I spent some time this weekend gathering up material for more posts of this type.
It didn’t take long.
As a start, here is a radical feminist making a video about “straw feminist tropes”. She whines about a handful of television portrayals of radical feminists and how unrealistic they are, all the while sounding and acting exactly like those “unrealistic” portrayals.
Wow, she really is the cliche.
I’ve found over the years that many cliches are based on reality.
I think it was Nietzsche who pointed out that (paraphrase here) when you go out to hunt monsters make sure you don’t become one. Feminism, like most of the classical liberal movements, started out with good intentions. However as the years went by and anger took hold within some feminist’s minds when the patriarchy didn’t immediately fall to their goddess-power, parts of the women’s lib/feminism movement turned in some from equality between the sexes to misandry. Stereotypes have a kernel of reality from which they emerged, and we have Marcy Darcy and Ms. Ironbox on television because the feminist movement had Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin peddle misandry as pro-women/feminist thought. And feminists REALLY hate it when you point this out.
I’m not so bugged by the imaginary worlds of Townsville or Veorinca Mars’ college campus being painted as a place where there’s equality between the sexes instead of the reality of what there is outside the television. Why? A- It’s eaiser to start a story with everything being a blank, hunky-dory slate and then introduce conflict instead of taking a complex, already-conflicted social setting and having to establish why it’s this way, THEN adding the outside conflict. It can be done (watch Ken Russell’s “The Devils”), but it’s not easy to do in a 20 or 40 minute TV show. Even if you are working with a 8-9 episode story arc, because you’re still chopping this arc up into 20 or 40 minute blocks. B- because a society in which there is no conflict between the sexes is the ideal being reached for. Lots of writers in Hollywoodland are liberal themselves, liking the idea of equality-between-the-sexes and everyone-gets-a-fair-deal, so it’s natural for their default-setting, blank slate world to have these aspects. That’s their ideal, and they’re projecting it in fiction because they want it to be their ideal reality. The ideal powerful woman is Veronica Mars or the Powerpuff Girls, not the angry feminist or the Femme Fatal characters.
Oh, but we’re not supposed to point that out.