December talking meme: 12/6

Dec 06, 2013 22:04

male and female characters and childhood trauma, for Ray

I’m going to reshape this a little bit to talk about formative abuse-related trauma (that is to say, including adolescence and young adulthood, excluding act of R’hllor stuff like illness and accidents) because it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Some thoughts about different aspects of gender socialization affect the differences in how we understand these characters, and a few case studies, about which knowledge of the respective canons shouldn’t be necessary.

Of course, the biggest problem here is simply the male default. Men are more likely to be the subject protagonists whose issues and perspectives are foregrounded. On top of that, viewers exist in a world where we are conditioned to prioritize men’s experiences and emotional states, and this problem is compounded both by a cultural context that privileges male characters and in the individual narratives which fall in line with the dominant paradigm. This can be true even in narratives that are pretty clear about abusive dynamics generally. The Soprano family is a solid example of this. Tony is our main character, and he’s a man’s man, and the abuse he experienced at the hands of his mother and the trauma his father’s violent lifestyle exposed him to is our focus. This doesn’t preclude the show from demonstrating how his older sister Janice probably got the brunt of Livia’s anger: while both of them were subject to their mother’s terrifying mood swings, Janice also experienced cruel sexual, body, and femininity policing, and did not even get the backhanded pride in her achievements that Tony did. This isn’t treated like a big reveal, it’s a matter-of-fact part of their interactions, and it’s something Tony knows. But Tony also nurtures some resentment at his big sister for not having protected him from their mother, so he insists that Janice is uniquely selfish and awful. To me there’s no inherent problem to that narrative. The problems are in the context of POVs being overwhelmingly male characters (and even then, The Sopranos was operating as far outside of any context as it gets), and in the eyes of viewers, who are so used to uncritically accepting a man’s opinion of a woman as the final say on her worth that they just go with “Janice selfishly prioritizes Janice” as if the point of the show wasn’t “99% of people are out for themselves 99% of the time.”

Given the way our society likes to see women be fragile and wounded, one might expect to see this issue, at least, evened out a little bit more than other ways in which men’s problems are prioritized. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons why that doesn’t happen, but I think the one I keep come back to is that women’s pain is near-universally sexualized. Men’s experiences are universal, women’s experiences are titillating, and ‘twas ever thus.

Moving a little bit out of trauma and into neglect and endangerment, I think this is true in different ways even when women tell our own stories. Probably the two most prominent American writers for young women, Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder, grew up in economically precarious situations, which was to some degree the choice of their parents (specifically their fathers). Based on her father, who seems to have otherwise been a good man, Alcott’s projected Papa March is relatively unproblematized as an admirable figure simply because he isn’t around much (for a good reason, off being a chaplain for the Union Army). By contrast, given the roman a clef nature of her books, Wilder practically admitted to having grown up in a very violent home. And again, we have to separate the actual narrative itself from the context of reader response. Whatever we might say about the context in which the book was written, we still to this day treat the Little House books as a warm, wholesome slice of Americana, and IMO this shocking cultural irresponsibility isn’t just due to our gross general acceptance of violence toward children, but also to the fact that abuse of girls just….doesn’t seem to register (unless, again, it’s sexual). I suspect that the Little House books are given the same halo of wholesomeness in popular culture as the Little Women trilogy in large part because “girl stuff” is assumed to be the one and only relevant factor in feminine stories. Childhood trauma that doesn’t come at the hands of one’s family does seem to be treated differently - LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, for instance, shows a lot more marks from her life as an orphaned child laborer.

But, unfortunately, child abuse is common enough that there are pretty substantial sample sizes of both male and female characters with such histories. Highly generalizing, but people’s response to these characters seems to depend on how they respond to weakness. Childhood wounds viscerally, near-universally, evoke raw human vulnerability. And our response to this, for better or worse, tends to be highly gendered. Common responses I feel like I see are (a) female vulnerability being trivialized or disappeared, but tolerated and (b) male vulnerability being simultaneously privileged and reviled.

Another influential factor, unsurprisingly, is whether there’s a less-vulnerable (and therefore more conventionally masculine) male figure around as a point of comparison, whether an affiliated character or the abuser himself. If we’re talking about a female victim, people again, deprioritize the story but understand the problem. If we’re talking about a male victim, though, HOOO BOY, we’re talking about someone showing weakness, transgressing gender roles by being a man who shows or experiences weakness, and safely distanced from the majority-female fandom audience, and is therefore apparently fair game for contempt. (I don't think I can do my Lannister thing tonight, but ugh, there's a large segment of fandom whose response to Tyrion and Tywin makes my skin crawl.)

That said, I have mentioned ~around that I’m frequently kind of uncomfortable with the female fans/male character with history of childhood trauma. There seems to be this idea that women who respond empathetically to such male characters are doing so in order to ~make excuses for their television crushes, silly wimmin! Again, that women’s experiences with and interpretations of trauma must in some way be sexual. And I...lost my train of thought as to where I was going with that, but I really don't like it.

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the sopranos, abuse

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