Who says fiction needs to make objective, logical sense?
That is not even remotely what this is about. It's about whether a work of fiction makes a segment of its audience feel uncomfortable or demeaned, or even reminded of a traumatic event from their past. A work of fiction that treats its female characters as sexual objects while not doing the same for its male characters, or a work of fiction that portrays Asians stereotypically as martial artists or math geeks and nothing more, or a work of fiction that features a gay villain who's "cured" when a sexy enough woman comes along, has problems that go far deeper than factual accuracy. Fiction is supposed to be entertaining. It's not too much to ask that a work of entertainment feel like a safe and comfortable place. No, not all fiction should be about comfortable subjects, but it's one thing to make a reader uncomfortable about a challenging subject the story is actually confronting, and it's an entirely different thing to make a reader uncomfortable because of a randomly demeaning portrayal of their group that's gratuitously tossed into a story that has nothing to do with it.
These are standard conventions of a genre that is inherently escapist in nature.
Escapism is exactly the point. Female readers deserve escapism too. They deserve a story that lets them escape from the constant sexual objectification and harassment and marginalization and contempt for their feelings and opinions that they face in so many walks of life. The problem is that today's SF and comics audience is as heavily female as male, and yet many creators still default to the mistaken assumption that their entire audience is male. And so a lot of women who want to enjoy something they love and are excited by often find themselves randomly slapped in the face by depictions that humiliate them and make them feel unwelcome. And often it's in the context of a story where it serves no purpose whatsoever, like the gratuitously skimpy outfits and porn-star poses of female comics or gaming characters in non-sexual story situations.
BTW, with all of the talk here about the "male gaze," what about the woefully underrepresented female gaze? What does that look like? Are there any ready examples of it?
There's the scene in
Thor where Jane and Darcy are rather openly admiring the shirtless Thor as he cleans himself up and the camera lingers lovingly on his torso. There is some of it out there, but there's still a lot of the other stuff.
What determines whether a work is for a "general audience" or not? Shouldn't the audience for a work of art be determined by its content, not the other way around?
But there are different elements of content. Women like adventure stories and superheroes and video games just as much as men. There's nothing in those stories that requires the female characters to be half-naked or objectified; that's a gratuitous element that would change nothing if it were excluded. So most of the content is appealing to men and women alike, but this one unnecessary part is off-putting to women because it's assumed, falsely, that the entire audience is male.
And you can't always anticipate what your audience will be. Sometimes it's not who you expect. Look at
RoboCop. The original film was intensely R-rated, but kids loved the character. When I went to see
RoboCop 2 in the theater, a couple of parents brought their children in to watch this film that was utterly unsuited for them, even though the film was clearly marked as R-rated. But the later TV series couldn't be restricted even that much, and the producers knew there would be a lot of kids watching, so they made the show less violent and more child-friendly. Which was really the only responsible choice to make.
Also, I don't think the makers of
Xena realized just how strongly the show would resonate with lesbian fans. Once that became clear, they began writing more toward that audience. It's just smart to recognize that your actual audience isn't necessarily what you expected.
I think nearly everyone has been marginalized at some time in their life. For the vast majority of us, society doesn't really care whether we live or die. But, for some reason, a lot of women & minorities seem to think that there's some specific reason that they've been marginalized, not that it just kinda happens to everyone.
Oh, good grief. Have you ever even read a history book, or seen a news headline?
Look, I grew up as a bullied child. I was ostracized and excluded and demeaned all the time. But I would never be so obnoxiously self-absorbed as to think that what I went through was a fraction as much as what women or ethnic minorities or LGBTQ people have to endure on a daily basis. At least I can walk down the street by myself and feel reasonably safe, which is more than a woman or a black person in America could say. Don't assume it doesn't exist just because you don't understand it. "I don't understand" is a reason to
start listening, not to stop listening. Until you learn enough that you can understand, you simply aren't qualified to judge.
