I'm not sure if this quite constitutes a "rant" or not...

[sholio]

It's just something that's been vaguely bothering me in perusing episode reactions over the last few weeks -- well, all right, over the last few years to be honest, but it's been more noticeable lately for some reason. It has to do with objections to the way men are characterized on SGA.

Basically, it appears that at least some of the fandom object to the guys of SGA being depicted as, well, guys: divvying up alien princesses, competing to impress a girl and the like.

I hate to tell you folks, but this not only reads as perfectly normal guy behavior to me, but it is just the very tip of the iceberg -- if anything, SGA is sanitizing for television like whoa. I've had plenty of opportunity in my life to observe men of all ages in their natural habitat, i.e. sans women (or at least women they felt like censoring themselves around), and, yes, I can pretty much assure you that most of your boyfriends, husbands, brothers, and male friends really do get together amongst themselves and rate women based on breast size, compete over who has the biggest/best/most guns/cars/other male status symbols, show off in stupid ways to attract the attention of the nearest female thing, make goddawful sexist jokes, and so forth.

And, no, it's not just blue-collar guys that do this -- geeks are just as bad, if not worse. Just more erudite about it. *g*

I'm not sure if the basic objection is the belief that men don't really do this, or if fandom is well aware that men do it and the characters are probably doing it off-camera but we just don't want to see them do it. And I'll fully admit that there's a definite gender imbalance in the way that sort of thing is depicted -- i.e. most women are just as crude amongst themselves and objectify men just as badly (*cough*FANDOM*cough*), but it's not something you typically see on a show like SGA. (This was one of the reasons I liked Trio so much; we finally got to see the women doing a little of that!) But I guess I run into the Wall of Bafflement when I start seeing the implication that the writers of SGA are doing something wrong for depicting their male characters acting like just about every man I've ever known. Maybe I'd be able to see the point more easily if the boys of SGA mistreated women, or had trouble taking orders from women, but they don't; John, for example, seems to have a perfectly easygoing friendship with Teyla, and no trouble at all accepting Elizabeth or Sam as his boss. (Well, no more trouble than he does with any authority figure.) The one real exception I can think of is Rodney's dismissive attitude towards Sam, but it's not specifically her -- he's just the same way with Zelenka or any other scientist around him, regardless of gender.

I guess I'm also hugely biased because I actually like SGA as, basically, the Red Green Show in space. That's a big part of its appeal for me -- I crack up watching grown men behaving like the little boys that I am absolutely positive my husband and all my male relatives would turn into if you gave them a spaceship and a big box of alien robot parts. I can certainly recognize that this might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I don't want my guys sanitized and watered down, and I get a little knee-jerky defensive of them, especially since they don't seem to have any behavioral problems other than acting like overgrown adolescents as soon as the womens' backs are turned, which is exactly what most of the guys I've known do, too.

(Though I could totally go for more of the girls being girls, as well as the guys being guys.)

Comments

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

It depends on circumstance, of course, and the more power that an individual wields over another, the less excusable it becomes.

I think this might be the core of the problem - because many women perceive *all* men as having power over them, as granted by society, and that's what they react to.

I was thinking about this last night (...er, morning) as I went to bed, and I think (again, talking out of my hat here, not versed enough in the theories to argue it properly) that a lot of perception of the dangers of objectification is correlated to the perception of equality. If you are comfortable with yourself and your sexuality, and comfortable around men and do not feel threatened (socially or physically) by them, then men expressing their sexual desires and attraction in crude terms doesn't bother you. If you're offended, it's entirely on a moral basis - similar to how you feel about slashers objectifying men, it's not something you're really into, but the only pressure is peer pressure, and that's up to you to fight.

But that's not true of all women - many women feel, not just offended, but threatened when they hear men objectifying - and sometimes they're 'oversensitive', but a lot of times they've got good reason; they might have been assaulted or abused or otherwise struggled with the more extreme end of the gender divide. To a woman who has been raped, hearing guys joking about gang-rape may never be funny, because she has no way of knowing if it's really a joke, or an actual declaration of intent. And there are a lot of women who do feel so threatened, even in modern society; while as there are very few men who feel so threatened by women.

This brings up an interesting point, I think, in a case like SGA, where the society is presented as totally egalitarian - in SG-1 Sam's gender came up a few times, but in SGA they're pretty much never encountered anyone, even off-world, who questioned, say, Elizabeth's leadership abilities because of her sex, or Teyla's fighting skills because she's got boobs. In an equal society, open expression of sexuality and attraction threatens no one, so it's not anything to be offended by. (This is why Rodney doesn't come across as *that* sexist to me, for all his drooling over VR-Wraith and watching asses - he works with people who are totally confident of themselves and their abilities regardless of gender. None of the female scientists under him fear ogling will lead to rape, or refusing a sexual offer will get them fired; they know it's harmless and unrelated to their status as employees or as people.)

The problem with SGA is that while they live in an idealized world where it's all okay, we don't live in that same world, and there's a danger in pretending our world is as safe as theirs, when it's not.

[sholio]

And here's where I feel like I should back off a bit, because I certainly don't want to write off other peoples' experiences as invalid. It's simply -- so alien to me, honestly, to see the world that way, that I have trouble putting myself in the other person's place. I can try to imagine what it might feel like to see men that way, and I do recognize that that viewpoint exists and that it's perfectly valid for people who hold it, but I can't viscerally, emotionally understand it -- and I'm not willing to write off my own experiences as invalid, or my own morality as inconsequential, or to change the way I do things based on how other people think they ought to be done. So I think we've gone about as far as we can down this particular track.

... though SGA-as-egalitarian-society is a thread that's probably worth exploring; I'm just not sure whether this is the discussion for it. The thing is, the egalitarian society in SGA is close enough to the society that I experience in my day-to-day life not to ping "off" to me. From a pure anthropological standpoint, I would really like to see more conflict between the Atlanteans and the societies they meet regarding gender roles and all of that, but since we don't get it on the show, I write it in my head. However, the rough-and-tumble gender-equality of SGA is pretty much accurate for my general workplace and real-world experiences, allowing for a bit of idealism -- but it's the sort of idealism that I really don't mind seeing on TV. Though it might be interesting to explore less idealized Atlantis workplace dynamics in fic, come to think of it ... *ponders*

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

It's simply -- so alien to me, honestly, to see the world that way, that I have trouble putting myself in the other person's place.

The truth is, you, and Tipper below, and myself as well - we're privileged. We grew up with families and teachers and friends who taught us to have self-respect, who taught us never to doubt ourselves because of our sex, who taught us that men and women are equal even if different. And we mostly are lucky enough to be around men who, even if they admire women and do the "guy" thing, don't see themselves as innately superior, who don't feel they have a right to dominate or patronize us just because they're men. When we do meet men who feel this way, we're confident enough in ourselves and our standing to write them off - to see them as old-fashioned, abnormal, not representative of most men or our society as a whole.

I probably would've easily agreed with you about all of this before I came to Japan; before I came here I tended to see a lot of feminist types as oversensitive, as still fighting battles we'd really already won. I don't have the luxury of seeing it like that anymore, not when I see how easily and comfortably so many of the Western guys who come to Japan fall into the Japanese mindset, after hearing the way they talk about female students, or picking girls up in bars. The English-conversation teachers' rooms here are not egalitarian places, and I've found myself having to listen to conversations and jokes that left me deeply uncomfortable, without being able to say anything, because I was outnumbered, and if I hadn't either ignored it or smiled along with it, I'd have been targeted; I'd have had my attributes discussed in front of me and my ass pinched, and I couldn't complain because "boys will be boys". I'm living in a place now that if I walk through a thick crowd, my breasts will be groped, and I just have to live with that because there's a lot of crowds here and I can't avoid all of them.

I'm finding myself feeling uncomfortable around men in a way I never did before, and possibly sexist jokes sometimes hit me now in a way that they didn't before. When I'm with guys I know, I'm fine with it (my brother & sister & I together will get incredibly crass!); but with guys I don't know - I used to just assume, until proven otherwise, that they came from the same place as my brother, as a lot of guys I know, that they're using sexist lingo because it's fun, but fundamentally they accept women as equals. I don't assume that as automatically now.

...Er. Yes. Like I said. I understand where you're coming from, because I used to be in that same place. It's a better place to be. But I don't think we can accept objectification as innocuous expression of healthy sexuality until we're all in that place, and right now, we're not.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

--Er, I just want to clarify - as shows go, I don't think SGA is especially objectionable in its characterization of men; I'm not usually personally bothered by the boys' juvenile behavior, even when it's mildly sexist. Hell, it cracks me up a lot.

At the same time, I don't think that the people who are disturbed by it are necessarily overreacting. The show's not the worst out there by a long shot, but it definitely could be better. (And I wonder if some people are especially disturbed because when it comes to seeing women as equals - the writers write strong female characters in positions of authority, and the guys accepting them as equals; but they don't have any women in their writing room or on their production staff. They aren't practicing what they preach. And maybe it's just coincidence, that they've never found a girl who's a good fit for their boys' club - but it might be a sign that they actually aren't comfortable working with women; that the characters' mild sexism is symptomatic of bigger issues in the people behind those characters.)

[sholio]

You make a lot of sense -- and, truly, I'm sorry that you've had (and are still having) those experiences. I know I'm privileged and that I've been lucky -- and in some cases, have made a deliberate and conscious decision not to let the bastards drag me down (my father, for example, was in many ways an emotionally manipulative ass, who laughed at me for going to college -- "What are you going to study, cooking?" Feh. Jerk. But if I let him taint my interactions with other men, that's the best way to ensure that I never get his voice out of my head! And he's definitely an aberration in my experiences with the male gender, not the rule.).

I'm not going around to other people's posts and trying to argue them out of what they see. That would be making a grade-A ass of myself. For one thing, I do recognize (moreso after this discussion) that a lot of people who have a problem with it probably are reacting because it reflects unpleasant experiences that they or people they love have had, and I would never dream of telling them to their face that they're wrong or that they shouldn't discuss it, in their journals, with like-minded people.

On the other hand, I get the impression from the response to this post that there are quite a few fen who agree with me and who feel validated by having this said -- and I think it's worth saying because of that. I mean ... if I see fen elsewhere ripping on one of the things I like about the show, I think I'm perfectly entitled to defend it from my own journal and present things as *I* see them.

And I do feel that, especially considering all of the sexism and discrimination that does still exist, it's necessary for us (women) to learn where to draw the line, too -- to be able to distinguish between things that hurt us, and things that we have to be willing to concede to other people because they're autonomous human beings, too. I think that's why I'm wanting to defend the SGA boys here -- it'd be different if they were making the women around them uncomfortable or unhappy, as opposed to being themselves on private time. I do think that Rodney's behavior in "48 Hours", and to a lesser degree "Redemption", was unconscionably sexist (though, in "48 Hours" at least, he did get smacked down pretty hard), and John's reaction to the "girl" team in Whispers was highly inappropriate as their boss. (But subsequently, he seemed to be able to work with them comfortably.) To me, there's a very big difference between that, and the "cute little ... smile" scene in Tao (where it's just three people of the same sex working together, chatting about the opposite sex, like people do) or John and Rodney calling dibs on the princesses (and subsequently getting smacked down, by the show, too -- DORKS!).