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.