You know what's truly baffling?

[surrealistdreamer]

People who insist on liking female characters that are horrible bags of sexist tropes to deal with their own "internalized sexism". Doesn't that sound fucking stupid. Here you are adhering to a horrible characterization that people use to put real life women down and you do it under the guise of wanting to deal with your own issues. Wouldn't that just exacerbate them?

Maybe it'd be better for you if you just looked outside the realm of live action television shows to other genres that had more to offer in the way of female characters that were treated like...actual characters? True enough that there's sexism in every genre, but I've found more positive portrayels of female characters in various animated series and webcomics.

Comments

[gryphonsegg]

This is a good post and you should feel good about it.

Also, there was a big mess on tumblr last week where a teenage girl said she quit a (male-authored) series because she didn't like the female characters and found their depictions sexist, and other girls/women started giving her shit for turning her internalized misogyny against other (fictional) women (written by a man), and one of them had the nerve to say that nobody ever drops a series because of male characters, no matter how sexist they are. BULLSHIT! I didn't reply because I didn't want to get into it on tumblr, but that's just so obviously untrue. People stop watching/reading things because of badly written, offensive, sexist, or otherwise frustrating male characters ALL THE TIME. As is every person's right!

[surrealistdreamer]

Blargh. That's annoying.

And yeah it's true enough that male characters aren't held to as harsh a standard as female characters, but at the same time saying that a male character never turns anyone off ever is to ignore how much you and I both hate Supernatural. Our combined hate could probably start a fire honestly.

[gryphonsegg]

We ought to test that sometime. You know, for science.

But yeah, we're not that unusual in that respect. Even people who don't think about feminism at all quit all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons, including dislike of a male character because they find him too unpleasant, too boring, too weak, too annoying, or too anything. If anything socially conscious fandom types are unusual in that they'll keep following series where they think all the male characters are horrible people because engaging with the discussion about the series is important to them.

[surrealistdreamer]

Hurm. I can see that.