#idpickyoufirst

So when my modmates and I talk about media in terms of feminism (which, in my hippy dippy mod full of media makers is a pretty common occurrence), one of the biggest things we talk about is female friendships. Are women pitted against each other? Do the women in it like each other, find ways to empower each other, and support each other? Or does the underlying message seem to be that other women are enemies, especially when it comes to men.

Anyway, that’s another topic for another blog post. Right now, I want to talk about how this idea and the idea of supporting the women in your life (you know, in that scary world of ‘reality’, whatever that means) intersect. Because most people, at least in the lefty hippy dippy circles I tend to run in, seem to understand them separately, but they don’t really understand them together.

I propose that we, as a feminist and fandom community, start treating our female characters how we want to be treated. Whenever I see a character in a fandom getting a lot of hate, 9 times out of 10 that character is female (note: not a real statistic. I’m just hyperbolizing the fact that’s it’s common). Why is it that people who proclaim themselves to be feminist take such pleasure in tearing female characters down? Why don’t we lift those characters up in a similar fashion to our mothers, sisters, and friends?

Feminism means something different to everyone, even if the basic idea is the same, and we’ve come a long way since the days not too long ago when we weren’t allowed to vote, but looking ahead, let’s stop putting down female characters because they don’t fit our idea of what a “strong female character” should be. In fact, can we just get rid of the term “strong female character” altogether? Strength is important, yes, but strength can and does mean different things to everyone, just like feminism. The term I’m choosing to use instead is “dynamic female character”. This, to me, implies one simple thing: that she’s three-dimensional, that she’s allowed room to live, that she’s allowed to have flaws. There are plenty of female characters in our media today that I don’t like as people. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate them as characters, and I think that’s a really important distinction we as viewers need to start making.