thoughts on the ladies

[meretricula]

partially prompted by sarahtales's most recent post, but I've been pondering this for a while.

has anyone else noticed a horrifying dearth of women in sports slash? I mean, this is true of slash in general, don't get me wrong. but I don't know if I've ever seen a fandom so prone to simply excising really important relationships from its fic just because one of the people in those relationships is (ew! ick! cooties!) a girl. Merlin fandom is all about the Arthur/Merlin, which is fine and dandy, but it's not like the authors habitually pretend that Morgana and Gwen don't exist. (to be fair: Supernatural fandom has always been about writing out all significant heterosexual relationships. but the heterosexual relationships are so badly written in the show that I'm sort of willing to give the fans half a pass on that one.)

this drives me crazy about fangirls. WE ARE WOMEN FOR FUCK'S SAKE. PLEASE DON'T HATE WOMEN. I've been thinking and thinking about a comment I got on a tennis fic, and I don't want to be ungrateful, because it was clearly meant as a compliment, but it basically said "the guys in this relationship are awesome! and so is female character X (the girlfriend of one of the guys) - even though she's just a girl," which makes me so fucking mad. she's just a girl? for the love of god, are you not a girl yourself?

in sports rps, most of the people we want to write about do have girlfriends. some of them are even married. and yes, some of them are dating women who are former nude models or pop singers or whatever (not that we should look down on women in any of those professions), but most of them are dating very lovely, nice women. aside from the fact that it's a little disrespectful to just pretend that they don't exist, they're very important to the men that we're writing about. how can you think you're doing a good job of characterizing someone if you completely leave out his relationship with a woman he's been dating for years? sorry to delve into specifics, but - Mirka Vavrinec has been with Roger Federer for what, nine years? she's a completely inextricable part of his life. Xisca Perello is not just Rafael Nadal's girlfriend, she's his neighbor and good friends with his little sister. Novak Djokovic is friends with women - not just his girlfriend, but also Ana Ivanovic and (so far as I can tell) Maria Sharapova. pretending the world is only peopled by men is not going to cut it, people.

I honestly think it's even worse when a writer deals with the presence of a woman who happens to be roadblocking the 'ship by turning her into a villainous bitch. these men are very rich and very good-looking: they would not be dating women they didn't like. can we all accept that their girlfriends are not evil and move on? also: gay sex is still cheating on your girlfriend. if the girlfriend doesn't know about and condone whatever is happening in the locker room showers, then yeah - your hero is being an asshole. which is fine to write! people are assholes all the time. just acknowledge that you are not writing a shining upright paragon of morality. I'd rather read about someone being sort of a dick than someone going around doing the right thing all the time, but I want the narrative to acknowledge his (or her!) dickishness.

sorry for the rant. I hope that if anyone spots me writing fake women or ignoring canon women, you'll call me on it! I know I've done it in the past, and it itches at me. fandom loves men, and loves men who love men, but - the vast majority of us are women. and women are fucking awesome.

Comments

[applegnat.livejournal.com]

This may vary from sport to sport, but in footie in general, and for me in particular, there's also a line to be drawn between ficcing public characters v/s private people. I realise that may be putting too fine a point on it (after all, this IS Real Person Fiction) - but there's a sort of squeamishness about ficcing someone who is an architect or an economist and just basically doing her own thing, staying out of the limelight (the great thing about Italy is that you can mostly do that even if your dude is A+ famous). For the ones who don't - sure. Victoria Beckham is more just as much fun to write about as David.

Having said that, what you say about misogyny in sports fandom is every bit true. And there's a tabloid-y thing about football, especially, where the general attitude in the mainstream is to say, "Oh ew, she's an ugly skank who dresses awfully, now show me more paparazzi photos of her!" that's deeply disturbing.

This is a very good post and a very god point to think about. Thanks for making it.

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

that is a really good point that I totally ignored. oops? idk, it's never made all that much sense to me in the sense that... I don't see how writing fic about someone that they'll never read is going to hurt them? but I know that's not how a lot of people feel about it. I don't agree that authors should be able to tell people not to fic their books, either, for what it's worth, so it's more of a "fic for all!" thing than something more specific. I do think there's the problem of "available information" in terms of WAGs and other family members, but it's not that much worse than the available information about anybody in RPS; we're making most of this shit up anyway! might as well use as many canon facts as we've got.

the bit where the wife/girlfriend is included just to make her the villain burns me way more. I've seen that a couple of times with Mirka in particular, which is just... does she not get enough flak from men? do we really have to do this? ffs, people. it's such a cheap out.

I just needed to get the rant out, you know? thank you for making such thoughtful points! ~hugs~

[aramley.livejournal.com]

I loooove you for this post <3

I think it's also telling that there's a big fandom for the ATP, but practically zero for the WTA.

Even though I agree with everything you've said here, after reading this I went back and checked my list of fics, and was actually shocked to realise how much I've marginalised or completely ignored women in my own writing. That's definitely something I have to be more aware of in the future. I hope you'll call me on that if you see me doing it!

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

~hugs~ I don't know if I would have really started to notice if we hadn't talked about the whole "women" thing before, so.

I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to femslash, but I wish there were more for the WTA. I swear to god Sveta and Momo slash themselves, it's not like it would be hard.

it's so upsetting to go back and realize you used to do things you hate now. I keep meaning to go back and fix things, because I realize now that they're kind of unacceptable and they make me cringe when I read them. (for what it's worth, I really liked the way you dealt with Roger cheating on Mirka in Mallorca. he was being a dick, and he knew it.)

[aramley.livejournal.com]

It's weird that I feel uncomfortable writing women but not men. I am a woman! Why aren't I writing women? I wonder if it's because women seem to be judged to a much higher standard - even in fiction, so writing women is a much more fraught undertaking (I read and really enjoyed the essay at sarahtales btw, and also, didn't she used to go by a different name and write parodies, or is that someone else I'm thinking of?)

It's sort of embarrassing that I used to be so much better at not handwaving away the guilt and the cheating stuff that long ago. I think I got my tinhat stuck on too tight after that, haha.

(Thinking about this has also made me realise that I've done something terrible and lazy in the bigbang project with a female OC, and that she is so far the only woman in the story, and I can't believe I didn't see that before, omg)

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

well, male characters definitely get forgiven for more (sarahtales was right, Harriet Potter would be the most annoying character on the planet, though I'm not crazy about Harry either), and at least in my case I worry about imposing myself on female characters too much. but on the other hand I also worry about making male characters too feminine (by which I mean: able to communicate and concerned about hurting each other's feelings), so there's no easy solution. woe. (yeah, Sarah Tales used to be Mistful, who was Maya in HP fandom. since she got published she took her fic down.)

I guess it depends on the situation? I mean, if you're writing an utterly contextless pornlet, then going into the guilt in depth is going to take away from the point of the story, which is hot sexings. and there are some fics where it's more apropos to gloss over stuff than others. I mean, the ATP is an almost all-male environment, and I could accept that some players compartmentalize "my girlfriend is here so I am with her" and "my girlfriend is at home and I am on tour so I can do whatever I want" and feel very little guilt over that. I mean, I still think it's a dickish thing to do, but you know what I mean.

(you keep hinting about your bigbang! ~grabby hands~ I am excited.)

[aramley.livejournal.com]

Characterisation is just hard, in general. I think it's difficult not to write idealised versions of characters, particularly since fic generally comes out of love (or at least liking). Which might be another reason why cheating doesn't get dealt with very much. It's unpleasant to think of someone you really like as being a dick.

(Oscillating between excitement and terror and deep, deep loathing for the bigbang atm. Only halfway to the wordcount D:)

[meretricula.livejournal.com]

yeah. I don't want Novak to be a dick! I love him! ~cuddles Nole protectively~

once you're over 50% done it's all downhill from there. =)