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bookgazing) wrote2011-11-13 11:44 pm
bookgazing) wrote2011-11-13 11:44 pm
Entry tags:
Male relationships in media: Something is missing from my order
I’ve just written a post about my recent attempt to see more, smart films (going up later this week); where I talk about my current film crush ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’. I loved, that film, loved it, saw it twice in fact, but mixed in with the intense love I felt for ‘TTSS’, I found a little bit of dismay. The film features gay romantic relationships, which are so often missing from mainstream film, genuine friendships between men and scenes showing the vulnerability of hard, otherwise traditionally manly characters. Unfortunately it also lacks any substantial female involvement and presents the main character’s wife as an object – the viewer is for some reason never allowed to hear her speak, or see her face, but they do get a shot of her ass being groped.
Over the years I’ve worked my way around to a stance where I can be comfortable with my own enjoyment of media that contains a certain level of casual, questionable socio-political content. I notice, I critique, I dislike and then I enjoy other things about those creative projects. So, my mixed feelings about TTSS aren’t exactly a surprise or a concern to me now.
What does worry me is that TTSS’s mix of re-written male relationships, different models of masculinity and absence of female characters is becoming an overwhelming pattern in media. It seems that increasingly new types of male relationships can only be portrayed in films and books which don’t feature female characters. If female characters appear, male relationships with other men become less involved, for some reason. It’s like creators can’t handle making men care about men, at the same time that they make men and women care about each other.
There’s a growing collection of media that features men having all kinds of relationships with other men. This media often examines subjects that are usually depicted as full of overt, traditional masculinity like sports, crime organisations, war, the drink ‘til you puke scene and growing up as a boy. There have always been media sources like this that deviate from traditional stereotypes about masculinity to examine the diversity of how real men act and grow, but right now I think we’re seeing an exciting increase in the frequency of books, films and tv shows that portray men and male relationships differently. Recent films like ‘The Eagle’ and ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ question the idea of men as emotionless beings, devoid of tender emotion for other men and they also avoid showing male self-growth and happiness as entirely tied up with straight sex.
It could be argued that the bro-mance story, the rom-com replacement of recent years, was the media type which showed that alternative stories about male friendship and development were ok and could be popular. I’m not exactly sure that I’d support the idea that the bro-mance is the greatest living fictional investigation into male friendships. However, I do think the popularity of some bro-mances signals public interest in alternative model of maleness. People want to see male characters who differ from the isolated, narcissist, murderously competitive characters which populated some much heralded lit-fic of the 80s and 90s and they want to see them interact in diverse ways with other men. Whatever has brought about the resurgent interest in new relationship models for mal characters, it’s produced some stunning results, with books, films and tv series now forming themselves around significant male relationships of all kinds (siblings, parent/child, friendships and romances).
I love this development. I will watch anything that even hints at a serious relationship of any kind between men, because I’m just not privileged to see that kind of genuine interaction between men in my world. Still, I’m concerned that these male relationships do not occur alongside the inclusion of significant female characters. Here’s part of a comment I made on Renay’s review of ‘Havemercy’:
I wrote that (terribly typed comment), after she said in her review:
’ I would like to have my awesome gay romance that doesn't also feature many of the male characters verbally abusing woman and equating gay sex with femininity, as if being female is a terrible, terrible thing.’
It seems that at the moment viewers can have great male relationships and no female characters, or decent female characters (decent could cover a wide range of things like being named, having a significant, or large role, non-stereotypical) in an environment where there are no important male relationships. There are few exceptions that bridge this divide successfully from what I can see. ‘The Big Bang Theory’ gives the viewer both significant male relationships and lots of female characters, tons in fact, but many of those female characters continue to push problematic stereotypes about women (despite the ladies in that series being awesome characters). ‘Brokeback Mountain’ by Annie Proulx allows the viewer to see something of the wives whose husbands abandon them emotionally. ‘False Colours’ by Alex Beecroft, makes space for the feelings of a wife of a gay sailor, as well as allowing for his affair with another man to have meant something. ‘Scrubs’ is kind of 50/50, but does contain one very prominent male friendship and central female characters. There are almost certainly more examples (maybe ‘Smallville’ fits), but honestly I feel there are more counter-examples: more romances where the male character has no male friends, more straight male leads, more men competing with other men over a woman, or a promotion.
Why the divide? Well, I think that the split between valuable male relationships and noteworthy female characters has some complicated roots. Aja over at bookshop made a post ages ago called ‘The Flip Side (Pickering, why can’t a woman be more like a man?)’, which discusses internalised misogyny in fandom. She argues that when fan-fiction brings male characters together in a romantic partnership it often does so at the expense of the female characters. It’s thought provoking stuff:
Aja sees the removal of ladies from the scene as a consolidation of sexism in a (largely) female populated media sphere. In fandom many women are creating a more diverse image of male relationships by inserting gay male relationships into media, when they are largely missing from mainstream media. As a function of having to pair male protagonists that various media canons code as straight, in order to subvert the straight mainstream focus, they may be removing women from view. As women are largely written into mainstream media sources as the love interest of a straight man, it’s almost inevitable that rewriting those relationships to form gay partnerships will eliminate female characters.
I sense that the removal of women to enhance subvert dominant ideas about male relationships may be replicated in mainstream media, especially in film, a largely male dominated industry. Media creators want to include more diverse relationships between men. In order to shift the mainstream focus, which has primarily been on relationships between straight men and women, they sideline female characters to make room for male relationships. In the rest of my comment to Renay I said:
Although I’m all for diverse representation when it comes to men, I hope you know me well enough to understand that I’m not justifying kicking women out to benefit the men. Ultimately it is hard for creators, born into a particular world which privileges particular prejudices and focuses to resist the lure of the dominant narrative. Even when those creators, like the awesome ladies writing male/male fan-fic, try to subvert one set of mainstream values it can be hard to avoid corresponding with a different taught privilege (lady characters are less important) while doing so. It’s especially hard to avoid pushing one group up above the other when society sets two underprivileged groups in almost direct competition. I’m not ruling out deliberate sexism being the reason why so many mainstream media sources featuring alternative male relationships contain fewer, or poorly represented women, but I’d guess there’s a fair amount of subconscious confusion going into these media sources as well. I’m also saying that even though the cause of this female erasure may be unconscious, some misogynistic results still occur. People who love to watch and read media are still left with sources that put the dudes ahead of the ladies, even if this time there’s a wider range of manly relationships being represented.
Getting back to what Aja was saying about fandom creators and internalised sexism, I think it’s important for viewers like me who want more diverse male representations to take a good look at themselves. If art really is partly designed to reflect reality my views could be shaping media and I would like to make sure my reactions to media aren’t covered in sticky misogyny. Taking a hard squint I finished up my comment to Renay by saying:
Yep, that’s not the pretty side of my brain and it’s not a constant idea whenever I encounter female characters (hello, I love the ladies) but this kind of thinking does appear in my head sometimes and it’s hard to deal with. While mainstream media continues to cast female characters as default love interests for straight men, refuses to make a space for gay romance and sets female characters as the only acceptable place for straight men to deposit all their emotions I am going to find myself placed in default opposition to some female characters when they first appear. I want to see different kinds of male relationships and many creators often erect barriers built of female characters performing traditional female roles (listener, care giver, default romantic interest) in strategic places that seem to prevent these male relationships from blossoming.
Of course more diverse representation for women would partially solve this problem. If female characters were treated better, given more varied roles and treated as real people, not just listeners for boys to pour their feelings out to, there would be more occasion for varied male relationships to be shown. Empower the women, unshackle the men and all that, PS MORE STORIES ABOUT EVERYTHING. Still, I’d be a pretty poor feminist if I threw up my hands and said ‘Well, society has screwed me, I’d best just go along with the default and lady hate away, occasionally stopping to remind creators to do THEIR jobs better’. I have to take responsibility for my own views, which is what I try to do by providing as balanced critiques as my privilege filters allow when it comes to films like TTSS. I try to educate myself out of misogynistic stances, while also calling for more diverse male and female representation, in order to help present a reality that art can reflect back without obscuring the ladies. Sometimes I can work things out on my own and sometimes I have to be shown the way by feminists with way more knowledge, who’ve been through all this before.
It’s tricky to know whether my views can inform the way that men and women appear in media; whether my own feelings towards male and female characters can increase change. As we all know from discussions about book marketing sometimes it seems like changing the world will change the marketing, whereas sometimes it seems like the marketing is determined to reflect a distorted world no matter what change comes. Still, it feels better to try to shape my own thinking in ways that make me a better supporter of female characters AND diverse male relationships. Even knowing that media may take a long time to constantly represent both of the things I want at the same time, I’d rather try than not.
How do you feel about the intersection between diversity of male representation in media that is only about men and media that has both men and women?
Do you think the divide I’ve identified is real?
If you’re looking for more diverse representations of men, are you finding them? Are you seeing the diversity of female character’s role grow as well?
Spill your thoughts in the comments if you’d like.
Over the years I’ve worked my way around to a stance where I can be comfortable with my own enjoyment of media that contains a certain level of casual, questionable socio-political content. I notice, I critique, I dislike and then I enjoy other things about those creative projects. So, my mixed feelings about TTSS aren’t exactly a surprise or a concern to me now.
What does worry me is that TTSS’s mix of re-written male relationships, different models of masculinity and absence of female characters is becoming an overwhelming pattern in media. It seems that increasingly new types of male relationships can only be portrayed in films and books which don’t feature female characters. If female characters appear, male relationships with other men become less involved, for some reason. It’s like creators can’t handle making men care about men, at the same time that they make men and women care about each other.
There’s a growing collection of media that features men having all kinds of relationships with other men. This media often examines subjects that are usually depicted as full of overt, traditional masculinity like sports, crime organisations, war, the drink ‘til you puke scene and growing up as a boy. There have always been media sources like this that deviate from traditional stereotypes about masculinity to examine the diversity of how real men act and grow, but right now I think we’re seeing an exciting increase in the frequency of books, films and tv shows that portray men and male relationships differently. Recent films like ‘The Eagle’ and ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ question the idea of men as emotionless beings, devoid of tender emotion for other men and they also avoid showing male self-growth and happiness as entirely tied up with straight sex.
It could be argued that the bro-mance story, the rom-com replacement of recent years, was the media type which showed that alternative stories about male friendship and development were ok and could be popular. I’m not exactly sure that I’d support the idea that the bro-mance is the greatest living fictional investigation into male friendships. However, I do think the popularity of some bro-mances signals public interest in alternative model of maleness. People want to see male characters who differ from the isolated, narcissist, murderously competitive characters which populated some much heralded lit-fic of the 80s and 90s and they want to see them interact in diverse ways with other men. Whatever has brought about the resurgent interest in new relationship models for mal characters, it’s produced some stunning results, with books, films and tv series now forming themselves around significant male relationships of all kinds (siblings, parent/child, friendships and romances).
I love this development. I will watch anything that even hints at a serious relationship of any kind between men, because I’m just not privileged to see that kind of genuine interaction between men in my world. Still, I’m concerned that these male relationships do not occur alongside the inclusion of significant female characters. Here’s part of a comment I made on Renay’s review of ‘Havemercy’:
'Look,' I am always saying in my head 'it is a great dude story, which doesn't put out the typical dude relationship - dude friendships, dude relationships agh this is so good.' Then I sit down after the haze has passed and realise there were either no good parts for women, or no women at all at my lip starts to tremble.
I wrote that (terribly typed comment), after she said in her review:
It seems that at the moment viewers can have great male relationships and no female characters, or decent female characters (decent could cover a wide range of things like being named, having a significant, or large role, non-stereotypical) in an environment where there are no important male relationships. There are few exceptions that bridge this divide successfully from what I can see. ‘The Big Bang Theory’ gives the viewer both significant male relationships and lots of female characters, tons in fact, but many of those female characters continue to push problematic stereotypes about women (despite the ladies in that series being awesome characters). ‘Brokeback Mountain’ by Annie Proulx allows the viewer to see something of the wives whose husbands abandon them emotionally. ‘False Colours’ by Alex Beecroft, makes space for the feelings of a wife of a gay sailor, as well as allowing for his affair with another man to have meant something. ‘Scrubs’ is kind of 50/50, but does contain one very prominent male friendship and central female characters. There are almost certainly more examples (maybe ‘Smallville’ fits), but honestly I feel there are more counter-examples: more romances where the male character has no male friends, more straight male leads, more men competing with other men over a woman, or a promotion.
Why the divide? Well, I think that the split between valuable male relationships and noteworthy female characters has some complicated roots. Aja over at bookshop made a post ages ago called ‘The Flip Side (Pickering, why can’t a woman be more like a man?)’, which discusses internalised misogyny in fandom. She argues that when fan-fiction brings male characters together in a romantic partnership it often does so at the expense of the female characters. It’s thought provoking stuff:
‘But if we love Gwen so much, why aren't we happy to see her and Arthur so happy together in S2? Don't we love Gwen enough to enjoy her stepping into her role as main character? Or do we only love her enough to shunt her off to the side to be happy with Morgana, so we can all enjoy the lovely Merlin/Arthur slash. And how many post-canon Harry/Draco fics have you read where Ginny got to remain a "strong, proud woman" by coming out and moving in with Luna Lovegood, or conveniently dropping off the face of the earth to play for the Holyhead Harpies? Lovely, lovely Katy Allen, how many times have you been pushed to the side since last May so that Kris could have Adam and you could have... what? Certainly not the respect you deserve. And then there's lovely, lovely Uhura, and I'll just leave that pain to Star Trek Reboot fandom to tell.’
Aja sees the removal of ladies from the scene as a consolidation of sexism in a (largely) female populated media sphere. In fandom many women are creating a more diverse image of male relationships by inserting gay male relationships into media, when they are largely missing from mainstream media. As a function of having to pair male protagonists that various media canons code as straight, in order to subvert the straight mainstream focus, they may be removing women from view. As women are largely written into mainstream media sources as the love interest of a straight man, it’s almost inevitable that rewriting those relationships to form gay partnerships will eliminate female characters.
I sense that the removal of women to enhance subvert dominant ideas about male relationships may be replicated in mainstream media, especially in film, a largely male dominated industry. Media creators want to include more diverse relationships between men. In order to shift the mainstream focus, which has primarily been on relationships between straight men and women, they sideline female characters to make room for male relationships. In the rest of my comment to Renay I said:
It's like...it's like a whole lot of people don't know how to write stories any differently. If there are ladies there has to be heterosexual romance because that's how things are done and the romance almost has to become the focus (so these kind of storywriters seem to think). So the best way to shift the focus onto the dudes and create totally different ways for them to have relationships with other dudes is...? Oh right, remove the ladies. And then somewhere tangled up in there is that if there are women the dudes have to fall back into these misogynistic stereotypes/live in misogynistic worlds. We can't have it all apparently, that would be an afront to realism or something. Ugh David Levithan where are you with your smart commentary?
Although I’m all for diverse representation when it comes to men, I hope you know me well enough to understand that I’m not justifying kicking women out to benefit the men. Ultimately it is hard for creators, born into a particular world which privileges particular prejudices and focuses to resist the lure of the dominant narrative. Even when those creators, like the awesome ladies writing male/male fan-fic, try to subvert one set of mainstream values it can be hard to avoid corresponding with a different taught privilege (lady characters are less important) while doing so. It’s especially hard to avoid pushing one group up above the other when society sets two underprivileged groups in almost direct competition. I’m not ruling out deliberate sexism being the reason why so many mainstream media sources featuring alternative male relationships contain fewer, or poorly represented women, but I’d guess there’s a fair amount of subconscious confusion going into these media sources as well. I’m also saying that even though the cause of this female erasure may be unconscious, some misogynistic results still occur. People who love to watch and read media are still left with sources that put the dudes ahead of the ladies, even if this time there’s a wider range of manly relationships being represented.
Getting back to what Aja was saying about fandom creators and internalised sexism, I think it’s important for viewers like me who want more diverse male representations to take a good look at themselves. If art really is partly designed to reflect reality my views could be shaping media and I would like to make sure my reactions to media aren’t covered in sticky misogyny. Taking a hard squint I finished up my comment to Renay by saying:
But at the same time my brain totally buys into the idea that to have the awesome dudes with feelings for dudes stories we need an absence of ladies. It is broken Renay, society broke my brain and now it is weird! But as soon as I see the lady walk on, I know how conventional plotting goes, I know she's going to become a romance object and I just so want gay male characters upfront, or just dudes who aren't hard and unbending in their relationships with other men that I almost groan when a girl shows up in any kind of male buddy movie. Argh do not like about myself!
Yep, that’s not the pretty side of my brain and it’s not a constant idea whenever I encounter female characters (hello, I love the ladies) but this kind of thinking does appear in my head sometimes and it’s hard to deal with. While mainstream media continues to cast female characters as default love interests for straight men, refuses to make a space for gay romance and sets female characters as the only acceptable place for straight men to deposit all their emotions I am going to find myself placed in default opposition to some female characters when they first appear. I want to see different kinds of male relationships and many creators often erect barriers built of female characters performing traditional female roles (listener, care giver, default romantic interest) in strategic places that seem to prevent these male relationships from blossoming.
Of course more diverse representation for women would partially solve this problem. If female characters were treated better, given more varied roles and treated as real people, not just listeners for boys to pour their feelings out to, there would be more occasion for varied male relationships to be shown. Empower the women, unshackle the men and all that, PS MORE STORIES ABOUT EVERYTHING. Still, I’d be a pretty poor feminist if I threw up my hands and said ‘Well, society has screwed me, I’d best just go along with the default and lady hate away, occasionally stopping to remind creators to do THEIR jobs better’. I have to take responsibility for my own views, which is what I try to do by providing as balanced critiques as my privilege filters allow when it comes to films like TTSS. I try to educate myself out of misogynistic stances, while also calling for more diverse male and female representation, in order to help present a reality that art can reflect back without obscuring the ladies. Sometimes I can work things out on my own and sometimes I have to be shown the way by feminists with way more knowledge, who’ve been through all this before.
It’s tricky to know whether my views can inform the way that men and women appear in media; whether my own feelings towards male and female characters can increase change. As we all know from discussions about book marketing sometimes it seems like changing the world will change the marketing, whereas sometimes it seems like the marketing is determined to reflect a distorted world no matter what change comes. Still, it feels better to try to shape my own thinking in ways that make me a better supporter of female characters AND diverse male relationships. Even knowing that media may take a long time to constantly represent both of the things I want at the same time, I’d rather try than not.
How do you feel about the intersection between diversity of male representation in media that is only about men and media that has both men and women?
Do you think the divide I’ve identified is real?
If you’re looking for more diverse representations of men, are you finding them? Are you seeing the diversity of female character’s role grow as well?
Spill your thoughts in the comments if you’d like.
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I am so interested in The Monstrumologist series, because it sounds right up my alley re boys, dreams and stories, but it makes me sad to hear that there are no decent parts for ladies. I totally agree I don't think adding women in has to change the dynamic of the way men act towards each other (although I do think from experience that once someone gets a partner things do change between friends, but the change doesn't have to be for the worse/the depleting of the relationship). It's just so many people are caught up in sticky story traditions & female gender roles that authors shift the dynamics themselves, creating self-fulfilling prophecies.
It would also be interesting to see if and how female friendships shift significantly in novels with straight romantic narratives when boys come into town, but we alreday have too many 'needs to be a research project' ideas, so...
PS I'm glad you commented because I was starting to think dreamwidth was not comment friendly/everyone disagreed with this post.
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