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👁️🍄🪸@bloomfilters.plus · 8mo ago

on female characters "made by men for men" and the possible reasons some women may find ways to like them or give them a second life anyway (crosspost from a debate in tartarus, transcript fragment presented)

i think women who do personal readings of female characters that are basically desire-objects often do not ignore the gooner bait part, sometimes even incorporating it. every female character in history is lensed thru sexualization, so the difference is a negotiation of degree \[ discourse subject: *"when a female character is so obviously created by male writers for male fanservice but she’s appeals to the women who are appeased by surface level girlboss appearances while ignoring the obvious gooner bait…so you just gotta hold hate in or get called an evil misogynist"* \] isn't wrong by any means but in a sense it's sort of the goomba fallacy happening, where two modes of interpreting female characters are sort of being conflated. people who already approach female characters with a shallowness generally don't go beyond the girlboss-ification regardless of whether or not the female character in question is simply a desire-object, but part of going deep into an interpretive reading of a female character made *only* a desire-object (even if this includes girlboss-ing her) is to give her context (textual) and metacontext (the limits of her characterization by the circumstances of her creation as desire-object). this often means not disconnecting the "gooner bait" aspect but putting a female character's position as a desire-object in such a way to renegotiate this (satire, personal desire, etc). thus, a reading of a female character by a scholarly woman inevitably carries a bit of exegesis, a bit of fiction-making, a bit of social-commentary (a reflection on the woman's own attempt to negotiate her desire). girlbossing a female character is hardly a reading at all but mostly the same kind of dismissal of desire-object that a male writer created her to be. i think this might add the context for why some women like peculiar visual novels or characters like bayonetta. it's never so straightforward as pure affirmation or subversion/condemnation, simply because women (aspire to) avoid negotiating their own desire and embodiment in terms of a strict madonna-whore mutual exclusion.