Gender Equality Crusaders

Normally, I let my co-blogger Nelrond write stories about the problems that men face in our divided society, as I'm sure he's better able to pinpoint and articulate the problems that affect him than I am. A while back, he wrote an article on how men are often acceptable targets of violence, especially from women, because women often view men as a threat and are, as far as they can tell, acting preemptively.

We're all aware that it's much more socially acceptable for a woman to hit a man than for a man to hit a woman. The idea behind this logic is that women are generally weaker and will normally only slap someone to make a point, while men are generally stronger and will hit someone in an attempt to cause actual damage. It should go without saying that, even if this is normally how it is, that's not always how it is. Some women are stronger than some men, and some women mean to inflict real harm when being violent.

Not that symbolic slapping is much better, of course.

And I'll admit, right here and now, that I've not always been sensitive to the idea that men can be hurt. As a woman in the United States, I was taught that boys don't hit girls, because boys are stronger, but boys can hit other boys. By that logic, it must have been okay for me, as a girl, to hit boys. And I did. Often. Not to hospital-placing extents, but the bottom line is that I hit someone who was told, all his life, that he was not allowed to fight back. Let that sink in, if you've never thought about it.

I have a cousin who's always been bigger than me. He's two years younger, but he's always weighed more. As kids, I was brutal to him. And he couldn't hit me back. I always thought it was okay, because he was a boy and bigger than me, and he was completely capable of stopping me whenever he wanted-- Oh hey, victim-blaming. Looks like it happens to the gents, too.

It's amazing that, despite the fact that he was bigger than me and that he physically could have stopped me whenever he wanted, he never did. Because he was conditioned to believe that there was something wrong with defending yourself if the attacker is female. And that's wrong. Everyone, male, female, or otherwise, should be encouraged to protect him/her/zirself if the need ever arises, no matter what the attacker looks like.

And we can see this played out in media very often. On TV and in movies, a woman will be offended by a man and smack him out of retaliation. And, to any woman who's ever been harrassed by a man, that is awesome. Some guys can be jerks and probably deserve a slap for it.

But wait, let's switch the genders on that. Let's say a woman walks up to a man who's minding his own business and starts making lewd remarks. He's clearly not interested; he's just at the bar having a drink with some friends or something. How would we feel if he hit her? Or if he even threw a drink in her face?

The most difficult part of recognizing sexism is recognizing that you've been raised with certain beliefs regarding it. In my mind, where everything can be thought out, of course I can see that this is unfair. But my instincts, from being raised the way I was, tell me that a woman harrassing a man can never happen. I've been conditioned to believe, somewhere deep in there, that women don't approach men and that men don't hit women.

(Which is incredibly confusing, since I approached my husband before he approached me. So clearly, somewhere in there, I know better.)

Back to media. TV and movies are obvious culprits. What about the musical world?

I know, I know. The music industry is terrible to women, especially to black women, who end up being overly sexualized to ridiculous standards. And that's very important and will probably be touched on in a different article, but this one's for the guys.

Have you ever listened to a song and liked it before learning the lyrics? That happened with me recently. I didn't realize that it was violent until a certain line got stuck in my head.

I'll burn your house down to the ground.

That line made me look up the rest of the lyrics. And, honestly, since it's easily compared to the end of a song by Eminem and Rihanna that bothered me, this one bothered me by association. The line in that song which was so similar was:

If she ever tries to fuckin' leave again, I'mma tie her to the bed and set this house on fire.

Let's look at more lyrics from X.O.:

I'm not a maniac, just love to control
You'll listen when I'm talking, shut your pie hole

Wow. Okay, so, we can conclude from this that the lady in the song is a jerk. Sorry, just, wow. If a guy said this, he'd probably get hurt.

And while you're in the restroom, while I'm on my own
You don't even know, I'm going through your phone

So we've already established that she "loves to control," and now she's actually snooping through his private items while he's in the other room. The song informs us that he is, in fact, cheating on her, but I would, too. This woman is clearly abusive, at least verbally. Surely it can't get too much worse--

I'm watching
The show
Got cameras
In your home

...Wha... Does she literally have cameras in his house? I can't think of a figurative meaning for this, and even if I could, it couldn't be anything good. Again, if you can't see how horrifying this is, just switch the genders. This is stalking and an even clearer invasion of privacy than the phone-snooping. This would get a real person arrested in ten seconds flat.

The scary part is how lines about how independent and empowered she is are sprinkled thoughout the song. The very next lines are:

I'm not a criminal, more like the government
I'm not the first lady, I'm the president

Anyone who's studied the U.S. knows that we've never had a female president. It's every little girl's dream to grow up to be the first one. This is, as sad as I am to phrase it this way, an empowerment-related fantasy. The beginning of the song also starts out in a very self-assured fashion:

I'm awesome
I know
I'm super
For sure

Why does it have to go from this woman feeling good about herself straight into controlling, abusive girlfriend territory? Can women only be positive about themselves when they're holding men down? The thought is scary and incredibly offensive. I am perfectly happy with my level of power in my own marriage, and we treat each other as equals. If you have to hurt someone to feel empowered, you're not actually empowered. Being empowered includes being secure, and abusers are rarely, if ever, secure.

The major difference in these songs, I think, is that at least the Eminem and Rihanna one, where the man is more abusive, is played out as a bad thing. The song by Kerli (who I otherwise love, so smearing her name here is hard for me) plays the violence against the man as though it's making her independent and empowered.

Being independent and empowered is not about hurting people. It's about having the ability to hurt someone and not doing it, because you know better. A large part of being independent and empowered is acquiring knowledge and learning from the past. Women and minorities have always had a hard time. We've been sent to different schools or not allowed to attend school at all. We've been told to do the work that the ones in power didn't want to do. We've been the victims of abuse of every kind. We still have problems now.

The problem, I think, is that we're used to this idea that someone has to be dominant, someone has to be in charge. And that, if we don't want to be on bottom, we have to fight our way to the top and hold others down. That is not what equality is about, and it is not what empowerment should be about.
The problBeing Complete lyrics: http://www.directlyrics.com/eminem-love-the-way-you-lie-lyr

I read a lot of webcomics.

I've always seen the majority of TV shows as sort of inane, at best. Will I watch a few of them? Sure. I'll plop down next to my husband and watch Futurama, The Simpsons, or Fraiser. But there aren't any shows I really go out of my way to watch. (Well, okay, there is one.)

Plus I just really don't care to watch a show about a couple with nineteen kids attempting to push out more when there are perfectly adoptable children available.

I digress.

So what kind of entertainment do I consider good enough? I like reading; always have. But (maybe more than reading?) I love drawings. They don't even have to be good drawings most of the time.

It's probably not surprising that I've picked up a lot of manga over the years. I'd never cared for superheroes in the past, and that seemed to be what the vast majority of western comics were, so I skipped them altogether. Why would someone like me, who can spot unfortunate implications a mile away, want to read stories where some big, muscley and/or rich white man or alien who is somehow a white man zooms around saving damsels in distress? Don't get me started on Wonder Woman. Just don't.

Superhero comics tend to be less than nice to the ladies, is what I'm saying.

But honestly? Manga's not perfect, either. Probably has something to do with Japan lagging in the area of women's rights.

For the most part, the women on TV, in western comics, and in eastern comics are all... useless, essentially. Female authors are still less read than male authors, so any book with a strong female main character is almost impossible to come by. What's a girl to do?

Well, she could try turning to webcomics.

The thing with TV and published books/comics is that they have to be approved by someone. Publishers and such will look over your script and ask themselves, "Does this appeal to the 18-to-35 straight white male demographic?" And hey, you know, of course. They need to make money, so they want to make sure their shows/books sell.

Surprise! Women have money, too now! I know, I know, isn't it a kooky world we live in? We make up half the workforce (still don't get half the pay, but that's a different story for a different article) and we could also be buying half of the entertainment if it even tried to appeal to us.

That's what makes webcomics so refreshing. The internet gives us a place where we can say whatever we want whenever we want. No one is ignoring female-based stories in favor of male-based stories. No one is in charge of which webcomics will and won't publish based on how much of that magical demographic they'll snatch up. Women have just as much of a voice as men here (though we still often need to pretend to be men to be taken seriously, but that's also a different story for a different article).

According to Top Web Comics, we've got a decent mix of male and female main characters, or at a least a much better one than other forms of media will give us.

In fact, just a quick look at the current top ten comics tells me we have...
- TwoKinds: Two main characters, one male, one female
- Slightly Damned: Female
- Goblins: Five main characters, all appear to be male
- Not a Villian: Female
- Ballerina Mafia: Appears to have two main characters, both male
- Too Much Information: Male
- Bear Nuts: Ten main characters, all male
- Sandra and Woo: One female, one male (racoon)
- dream*scar: Five main characters, three female, two male
- Pictures of You: Male

So that's five male-only main casts, two female-only main casts, and three mixed-gender main casts. There are even some anthropomorphized characters and non-straight characters mixed in there! Much better than what TV and printed books have prepared me to expect. Still lacking a bit in racial diversity, it seems, but that was only the top ten, so still an overall success.

The internet is very important to women's ability to be heard in much more important ways than this, of course, but it's telling how relieved I am just to have some gender-relevent entertainment. It's not like I refuse to read about men, but I was starting to wonder how the world of media would work with such a female shortage. Do main characters reproduce asexually?

And, since this is as good a place as any, I may as well end this with a few links to comics that I feel are diverse and fair as far as male and female representation go. These comics also deal with LGBT issues.

Penny and Aggie and its spin-off Quiltbag are good if you're into down-to-earth types of comics. El Goonish Shive is better if you like fantasy/sci-fi elements thrown into an otherwise realistic setting. The guys of EGS start out a little objectifying, but it gets better, I promise. There's also Dead Winter, which is the story of four people (two men and two women) trying to survive what is effectively a zombie apocalypse.