Never changes

[eye_of_a_cat]

With thanks to rivendellrose for linking to this: Total Sci-Fi's list of The 25 Women Who Shook Sci-Fi. Where by 'shook', we mean: 'Some are striking for their leadership and bravery, others for their incredible sexiness, many for both.' The list itself is a bit weird (Rose Tyler at 7? No Firefly characters at all? Barbarella what now? Pfft, whatever), but leaving that aside for a second, let's see if we can spot any general trend in the descriptions:

• "An appealing combination of toughness, self-reliance, vulnerability and sexiness, Ripley is far from a conventional damsel in distress."
• "... and, of course, there’s the slave girl Leia that fanboys will never forget."
• "The image of Leeloo, clad in white strips and boasting flame-red hair, hanging off of a ledge above 23rd Century LA remains one of science fiction cinema’s most arresting moments. Jovovich’s character holds the key to saving Earth no less, and combines an alluring sense of mystery with an unbeatable sexiness." [You're missing a comma there, friend. Try typing with both hands.]
• "She can pull boiling eggs out of a saucepan with her bare hands! She can crush a man’s head with her thighs! Could this robot woman be any more sexy?"
• "Fans will always debate whether the Julie Newmar or Michelle Pfeiffer incarnation of Catwoman is the sexiest..."
• "Posters of the scantily-clad space heroine still adorn bedrooms and living rooms everywhere..."
• "But thanks to images like the much-reproduced one above, movie fans everywhere can’t wait to get another glimpse..."
• "After that she appears as Baltar’s sexy, advice-spewing vision..."

Jesus Christ, fanboys.

To head off the inevitable "what, so men aren't allowed to find women attractive in your feminist utopia?" grumbling that always follows this kind of complaint, I have a reasonable suggestion: TV/film sci-fi fandom magazines can either stop describing female characters predominantly in terms of their sexiness, or start describing male characters the same way. This seems fair. And anyone who would like to protest this on the grounds that women don't find visual stimuli attractive in the same way that men do etc. etc. is kindly invited to think about whether we're all watching Supernatural for the plot.

Comments

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

awww And here I was working myself up to start watching Supernatural. For the plot, of course.

:-)

To get a little more serious, I have some faith in the market system - at least to solve this type of problem. I would have thought that female response to eye candy would have been noticed. And perhaps it has been - on TV, as you (and others on my FL) testify. So why hasn't it been noticed as much on the big screen? (recalls various muscular torso scenes) It hasn't been completely ignored.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

I... really don't have much faith in the market system to fix things like this. It's a self-perpetuating cycle - assume your readers mostly care about women as eye-candy, women will get pissed off and stop reading, your readership demographic will skew even more male, and so on. I stopped buying sci-fi magazines years ago, largely because I got fed up with being invited to join in fanboy drooling sessions every fifth page.

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but women don't seem to stop reading altogether, they simply shift genres, and those genres eventually begin to blend together, until they eventually end up carting pieces of each other around.

The problem with market-based correction is that it's not swift. You have to wait for an impetus to build up that creates an entirely separate market structure, and then for the weight of those two to force them to sag into each other. It can take years when it's short; for the written word it could take decades, and possibly even generations. The market tends to work - just not when it's convenient for it to ever do so.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

I don't think they stop reading in that genre at all, necessarily - they just (well, I just, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one here) drop back from the fandom. Thus: "We know most sci-fi fans are male, because most of the readers of our magazine are male!"

The market tends to work

When all other factors are equal, and when there's no deep-seated pre-existing tendency to cling to a particular belief in the face of the evidence. Alas, this seems to be somewhat of a problem when it comes to such matters - specifically, film and TV. When 50% of your paying viewers are female, and most of your material is still failing the Bechdel test, it's fair to say that market forces might not be the only thing swaying your decision.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Yes! '25 Female Sci-Fi Characters Who Look Hot In PVC' - you can pretty much keep the same list, and nobody's going to start reading it with any different expectations in mind.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Although in that case they have even less excuse for leaving off Farscape.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Hee!

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

At least Farscape, which has been described as an American's descent in the Australian S&M scene, is aware that it's about sex, that viewers want to drool over the male actors as well as the female ones, and that it's silly. As opposed to all the shows which have women in ultra-revealing and highly impractical costumes for no apparent reason, or Stargate occasionally putting their characters into leather corsets and the like but not appearing to notice what that implies. You know, "and here we have a bondage scene that hasn't noticed that it's a bondage scene" sort of thing.

Though they still have nothing on some SF book covers, which will have an anatomically-impossible "warrior woman" in a costume she probably could hardly move in, especially not without anything falling out, and this will be merrily plastered on the front cover irrespective of whether it bears the slightest relevance to the contents of the book. Honestly, they're not even all that different from some of the Pratchett covers, which are satirising that sort of thing. I've got some Le Guins where the covers are straining after this approach, and evidently no one told the publisher that it was actually fairly serious SF and strongly feminist to boot.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

an anatomically-impossible "warrior woman" in a costume she probably could hardly move in

That's more common in fantasy, I think? Or at least, the kind of pulp SF approach to such things has died down a lot over more recent decades, while lots of fantasy is still very much of the 'Alas, we have stumbled across the lost kingdom of the nymphomaniac Amazons!' school.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I've seen it in plenty of SF, but they may not be particularly recent editions.

The "lost kingdom of the nymphomaniac Amazons" is making me want to throw Herland at them - in which three men think they have stumbled over exactly that, and get a rude awakening. Now I look back at it, it really does fit a lot of (bad) stereotypes about lesbians: they're tranquilly uninterested in sex, wear Sensible Clothing, vegetarian, and keep cats. It was published in 1931, I think? I wonder how long that stereotype has been around (I'd guess second-wave feminism), and whether Herland influenced it at all?

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

With a list title like that, I would expect the list to consist almost entirely of...well, y'know...authors. The kind of people who actually changed Sci-Fi over the course of the years.

I'm just sayin'

Strangely enough I think I would be in trouble no matter who came up with this list.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Heh. I see the point there, but I was expecting it to be fictional characters from the start. If they'd used 'SF' rather than 'Sci-fi', on the other hand...

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

I suppose so, but "rock" seems to indicate that they had some influence beyond the realm they were in, and I don't think that Sci-Fi has had that many characters that do just as a consequence of the type of the genre it is.

Well, except in some people's wet dreams apparently.

[bend-gules.livejournal.com]

I confess I was expecting Ursula le Guin, Andre Norton, etc.

The (partial) answer is to start your own list of great women SF characters, and I'd put Linda Hamilton in her pumped T2 incarnation high on the list. Assorted Joss Wheldon women characters follow close behind.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I've seen some great lists of excellent female characters on Livejournal that do just that. But, I don't know. Making my own list seems like a reasonable response to, say, disagreeing with the selection of 'Top 25 Greatest Rock Ballads Ever', but it's not even the selection that bothers me here - they could have picked the exact same 25 characters that I'd have picked, in the exact same order I'd have picked them, and I'd still have been pissed off if the main criteria used to select them was how sexy they looked on screen.

[jennyanydots21.livejournal.com]

You'd think the editor might have wanted to do something about the overuse of variations on the word "sexy" for stylistic reasons, at the very least...

anyone who would like to protest this on the grounds that women don't find visual stimuli attractive in the same way that men do etc. etc. is kindly invited to think about whether we're all watching Supernatural for the plot

I'm strongly suspecting the producers of Star Trek did their casting with the same issue in mind... or at least the reactions among my female friends, non-nerds included, would make you think so. Maybe what we need is a sci-fi magazine aimed at women. *muses*

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

ou'd think the editor might have wanted to do something about the overuse of variations on the word "sexy" for stylistic reasons

I know! You'd think someone who's spent the formative years of their adult life developing ever-more-intricate fantasies over Princess Leia in the gold bikini would have thought of some alternatives to 'sexy' by now.

[bhadrika.livejournal.com]

Whew, when I first read your post, I thought by "Rose Tyler at 7" they had listed a 7-year-old incarnation of her... on their sexy babilicious list. Eww.

I also found the copy for Willow amusing: "The character went through some interesting developments over the course of the show, including studying witchcraft and eventually coming out as a lesbian." Makes it sound like one led inevitably to the other, no?

What annoyed me the most were the comments for those like Scully, which seem to boil down to, "well, she wasn't sexy like the others, but at least she was smart." Thanks for the clear either-or, with the handy ranking of importance.

Agreement that last of Farscape is ridiculous. And who decided Alias is Sci Fi?

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

"well, she wasn't sexy like the others, but at least she was smart." Thanks for the clear either-or, with the handy ranking of importance.

Yes, it did have rather the air of a consolation prize...

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I used to have a fridge magnet which read, "Sorry I missed church. I was practising witchcraft and becoming a lesbian." Of course the two are related! Actually, I think Buffy did help popularise witchcraft and paganism amongst lesbians, at least if my ex is anything to go by.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

I was expecting the likes of Mary Shelly, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Kate Wilhelm, Olivia Butler, and C. J. Cherryh.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Not from Total Sci-Fi. They're very much in the film-and-TV (and-special-effects-and-shiny-things) camp.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

I spent a loooong time poring over that list (and the captions) trying to figure out what possible criteria they could be using other than "sexy" to pick people. I really wanted to believe that wasn't the entire focus of that stupid list. But in the end? Yeah. *Grumbles*

Jackasses. I kind of feel like writing them, but experience tells me the idiots will not either a) understand why this sort of shit upsets us, or b) accept it as valid.

[deadmonywalking.livejournal.com]

If I was them then I would ask you to submit a list of ugly women characters who with as much influence and popularity.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Amen.