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- #21
Jasnah- Ariel
Dreamer
Haha, where were all those examples from?
Again, you're joining the masses in equating male with strong and female with weak.
An example of this is rape and intimate partner violence. We know that sexism heavily drives both of those crimes in our world (of course they do happen along the lines of other gender dynamics, but primarily speaking). In a world built specifically to be sexism free, both a young woman and a young man could walk down a dark street at night with much more equal amounts of trepidation. A woman in a heterosexual relationship would have just as little fear of violence by her partner as a man would. I guess it's tiring to see dynamics to the contrary of this show up readily in fantasy stories.
And now we come to the next interesting bit. It wasn't like that when I was a kid here in Sweden. Those sorts of TV-series didn't get shown here. This is why I'm gently trying to widen the discussion because this is one of those issues where our cultural biases start to show through.I wouldn't call it a tug of war. An oversight perhaps? Or a blind spot?
Now, when I was a little baby Que the standard after school cartoon on. DBZ, Pokemon, BLEACH, Naruto and One Piece were formative in my youth. Each of these has prominent female characters, most of them have female characters in positions of expertise and authority and each has a power system (or the equivalent of a power system in Pokemon) that should largely make strength differences between sexes meaningless. Yet if you look at the main protagonist teams of each there's a noticeable trend in who generally gets what sort of plot beats. Yes, of course the primary target audience for them consists of young boys, but it gets a bit tiring when you start a new manga series and the main female character winds restrained by tentacles, threatened to be turned into a naked stone statue by the arc's villain or whose big dramatic legendary power is the ability to jump back in time so that she can save the actual fighters instead of something more suited towards directly solving the problem at hand. *cough*Eden's Zero*cough*Eden's Zero*cough*Eden's Zero*cough*Yes, all three examples are from the same series.*cough*
Of course violence exists, a dark alley presents a threat to almost anyone. But there is an increased threat for women purely because of being a woman.I'd have to ask, what would be the factor that is equalizing them? Why would fear increase for one, or decrease for the other? Whether you know it or not, men do not walk down alleys without fear. Men always live in the perpetual tension of violence, and if they do stupid things, they get stupid prizes. What would be required to make it happen that they would have the same confidence and interaction in an alley or in a domestic situation?
Well, that was why I suggested that this is about your characters and your setting. Yes, a setting which was sexism free might have less rape and intimate partner violence, but that doesn't mean the place would be less violent. Your young people might still walk down the street in trepidation. But the violence might then be about other aspects of society and it's structures and it might be interesting to explore that in a novel.Really I'm just trying to have a discussion, not prove a point, but I feel more than a bit set back by the replies.
It's more seeing the power struggle between male and female in our world reflected in fantasy worlds and having it be normalized there as well.
An example of this is rape and intimate partner violence. We know that sexism heavily drives both of those crimes in our world (of course they do happen along the lines of other gender dynamics, but primarily speaking). In a world built specifically to be sexism free, both a young woman and a young man could walk down a dark street at night with much more equal amounts of trepidation. A woman in a heterosexual relationship would have just as little fear of violence by her partner as a man would. I guess it's tiring to see dynamics to the contrary of this show up readily in fantasy stories.
But I do believe there has been a lot of digression, and I think maybe this thread has lost the entirety of its point.
But there is an increased threat for women purely because of being a woman.
And I think exploration of the blind spot was really what I was going for, but it's been a little convoluted, as I probably should have expectedAhem, apologies to anyone who's seen my previous one line post. That was unduly snippy of me. On a hopefully more positive note, it has generally been my personal experience that seeing works that feature experiences vastly different from my own can be incredibly useful as a source of inspiration and to potentially highlight blind spots in my own work. It is the nature of writers to take from a thousand different inspirations and smoosh them together to make our work. Seeing such works can readily supply more toys for the toy box, and I'm not sure how you can argue that's a bad thing.
You say plausibility. I say willing suspension of disbelief.
Well, the reason I asked the question about what Jasnah meant by the patriarchy is because to me this is about world building. To me it isn't enough to say that I want to have a more level gender-based playing field. I have to think through what that would mean. It's people who misuse power, not a gender. It's people who mistreat others.
The OP started us off with sexism in fantasy worlds. internalized misogyny, and how do we level the playing field? I read in that, my social responsibility to create some type of change (maybe that is off base).