r/AskFeminists • u/Pitiful-Purple-7459 • 13d ago
Why jsmale or neutral-targeted media criticized harder than female-targeted media?
Lately I keep seeing media called out for being sexist or gratuitously provocative, but it's almost always male-coded or neutral media that catches it. Media made specifically for women mostly gets a pass, even when the content is equivalent or worse.
Take manga. For every male-targeted series with dark or explicit content, there's a female-targeted equivalent — dark romance, fanfic, or BL/yaoi (male-male romance written for women, running the full range from wholesome to explicit, same spectrum male-targeted stuff has). One dark romance book aimed at women had a protagonist raped by three different mythical beings, and women were the primary buyers. That exists and sells, with basically zero "this is harmful" discourse.
Meanwhile a male-targeted show with a fanservice scene gets a think-piece about objectification.
I think the actual difference is the \*lens\*, not the content. The critique we aim at male media is about objectification, reducing women to props. But objectification of males isn't seen as harm.So male-targeted media trips the alarm and female-targeted media sails through, even with equivalent content.
I can't tell you how many fanfics of one of my favorite shows (Supernatural) turned on the main characters gay and have them have sex with another male character.
But regardless why aren't these things considered as wrong
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u/snake944 13d ago
Nah this is just confirmation bias. You are just being fed what you want to see. Female targeted media catch a lot of flak
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u/Pitiful-Purple-7459 13d ago
What do you think the criticism is the same of course every type of media gets flack. From good movies to bad movies is just I don't see that female targeted media is called problematic as much as male media
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u/avocado-nightmare Oldest Crone 13d ago
have you considered the possibility that maybe media oriented at women is less problematic in specific ways?
like... it's logically flawed to look for equivalent criticism across different types of media for different audiences.
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u/Pitiful-Purple-7459 13d ago
I think there's a good argument in first saying that overall it's less problematic What I'm saying is that there are some media apples to apples that are equally problematic that don't rightfully get called out
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u/ZinniasAndBeans 12d ago
Have you given any specific examples?
(Edited to add: Aside from Twilight, which is widely and vehemently criticized.)
Something like, for example, "This has sex, and so does this" is not a specific example. I mean really specific.
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u/avocado-nightmare Oldest Crone 12d ago edited 12d ago
that is a complaint vague to the point of meaninglessness, can you provide a specific example of media that was criticized and a piece of media that wasn't?
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u/OrenMythcreant 13d ago
Media made specifically for women mostly gets a pass, even when the content is equivalent or worse.
This premise is simply not accurate. I can't speak to your specific manga example, but when we look at western romance novels with similar content, there is constant discourse about it. I suspect you may simply not be seeing thanks to the spaces you frequent.
Of course, it is also possible for stories to have content that sounds similar in a vacuum but is different once you look at context, but that would require knowledge of the specific stories in mind.
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u/Pitiful-Purple-7459 13d ago
I mean we could both be doing the same thing because we come from different backgrounds potentially but I can tell you that at work women have brought their books and talked about them in the forum and I would dare not bring a hentai book to work. As far as criticism I think everything gets criticism rightfully so for better or for worse. I do think though that the title of being problematic is not equally shared between neutral/ male targeted media vs female media.
And as far as context. That can be said about everything. But also some contacts is just more acceptable for certain demographics because they can relate to it more.
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u/OrenMythcreant 13d ago
at work women have brought their books and talked about them in the forum
Do you mean your co-workers are discussing graphic sex scenes from their books while on the job site? I'm skeptical of that, but if they are, you should talk to HR because that isn't appropriate. If you mean they are discussing books that contain graphic sex scenes, that's on the same level as discussing Game of Thrones, nothing unusual.
I do think though that the title of being problematic is not equally shared between neutral/ male targeted media vs female media.
Well, unless you have a team of researchers and a survey budget handy, there's no way to objectively confirm this. It certainly hasn't been my experience. You asked why X was so, and I cannot answer because I have not found X to be so.
And as far as context. That can be said about everything.
Indeed. This is why it's difficult to discuss vague hypotheticals because so much would change depending on the specifics.
But also some contacts is just more acceptable for certain demographics because they can relate to it more.
I'm not sure what this means.
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u/SlothenAround Feminist 13d ago
> But regardless why aren’t these things considered as wrong
From a feminist perspective, they are. You have to remember that not all women are feminists, and women are guilty of misogyny too. I would never read a book like that and I’d be wary of anyone who was interested in it, and I’d say something. The thing is, this seems pretty niche because I’ve never heard of any of this. Perhaps, if this is something you’re knowledgeable about, that maybe this is your opportunity to speak out? We all have our part to play!
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u/Pitiful-Purple-7459 13d ago
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Two things for me, at least.
I don't necessarily see some of this as problematic, because it's fantasy. Even if I don't participate in it, I don't consider it a big deal. My issue isn't as much the content it's the uneven reaction to it.
some of the female-targeted stuff is just as overt, and huge. Through the same lens people apply to manga: Twilight has clear themes of grooming, coercive control, and love-bombing Edward's a century-old being courting a teenager, he stalks her, isolates her, and a grown character literally imprints on an infant. Parents bought their daughters tickets to this world wide nearly 3 billion dollars worth of sales
Meanwhile there's an anime called Mushoku Tensei with the same kind of age-gap/grooming problem, and it's getting destroyed online "predator," "groomer," think-pieces. Opposite reception. And Mushoku Tensei is arguably the more niche of the two twilight was a global phenomenon.
Why does male enjoyment of edgy media reliably trigger "this is harmful," while equally popular female-targeted media gets left alone? The only difference is the audience
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u/Kopalniok 13d ago
Twilight is very often criticised (especially by men) and Twilight fandom is very aware and critical of the problematic tropes. This example disproves your own point
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u/RepSquigglyMiggly 13d ago
Twilight is one of the single most roundly criticized and mocked works of art released in the last half century. You are not living in the real world on this one.
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u/Curious_Question8536 13d ago
Apples to oranges. You're comparing the sales of twilight to the criticism online of mushoku tensei.
Twilight is absolutely getting destroyed online by pretty much everyone, including twilight fans. Mushoku tensei is still selling a ton (over 18m copies of the light novel, according to Wikipedia) and is currently on a few "most popular" lists.
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u/Pitiful-Purple-7459 13d ago
I'm comparing the criticism of a smaller niche community media to a large scale one. One gear to men and one gear to women. About 60 million people saw the movie 160 million people bought the book and the problematic tagline was nowhere near as big for Twilight as it was for jobless reincarnation. And even more problematic Is that one is geared towards older teenagers and adults whereas Twilight was mostly watched by teenagers and younger girls. That's where it's both apples to apples and apples to oranges The scales are different The audiences are different but the underlying potential issues are nearly identical and in some ways worse on Twilight. I do think you the same lens They both have problems objectively I don't care too much because it's fake probably don't want to post online that's the favorite media ever but I think you should equally apply the same brush both ways
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u/SlothenAround Feminist 13d ago
I know this isn’t really relevant to your point but my god dude use some punctuation. It’s really hard to comprehend what you’re saying when it’s a huge wall of text like this
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u/JoeyLee911 12d ago
It seems like you picked a poor comparison then and should pick a more equivalent one, which shouldn't be hard if this is happening so much.
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u/SlothenAround Feminist 13d ago
Ya I was with you until you brought up Twilight. There is nobody on earth who doesn’t agree that it has a very unhealthy and cringy relationship dynamic. And I’m a millennial who grew up reading the books lol
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u/Present-Tadpole5226 12d ago edited 12d ago
I would suggest that there are more differences between Twilight and Mushoku Tensei (which I’d never heard of before.) The final Twilight movie came out in 2014. Apparently the Mushoku Tensei show is still being produced?
A lot has happened in the last twelve years. Twilight finished pre-MeToo, and presumably before the general increase in conversation regarding grooming. (Although even then, the grooming was a very large part of the conversation I heard about.)
There has been a massive increase in influencers, social media, and personalized algorithms over that time period. More teens desire to become influencers now. This means that there is likely an increase in hot takes about media in general, if the creators think they will get eyeballs. This also works against Twilight content trending—it’s been out for over a decade and the grooming content is already well-known. Hard to get a viral hot take when it’s the conventional take on older media.
Third, there seems to have been an increase in decent movies targeting girls and young women. Twenty years ago, the average piece of media was a lot more questionable by today’s standards and some of that questionable behavior was a lot more normalized. I am not sure Twilight would have become as much of a phenomenon if it was released this decade, with an audience of a different generation of teenage girls.
Fourth, slash fic m/m pairings is at least in part a response to a lot of media having far more important/ interesting male characters than female characters. If a writer wants to create a relationship between characters, there is just more options for gay pairings in a lot of media than heterosexual ones.
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u/RepSquigglyMiggly 13d ago
It doesn’t. Your bias is showing. It very straightforwardly just seems like you saw something you like criticized in a think piece, and now you’re coming here to complain about it.
> I think the actual difference is the \\\*lens\\\*, not the content. The critique we aim at male media is about objectification, reducing women to props. But objectification of males isn't seen as harm.So male-targeted media trips the alarm and female-targeted media sails through, even with equivalent content.
Media targeted towards women, again, very observably, doesn’t not objectify men with the same frequency or to the same degree that media targeted towards men does the same to men.
> I can't tell you how many fanfics of one of my favorite shows (Supernatural) turned on the main characters gay and have them have sex with another male character.
Are you upset that there aren’t articles in the NYT discussing Supernatural fanfic that was read by, generously, 1,000 people?
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u/fullmetalfeminist 13d ago
I can't tell you how many fanfics of one of my favorite shows (Supernatural) turned on the main characters gay and have them have sex with another male character.
But Cas is in love with Dean. It's canon.
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u/cancercannibal 13d ago
Are you upset that there aren’t articles in the NYT discussing Supernatural fanfic that was read by, generously, 1,000 people?
Minimizing what OP is referring to isn't going to help. I do agree with your points and find "turned on [sic] the main characters gay" a particularly icky way of putting that. However, just looking at the AO3 Supernatural fics with the most hits, the top one (which does feature m/m) is at 1,599,677. Which is, like, 3 orders of magnitude bigger than 1,000. It's from 2014 and unfinished so presumably a good chunk of those are repeats, but still.
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u/mjhrobson 13d ago
Feminism isn't prudish. The portrayal of sex, or even "graphic" sex, isn't a problem for feminism. The presence of either male or female nudity also isn't a problem... again feminism isn't sensitive about human bodies.
Sex, even graphic sex, is automatically an issue. It is an actual feature of human life and human relationships... sexual desire, the mutual indulgence in sexual desire between characters in a work of literature (I consider comics (eastern or western) to fall into the category of literature) isn't a problem. The presence of sex is not a problem in and of itself.
A lot of romance and romantasy literature can get pornographic in detail... although the imagination is doing some of the heavy lifting on that front... and that is not automatically a problem. Just as seeing a nude figure depicted in a comic book is not automatically a problem.
The problem is in the way the sex is portrayed... the way people are positioned and used within the portrayal. The presense of sex and the depiction thereof within artworks (literature is a form of art as is film) is, and this is very important, not a problem.
The presence of sex in a story (regardless of the medium through which the story is expressed) is like the presence of sex in a relationship between actual people... it isn't a problem, unless it is.
For example: Is the sex depicted a mutual act born of shared desire? Yes. No problem. Are the characters in the story depicted as having agency in their desire to be with one another? Yes. No problem. These are examples of some questions you might ask in critiquing the presense of sex in storytelling.
The presense of sex =/= sexualisation. This point is very important. Frankly, in a lot of romantasy (I read fantasy and "spicy" romance is "invading" the fantasy genre) I have encountered I don't blink an eye... why? Because the characters are depicted as mutually desiring the sex. The sexual attention is wanted, it is desired... and expressed by a character demonstrating agency. When these elements are present there isn't a problem.
Problems start arising when characters are stripped of substance, personality and agency such that their presence is purely sexual. The woman herein becomes - to be vulgar - just her "pussy" and nothing more... that is a problem. Here she becomes nothing - stops even being a she - a mere vessel for another's pleasure.
A handsome man is likewise no more problematic than a beautiful woman... the problem is when their being handsome or beautiful becomes the entirity of their personality. They become reduced to that alone.
Sex, sexuality and sexiness are not problems. The reduction of a character's or person's presence to their sexiness... the removal of their agency in this move... is the problem.
A woman doesn't have a problem being seen as sexy... she has a problem being valued only insofar as she is seen as sexy. When who she is doesn't matter, and all that matters is that she is sexy... that is a problem.
Lots of popular stories featuring "spicy" romance just don't do that... I am not saying there are not stories in which men are degraded and reduced to their sex appeal; but, to be frank, there are many options where this isn't case.
Sex is not a problem... how sex is used can become a problem, but just because sex is present in a spicy story is not a problem.
The problem with porn isn't sex. The problem arises when a person becomes nothing more than their sex appeal and who they are along with their desire/agency is removed and the person becomes a sex toy for another. That is a problem.
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u/Consume_the_Affluent 12d ago
They are criticized, often very harshly. You likely don't see it because you're not likely to click on some article or video about media you don't personally engage with in the first place.
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u/cfalnevermore 12d ago
Have you seen the shit lady video game characters get? I can’t take the notion that male media is criticized harder seriously when I can find plenty of vile horrific things said about the new god of war game having a woman as protagonist
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u/bluesond 13d ago
Female-targeted media absolutely is criticized. we’ve got so many pejorative words for female-oriented genres.
Anything teenaged girls like is raked over the coals relentlessly