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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1Rj5hda:
They ignore her a bunch, she has to wear a bikini, it’s very set in the late 70s and while it’s better than it had any right to be, it certainly relies heavily on a lot of Earth-sexist tropes and assumptions. (FOR EXAMPLE THERE ARE NO LADY PILOTS. Not that I’m bitter.) No doubt there’s a good foundational argument to say that sexism is not nearly so much of a thing in the SW universe as in prevailing Earth culture, but it’s just not feasible to argue that’s truly a gender-neutral society. (There are great female characters! Mon Mothma and so on! But there are also a whole lot of Twi’lek dancers and such! And literally every speaking character in the Imperial cast is male.)
Here, every line spoken by a woman who isn’t Leia: https://youtu.be/ODgwL7DJ9dY
I haven’t rewatched the movies in many many years, so I have no more concrete examples than that. And I know they filmed, for example, lady pilots for the first trilogy, which they then left on the editing floor except for one who they overdubbed with a male voice, for example. And I know the idea was to have a less gender-biased society. But that is not what was actually produced.
And the new movie is so much better about it! But the original trilogy exists. And there it is. Better than real life on Earth, yes. But gender-neutral? No.
(And I guess in the tie-in novel Poe gets a great line where Leia says “flyboys” and he corrects her “and flygirls” which is great! gender equality! that he had to remind her of because clearly it had to be pointed out i wonder why that is.)
Not that someone could not explore that more fully in their fic. I’d love to read it. It’s really hard, it turns out, to do that. I’m already running into problems just remembering to have characters not be homophobic, even in internalized ways. It’s really hard to remember! It takes a lot of deliberate effort! Even if you’re not sexist, you’ve been swimming in it your whole life! It’s so hard to remember to truly remove it from your stories.
[Side note: I actually had a nearly gender-free upbringing due to a bunch of circumstances but mostly because I had only sisters and went to a girls-only high school– it was a very artificially segregated environment but it also meant that I just literally didn’t have to think about it the vast majority of the time, so actually, I tend to notice things oddly, and simultaneously a lot of men think to this day that I come across “mannish” because I didn’t learn as a teenager how to talk to men like a woman does, I only learned to talk to people like a person does, and it’s different. I had to deliberately teach myself that kind of coding as an adult, and it was weird, let me tell you.]
I guess your ask was specifically about Leia, but I’m sorry, that wasn’t really what I was interested in and I don’t have a ton of insight on it– she does a great job at taking charge of stuff and, sure, she gets a lot done, but she has to fight for it and is rarely deferred-to as a matter of course, which you’d expect given her rank if all else was truly equal. I did a bit of rolling my eyes at it when I watched the movie, I remember that much. But in general, while Star Wars made an arguable attempt to show us a Futuristic Society Where Sexism Isn’t A Thing, it just showed us a society where sexism is *less* of a thing.
They ignore her a bunch, she has to wear a bikini, it’s very set in the late 70s and while it’s better than it had any right to be, it certainly relies heavily on a lot of Earth-sexist tropes and assumptions. (FOR EXAMPLE THERE ARE NO LADY PILOTS. Not that I’m bitter.) No doubt there’s a good foundational argument to say that sexism is not nearly so much of a thing in the SW universe as in prevailing Earth culture, but it’s just not feasible to argue that’s truly a gender-neutral society. (There are great female characters! Mon Mothma and so on! But there are also a whole lot of Twi’lek dancers and such! And literally every speaking character in the Imperial cast is male.)
Here, every line spoken by a woman who isn’t Leia: https://youtu.be/ODgwL7DJ9dY
I haven’t rewatched the movies in many many years, so I have no more concrete examples than that. And I know they filmed, for example, lady pilots for the first trilogy, which they then left on the editing floor except for one who they overdubbed with a male voice, for example. And I know the idea was to have a less gender-biased society. But that is not what was actually produced.
And the new movie is so much better about it! But the original trilogy exists. And there it is. Better than real life on Earth, yes. But gender-neutral? No.
(And I guess in the tie-in novel Poe gets a great line where Leia says “flyboys” and he corrects her “and flygirls” which is great! gender equality! that he had to remind her of because clearly it had to be pointed out i wonder why that is.)
Not that someone could not explore that more fully in their fic. I’d love to read it. It’s really hard, it turns out, to do that. I’m already running into problems just remembering to have characters not be homophobic, even in internalized ways. It’s really hard to remember! It takes a lot of deliberate effort! Even if you’re not sexist, you’ve been swimming in it your whole life! It’s so hard to remember to truly remove it from your stories.
[Side note: I actually had a nearly gender-free upbringing due to a bunch of circumstances but mostly because I had only sisters and went to a girls-only high school– it was a very artificially segregated environment but it also meant that I just literally didn’t have to think about it the vast majority of the time, so actually, I tend to notice things oddly, and simultaneously a lot of men think to this day that I come across “mannish” because I didn’t learn as a teenager how to talk to men like a woman does, I only learned to talk to people like a person does, and it’s different. I had to deliberately teach myself that kind of coding as an adult, and it was weird, let me tell you.]
I guess your ask was specifically about Leia, but I’m sorry, that wasn’t really what I was interested in and I don’t have a ton of insight on it– she does a great job at taking charge of stuff and, sure, she gets a lot done, but she has to fight for it and is rarely deferred-to as a matter of course, which you’d expect given her rank if all else was truly equal. I did a bit of rolling my eyes at it when I watched the movie, I remember that much. But in general, while Star Wars made an arguable attempt to show us a Futuristic Society Where Sexism Isn’t A Thing, it just showed us a society where sexism is *less* of a thing.
