from Disney’s Pocahontas movie. Fictional character!John Smith is a “good guy.” He’s an open minded explorer. He’s a kind and gentle lover.
How can I define the “nature” of this fictional John Smith character without also taking into account the “cultural trend” of romanticizing/whitewashing European imperialism in popular media.
Think about it. If a character is rewarded for doing “the right thing” within a narrative, and “the right thing” in this particular narrative is defined as “participating in a colonization process that ultimately led to the genocide of the Native Americans” than is the narrative really really rewarding the character for “doing the right thing”?
Or is it rewarding white imperialist men for their white imperialism?
I think you’re mistaking my point that many popular power fantasies require characters to operate according to a moral framework with a claim that power fantasies in general require characters to operate according to the correct moral framework.
Narratives can, quite obviously, be wrong about what “doing good” actually means. But that doesn’t really contradict my original point, which was that male characters are judged based on what they do. (Their maleness might cause the story to be more lenient in that judgment, but it’s generally treated as invisible within the context of the story and doesn’t act as a get-out-of-jail-free card for things the story doesn’t approve of.)
Similarly,
If Batman is “rewarded” for doing “the right thing” within a narrative, and “the right thing” in this particular narrative is defined as “using his privilege to seek revenge through violent means” than is the narrative really rewarding Batman for “doing the right thing”?
Or is it rewarding privileged men for violent behavior?
Your take on Batman is just as strange as your take on Katniss, apparently.
Batman’s hero status comes from stopping bad guys, not seeking revenge through violence. He’s got a pretty firm no guns/no killing moral code in most modern depictions, and he hands the bad guys over to the cops instead of meting out his own judgment.
Superhero stories in general are very particular about which types of violence are acceptable, and they carve out exceptions to “hurting others is bad” very carefully in order to maintain the audience’s sympathy. It’s hard to think of anything that would make it more clear that, within the story’s context, the types of violent behavior that even privileged men are rewarded for are highly circumscribed.
In other words, while those kinds of stories are constantly looking for excuses to resolve situations through violence (since action-based excitement is their bread and butter), the sorts of stories that you’re describing wouldn’t even need an excuse.
When you say:
I don’t think of power fantasies as boy fantasies. The fact that you do makes you the sexist one.
What you’re actually saying is:
I don’t acknowledge the sexism inherent in our culture, except when it’s convenient for my argument
So when you say power fantasies are (in general) better role models/examples for children than perfection fantasies, what you’re actually saying in the practical sense is that stories written by men (statistically speaking) are better than stories written by women (statistically speaking).
I will not indulge you in your desire to discuss sexism only in the most abstract terms. Sexism is a statistical reality. Every remark you make has factual relevance.
…are you kidding me? Attacking a strawman is low enough, but throwing one between fake quotes and claiming that’s what I said? That’s a whole new level of disingenuity.
There’s a big difference between saying, “People of any gender can have power fantasies” and “People of any gender can star in stories designed to function as power fantasies” and claiming that there’s no link between power fantasies and maleness, and that claiming otherwise makes you sexist. O_0;
There’s also a big difference in saying that it’s easier to look up to a character who’s defined by their actions than one who’s defined by innate perfection and in saying that statistically male-written power fantasies are better than statistically female-written perfection fantasies. I mean, for one thing, I think perfection fantasies are more heavily correlated to female characters than female writers – it’s very common for female love interests from male-written power fantasies to be perfection fantasies, for instance! For another, I think it’s very likely that perfection fantasies are as common as they are in large part due to authors’ internalization of societal ideals of women as being based in innate traits rather than actions (regardless of the author’s gender).
And I think your implication that it’s wrong to think that something that’s associated with women is worse than its male equivalent is disingenuous, since women often are socialized to accept inferior equivalents. High heels are statistically associated with women, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with pointing out that they’re much less practical for actually walking in than most men’s shoes. (…I think perfection fantasies and high heels have quite a bit in common, honestly.)
Now I think I’ve covered everything worth covering in your most recent reblog except for your disagreement with my criticism of the article you cited.
You said:
There’s nothing contradictory about people with more natural talent giving up easier – it happens all the time
You’re right, actually. Except I never said that was contradictory. I was referring to something else entirely when I called the article as contradictory.
Fair enough.
Now to clarify, it’s not people who ~have~ more natural talent who give up more easily. It’s people who ~attribute their abilities~ to natural talent, who give up more easily.
Actually, this is one of the few things in the article I agree with.
The book Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, has an entire chapter in which the author examines various scientific studies and concludes that children who are praised for being “naturally talented” by their parents/teachers give up more easily, and cheat more often than children who are praised for “effort.”
The book says nothing about these different parenting methods being gender-specific. It does note cultural differences – that the parents of middle/upper middle class Chinese American children more often attribute their children’s successes to hard work, and parents of middle/upper middle class white American children more often attribute their children’s successes to innate talent.
The article you cite, unlike the book I just cited, assumes that these different parenting methods are gender specific. It explicitly states that “girls” give up more easily than “boys” (based on one study of unknown scientific validity from 25 years ago).
I wasn’t saying that people who had more natural talent necessarily give up more easily… but it certainly seems like it’d be easier for them to fall into the trap of attributing their abilities to that talent, since they might not get enough counter-messages to counteract the experience of succeeding just because they’re good at stuff.
Also, there is evidence that the different parenting methods are gender-specific, even if the article didn’t specifically cite it:
Another revelation from the study involved how praise affects boys and girls differently. Parents gave boys and girls the same amount of praise, but of the encouragement boys received, 24% was process praise [praise emphasizing actions, in contrast to “person praise” which focuses on inherent qualities], while girls received only 10% of this type. Previous research suggested this pattern, but Gunderson says she was surprised by how great the difference was. The inequality could have consequences for how girls evaluate their abilities as they progress in school and may play a role in exacerbating some of the self-esteem issues that become more common among teens and adolescents.
[Source]
(This study was what I was looking for when I found the other one, actually.)
If female humans (in general) truly gave up more easily than male humans (in general) than how do we explain successful women outnumbering successful men in the workplace? People who give up easily don’t generally become successful – that is, unless they’re reaping the benefits of some kind of structural privilege.
That is what I find contradictory.
Either the article is trying to claim that women enjoy structural privilege over men (scoff), or the article is wrong about girls giving up more easily than boys, or the article is wrong about women outperforming men in the workplace.
The article’s point was that, while there are a ton of competent women in the workforce, a lot of them don’t think they’re capable of management positions even though they have all of the necessary skills.
It isn’t really contradictory for women to be doing better under circumstances where they don’t feel like they’re being pushed out of their comfort zone while also being less inclined to press on in the face of major challenges (due to socialization). Presumably, women are more comfortable with academics than men (for whatever reason) and end up doing better early in their careers because of it, but then struggle to move up the ladder due to their lack of confidence.
As for what you think the use of the term “natural” is meant to reflect – I can’t judge what the author’s secret intentions were when they wrote this article. I can only judge what is actually written.
"Natural” and “general” are two different words that mean two different things.
The article could have said “boys generally break more rules than girls, statistically speaking.” But the article didn’t say that. The article said "boys are natural rule breakers.” These two different word choices have two different meanings. The latter word choice – the word choice used in the article – explicitly describes boys’ “rule-breaking” behavior as “natural” i.e. intrinsic.
Now we already have strong scientific evidence that gendered parenting beginsat birth – that adults treat male and female newborn infants differently based on their assumed gender [link to study].
The idea that any gender specific behavioral trend is “natural” has already been thoroughly debunked by too many scientific studies to count. If you want to know about these studies in detail, Cordelia Fine discusses a large number of them at length in her book, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences.
Moreover history and sociology have proven that the different behaviors we assign to men and women vary wildly from culture to culture, and from era to era. For example, the modern American prejudice that women are “naturally” more inclined towards fashion and aesthetics contradicts the 16th/17th century European prejudice that only men can truly understand fashion and aesthetics.
I guess the thing is, “natural rule-breakers” was a single turn of phrase in an article that had very little interest in exploring the “why”s of boys’ tendency to break the rules more often.
I expressed my own disagreement with the idea that boys were born with rule-breaking tendencies that girls aren’t, but I don’t think that a single questionable turn of phrase designed to be a quick reference to something tangential to the purpose of the article is really worth arguing over, especially since there’s a good chance that it was chosen because it was the quickest way to get the “boys are statistically more likely to break rules” point across.
When I say that everything the article says should be taken with a grain of salt, what I mean is that the article was clearly written with a sexist bias. The conclusions the author draws are based as much on "conventional wisdom” (hearsay) as they are on actual scientific data. The studies from which the scientific data originates are of unknown validity. We have no way of knowing, for example, how many children were included in the “girls give up more easily than boys,” study, what age range was covered, whether they came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, whether they came from similar cultural backgrounds, whether they came from the same school/town/county, etc.
The truth is that a lot of pop psychology is written around ingrained prejudicial biases. Sexism, racism, abelism, etc. are everywhere. The scientific community is not exempt. In fact, it’s one of the more egregious perpetrators of these prejudices.
Well, it’s pretty clearly an article designed to be easily consumed by a lay audience rather than an article designed to hold up to academic scrutiny, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was written with a sexist bias. The attribution section says it was written by a female Ph.D who’s an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cornell; the article’s “hearsay” consisted of a section about what “psychologists believe,” which could have been based on the dominant theory in the field rather than the common knowledge of laypeople. And the content of her blog post boiled down to, effectively, “girls are socialized in ways that hold them back, and here’s how to change that” which seems more likely to have been the result of a feminist mindset rather than a sexist one.
But, here, have some more information about the psychologists behind this stuff… like this article, which was co-written by the woman who did the study from the ‘80s (a psych professor at Stanford). There’s a link to the actual study there, but it’s locked behind a paywall. I also managed to find a different study co-authored by the same woman that did the '80s study that references six separate studies reflecting similar findings (while also probably shedding some light on the general methodology of these things).
I don’t think these articles are coming from people who are invested in the idea of innate gender differences. I wouldn’t even be surprised if this woman was one of the sources referenced by the “Nurture Shock” book you mentioned earlier.