Oddly enough, I'm having trouble thinking of one. I'm sure you can, so I'll ask you for an example.
The one that immediately springs to mind is the superhero story I'm working on that's about teenage boys. (Whether you want to accept this is a *good* example is up to you). The main character is male and just a touch self-centered. Aside from his mother, the only people he has yet chosen to have play significant roles in his life are also male. There are females in the story but, aside from the mother, they're all bit players, which means there's no substance to the roles. Teenagers tend to group up by gender, so writing about a male character will net a story with more males, while writing about a female character will net a story with more females. (Obviously this isn't a rule, as I was the girl with all the male friends, but that still validates my point: if someone were writing a story about my teenage life, there would be precious few substantive female roles in it.)
On a more practical note: the classes I teach are all male dominated. I get at least once class every semester with one female besides me in the room. This last semester the most balanced class was 19 males and 5 females. Is this discrimination? Perhaps. For the males. It's an intro class in English, and due to historical gender inequities in how *guys* are taught humanities classes, they are the ones who don't test out of the class.
does the story (and thus its creator) value women enough to look at what they were doing at the time, if they were physically excluded from a certain place?
What if what women were doing at the time isn't relevant to the story? Why must ever story be bent and twisted to showcase the women? A story should be about what the story is about. Shoehorning a particular group into the story to emphasis their importance/existence is also a negative as it gives attention to the character only for being a member of a group.
If you have a heroine who supposedly has the power to kill creatures of the night and use a semi-auto, but yet the only discussions she seems to have with other females are about shoes and purses, then you have a problem.
Why? If you had a hero who supposedly had the power to kill creatures of the night and use a semi-auto, and yet the only discussions he seemed to have with other males is beer and football, a lot of people would view him as a rounded character.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-09 04:27 pm (UTC)The one that immediately springs to mind is the superhero story I'm working on that's about teenage boys. (Whether you want to accept this is a *good* example is up to you). The main character is male and just a touch self-centered. Aside from his mother, the only people he has yet chosen to have play significant roles in his life are also male. There are females in the story but, aside from the mother, they're all bit players, which means there's no substance to the roles. Teenagers tend to group up by gender, so writing about a male character will net a story with more males, while writing about a female character will net a story with more females. (Obviously this isn't a rule, as I was the girl with all the male friends, but that still validates my point: if someone were writing a story about my teenage life, there would be precious few substantive female roles in it.)
On a more practical note: the classes I teach are all male dominated. I get at least once class every semester with one female besides me in the room. This last semester the most balanced class was 19 males and 5 females. Is this discrimination? Perhaps. For the males. It's an intro class in English, and due to historical gender inequities in how *guys* are taught humanities classes, they are the ones who don't test out of the class.
does the story (and thus its creator) value women enough to look at what they were doing at the time, if they were physically excluded from a certain place?
What if what women were doing at the time isn't relevant to the story? Why must ever story be bent and twisted to showcase the women? A story should be about what the story is about. Shoehorning a particular group into the story to emphasis their importance/existence is also a negative as it gives attention to the character only for being a member of a group.
If you have a heroine who supposedly has the power to kill creatures of the night and use a semi-auto, but yet the only discussions she seems to have with other females are about shoes and purses, then you have a problem.
Why? If you had a hero who supposedly had the power to kill creatures of the night and use a semi-auto, and yet the only discussions he seemed to have with other males is beer and football, a lot of people would view him as a rounded character.