Stop using my heroine's lady part's in a plot against her. It's old.

[untonuggan]

So this is a thing that has been bothering me for awhile and I haven't articulated it in a written way. (Mostly rants to my partner which she has kindly asked me to stop and share with other people, actually.)

I am sick of my fandoms having bad-ass women being the hero, and then the plot goes down a winding path of "and now her uterus plays a central role in how the bad people are going to take her down!"

For one thing, I have enough of that in my day to day life. I am watching some form of escapism, and I would like to dispense with that.

For another thing, it's old. Here are the kind of plotlines I am sick of seeing:

• hero gets raped (or threatened with rape) and it messes with her head and now some dude hero has to help her
• hero gets abducted by evil scientists who want to rape her and/or perform surgery to steal her reproductive tissues to make evil babies that will undo all the good work she's ever done
• hero gets abducted by evil scientists who have all her friends in rape cells trying to impregnate them and are going to add my hero to them
• hero is the Only One of her hero-type (fae/superhero/whatever) who can reproduce! or a limited number who can! therefore everyone wants her body and her child! the only way to "protect" her and her child is for her to marry this one dude who she just met and either she's madly in love with or hates with a love/hate passion! (alternate solution I would like to suggest: she could medically sterilize herself? and go live her life, and fuck those people who want her to "mate" and make babies for the survival of their world and to fulfill some prophecy. but I digress.)
•  etc.

Basically, in an annoying way, it does sort of make sense. "Hi, I am an evil super villain. My opponent has lady parts. What better way to psychologically destroy someone with lady parts than to attack those parts themselves or get her with child and then attack that child?"

Cuz it seems to me that for the dude heroes, the story lines are never along the above lines. Like, I know I haven't read all the comics, so correct me if I'm wrong. But I don't remember seeing any Marvel canon plot lines that are like: "Steve Rogers! We know you loved Peggy but we think the only way to make a new super soldier like you with your heart of gold is for you to get women pregnant! So, you must jerk off into this jar that we will cryogenically freeze until we find the right woman!" and Steve Rogers going, "That's crazy talk, I want to know the woman who will bear my chid!" and SHIELD going, "That will put her in too much danger!" and then Steve going rogue with, I dunno, Romanov and them deciding to have a badass super baby for the good of the planet. Or her taking him speed dating. Or him deciding never to have sex ever because his partner could be a Hydra agent.

Because (a) dude hero sexuality must be macho and intact for us to still respect them, rite?; (b) even the above storyline, while degrading (or even if Hydra was all like "we are going to steal your magical super sperm!" would not be as vulnerable and scary as Peggy or Romanov or any lady part-bearing hero getting raped, even if Steve were actually getting raped, because that is how our society views gender and rape); (c ) if Steve did come out of such a scenario you know he'd get the same initial reaction male rape survivors do, which is a sense that the dude hero must have made a conquest rather than being violated.

Instead the story lines around dude heroes seem to be, "Hey here is a woman or child you love [aka that 'belongs' to you] and the super villain has taken possession of them, now what are you gonna do?" instead of, "Hey I have literally tried to take possession of your entire body and mind in one of the most invasive and personal ways possible, good luck saving the world after this!"


So my conclusion is that these story lines (think all of "Twilight" and a number of others but I don't want to spoil them if you are interested in reading them I guess?) are lazy story lines. Yes, okay, it's sense making that this is something a super villain might do. But hello, it's been done a gazillion times before and there is no storyline I can think of that is an equivalent violation (at least in the minds of the audience) for dude heroes. Can we just call a moratorium on these stories in general? OK, if it's your memoir. But if you're just looking for "huh what kind of evil plot can my heroine fight this time?" maybe forget about her gender and think about what plot might be happening…just because? Eugenics is grody and so is rape, and while I love reading stories with female protagonists there are only so many times I can deal with FEMINIST RAGE and also survivor flashbacks just because you as an author decided this was a convenient plot line.


(Probably why I read a lot of YA, honestly: the rape stores not deemed suitable for the audience if it's a core part of the plot. BUT ENOUGH DYSTOPIAS KTHNX I'm also done with those for a few decades.)

(Also yes it's important for survivors to see themselves represented in works of fiction. But there are better ways to do it than "and this will make my plot work perfectly!" And the director of a certain popular period television show can kiss my ass.)

Comments

[metanewsmods]

May we link this on metanews? We also post on LJ and Tumblr.

[untonuggan]

Yes, that is totally cool. Thanks! (Also poking some interesting links as well, so thanks for the rabbit hole. I think *g*)

[anke]

(alternate solution I would like to suggest: she could medically sterilize herself? and go live her life, and fuck those people who want her to "mate" and make babies for the survival of their world and to fulfill some prophecy. but I digress.)

Sounds good, though I guess the "Can't get a doctor to agree to remove and destroy my ovaries, cause no-one believes I would not regret it later and they need to 'protect' me from my own decisions" angle of the conflict would be feminist-rage-inducing, too.

RE male equivalent... What came to mind was a blog post I read long ago by someone who works in a zoo, about how they "harvested" semen from a male cheetah (which was sedated for another medical procedure). It involved an electrode up his ass...

[untonuggan]

Yeah that sounds about how that storyline would play out most of the time. :/ or in that theoretical universe the Dr who agreed would work for Hydra/evil-science and just harvest ovaries for use in evil-science so...

Also, ow for male cheetahs.

[lilacsigil]

Completely agreed, but I have twice seen the male version of this storyline. One was in Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series, where "Only One of his hero-type" was harvested of his sperm (and other bodily fluids) in order to make a supernatural creature, which he then considered his child. The other was in Marvel Comics, in the backstory of Josiah X. His biological father is Isaiah Bradley, the first Captain America, the only survivor of a group of African American men who were experimented on before they would use the super-soldier serum on a white man, and he was made in a lab.

I find it pretty interesting that this is a standard story for female heroes, but for male heroes, it's part of a bigger narrative about oppression by a dominant culture.

[untonuggan]

Yes, I remember that Nightrunner storyline now. Haven't seen that particular Marvel storyline, but thanks for pointing it out.

Still think it's an issue when there seems to be an endless litany of female heroes with the above storyline, but so far the list for male heroes is two + zoo animals. (And I did see that you agreed, so just pointing out that I saw that so it doesn't read that I didn't and then we need like a five point back and forth for us to agree that we both actually agree about the same thing. This probably sounds really awkward because I am stoned on painkillers at the moment, so sorry for the rambliness.)

[pipisafoat]

NO NEVER ENOUGH DYSTOPIAS
NEVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

on that note, if there are any dystopias (or okay, anything, really) that you have read that you found to be engaging and/or quality (yes, or, i am absurdly easy to please with my reading) - I always like recs! but that is not pressure to rec me. also that I enjoy "this book was terrible" recs too. see also: why i read twilight and 50 shades and that sort of thing. hilaribad is one of my favorite words. if it's mockable, it's worth my time!
anyway. if you are bored or want to ramble books at someone.

[untonuggan]

Oh I have the hilaribad of hilaribads for you, if I can remember the title. Hang on, let me poke my library website.

Claudia, Wife of Pontius Pilate

So I picked this up from the library's new release section awhile ago because I like historical fiction and Lindsay Davis sold me on Roman novels when I was taking Latin donkey's years ago.

This book is not actually historical fiction. (The historian in me started yelling around the time they went to the market and just bought fucking purple cloth, because purple cloth = only for the emperor's family and if anyone else bought it you could be put to death plus the purple dye was so hard to obtain from mollusks that it was usually used only around the edges...um, maybe my fiber geek is showing through.)

But seriously, the dialogue and writing is *super bad* and has that "bad chocolate feel" ("This is terrible, I should just stop. Maybe next page won't be so bad. Oh no, it's worse! How could this get worse! Oh gods, how did I finish the book? It was AWFUL.")

Anyway, the best way I can describe this book is: horribly written Jesus fanfic that should never have been published, unless it was seriously edited by a bunch of people.

And yes, it is HILARIBAD. Especially towards the end.

[tarnished]

This is amazing. I'm not interested in having kids and those plotlines ALWAYS skeeve me out. Even if I wanted to have kids, sheesh - it's sexist and demeaning and really gross and creepy to keep having these storylines over and over again.

'Instead the story lines around dude heroes seem to be, "Hey here is a woman or child you love [aka that 'belongs' to you] and the super villain has taken possession of them, now what are you gonna do?" instead of, "Hey I have literally tried to take possession of your entire body and mind in one of the most invasive and personal ways possible, good luck saving the world after this!"'

SO well put.

[untonuggan]

*blush* Thank you! Glad you enjoyed reading this. And yeah, it's like someone's frustrated the hero is doing badass hero things and is like, "Ah but if she was a mother she'd have to divide her time between work and mothering and find a way to breastfeed in her super suit! Surely even she does not have that many superpowers!" or something.

I just want someone to kick this trope into the dust.

[meridian_rose]

I agree entirely. The lack of childfree characters generally gets to me, and this insistence on making everything about a female character's womb is rage inducing.