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

[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~