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

[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?