Sadly, it's this type of behavior that makes me stay far away from fan conventions. I love the idea of mingling with people who are just as in love with a fandom as I am, but I am often disgusted by the reception that female fans give female characters.
(I'm making the assumption that most of the fans telling Dawn to shut up were female.)
That instinct(?) that many women have to form a pack with other women with the sole purpose of actively despising another female is one that I never understood nor formed myself... which made me the hapless victim of it quite a few times.
I wonder if it is essentially an act of self-misogyny. If you look at the female characters who are hated by female fans, they tend to be ones who most reflect an imperfect nature of women that we have been taught these past few generations to hate. Dawn is a teenage girl with no super powers who suddenly has to face a shit-ton of crap being thrown at her all at once. How does she react? Like a teenage girl with no super powers. Because she falls apart like just about any human would do when put in her situation rather than tough it through like some sort of goddess, we hate her. Why? Because we can relate to her and it's a mirror that shows us an image of our own vulnerabilities that we don't like to be reminded that we have.
Sure, Buffy was also a teenager who had to face just as much (if not more) bad shit being thrown at her, but she also has those awesome super powers under her belt. Most of the time she doesn't have to worry about a lot of the fears that regular woman have lurking in the backs of their minds. However, when she is made vulnerable (read: the attempted rape scene) and human... we don't react well. The reason that women hate some female characters with such passion is not because the character is badly written or annoying, it's because, whether we realise it or not, that character's storyline triggers a lot of deep-set fears that evoke an emotional responses in us that we interpret as the character being annoying, whiny, stupid, weak, etc., when it is actually a little voice in ourselves going, "I'm afraid of being kidnapped, I'm afraid of being raped, I'm afraid of losing my mother, I'm afraid that I'm not as good as my sister, I'm afraid that people don't like me, I want to be invisible, I want attention, I want sex, I want to cry, I have bad days, I think about suicide, I'm not powerful enough, I'm not beautiful enough, I'm not smart enough, I just want to be left alone, why does nobody leave me alone?"
Women are now raised with the idea that admitting anything other than full confidence in ourselves makes us weak, so we keep these thoughts inside and suppressed, and we idolize female characters who defeat these weaknesses and hate those who succumb to their fears.
This rant was brought to you by my Moka pot and my newfound ability to make a four-shot latte at home.
This needs to be a song lyric; reading that was like listening to Tori Amos the first time, and feeling that somebody was taking notes in one's own skull.
An addendum to your observations. It isn't just the female character falling apart or acting weak that gets a hostile audience reaction; it is displaying those traits, and for a lack of a better term, "getting away with it" that gets hostility.
By "getting away with it" I mean displaying vulnerability or making a mistake and getting help, receiving comfort, or at the very least, not being shamed, bullied, etc.
I am not all that familiar with Buffy other than the main premise, so I don't know if Dawn "got away with it" (did the Scoobies look after her?), but for some reason the comments in the LfT entry WRT Dawn remind me of watching news footage of the suburban school shooting of the late 1990s, and not being mad at the shooter, or adults who should have been paying attention, but at shaken, sobbing students being comforted by their peers.
I didn't say anything to anyone at the time, b/c of the more than slightly inappropriate nature of my reaction, but looking back, I now know that what I was feeling was jealousy at those students being able to express fear and hurt and be comforted.
Granted, I didn't experience a shooting spree until I got to college, my crap in my teens was standard issue bullying and long-untreated depression that I couldn't articulate, and not near the scale that the kids at Columbine and elsewhere went through, but I still feel that twinge of "what am I doing that doesn't make me good enough?/what makes her so damn special anyway?" on a fairly regular basis. Probably also the reason why my laptop HD groans under the weight of my H/C fanfic collection as well.
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Date: 2011-02-20 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 12:20 am (UTC)(I'm making the assumption that most of the fans telling Dawn to shut up were female.)
That instinct(?) that many women have to form a pack with other women with the sole purpose of actively despising another female is one that I never understood nor formed myself... which made me the hapless victim of it quite a few times.
I wonder if it is essentially an act of self-misogyny. If you look at the female characters who are hated by female fans, they tend to be ones who most reflect an imperfect nature of women that we have been taught these past few generations to hate. Dawn is a teenage girl with no super powers who suddenly has to face a shit-ton of crap being thrown at her all at once. How does she react? Like a teenage girl with no super powers. Because she falls apart like just about any human would do when put in her situation rather than tough it through like some sort of goddess, we hate her. Why? Because we can relate to her and it's a mirror that shows us an image of our own vulnerabilities that we don't like to be reminded that we have.
Sure, Buffy was also a teenager who had to face just as much (if not more) bad shit being thrown at her, but she also has those awesome super powers under her belt. Most of the time she doesn't have to worry about a lot of the fears that regular woman have lurking in the backs of their minds. However, when she is made vulnerable (read: the attempted rape scene) and human... we don't react well.
The reason that women hate some female characters with such passion is not because the character is badly written or annoying, it's because, whether we realise it or not, that character's storyline triggers a lot of deep-set fears that evoke an emotional responses in us that we interpret as the character being annoying, whiny, stupid, weak, etc., when it is actually a little voice in ourselves going, "I'm afraid of being kidnapped, I'm afraid of being raped, I'm afraid of losing my mother, I'm afraid that I'm not as good as my sister, I'm afraid that people don't like me, I want to be invisible, I want attention, I want sex, I want to cry, I have bad days, I think about suicide, I'm not powerful enough, I'm not beautiful enough, I'm not smart enough, I just want to be left alone, why does nobody leave me alone?"
Women are now raised with the idea that admitting anything other than full confidence in ourselves makes us weak, so we keep these thoughts inside and suppressed, and we idolize female characters who defeat these weaknesses and hate those who succumb to their fears.
This rant was brought to you by my Moka pot and my newfound ability to make a four-shot latte at home.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 07:31 pm (UTC)This needs to be a song lyric; reading that was like listening to Tori Amos the first time, and feeling that somebody was taking notes in one's own skull.
An addendum to your observations. It isn't just the female character falling apart or acting weak that gets a hostile audience reaction; it is displaying those traits, and for a lack of a better term, "getting away with it" that gets hostility.
By "getting away with it" I mean displaying vulnerability or making a mistake and getting help, receiving comfort, or at the very least, not being shamed, bullied, etc.
I am not all that familiar with Buffy other than the main premise, so I don't know if Dawn "got away with it" (did the Scoobies look after her?), but for some reason the comments in the LfT entry WRT Dawn remind me of watching news footage of the suburban school shooting of the late 1990s, and not being mad at the shooter, or adults who should have been paying attention, but at shaken, sobbing students being comforted by their peers.
I didn't say anything to anyone at the time, b/c of the more than slightly inappropriate nature of my reaction, but looking back, I now know that what I was feeling was jealousy at those students being able to express fear and hurt and be comforted.
Granted, I didn't experience a shooting spree until I got to college, my crap in my teens was standard issue bullying and long-untreated depression that I couldn't articulate, and not near the scale that the kids at Columbine and elsewhere went through, but I still feel that twinge of "what am I doing that doesn't make me good enough?/what makes her so damn special anyway?" on a fairly regular basis. Probably also the reason why my laptop HD groans under the weight of my H/C fanfic collection as well.