Normandy is glaring at your double standards - Comments

It's like the glass ceiling for women characters. Although since we like to exaggerate in stories these characters do appear. I don't hate girl characters I usually hate the guys they idealize. Haha. So I understand and I agree with what you said about the double standards. Women are still paid less then men. And women's professoinal attire for some reason seems to be quite revealing for most women which is only a plus for guys. So not only are women sexualized in society they get too distracted by dressing a Certian way instead of focusing on their intellect. It's even addressed in anthropology these signs and signifiers we dress ourselves in. And in sociology the playing out of hegemonic feminities and hegemonic masculinities. It's all written about so intensely. This society issue. Even religions like Islam address how to achieve a better society by dressing properly , giving charity to orphans etc., having good character as respecting your leaders and teachers among other things.

It's just us knowledge lacking kids that haven't yet learned the great words and thoughts of scholars. Lol I really want to be a scholar.

@ discoveringclouds
I don't mean when the author burdens their own characters with double standards (although that is a fair point, and they really shouldn't do that I hate it when I see two different characters in one story whom are endowed with similar behavior yet are treated entirely differently because of the gender they were given by the author themselves), I mean when people who are reading it look at stories and go, "oh, well, he's so sweet and emotional" for the male character, but the moment a female character gets anything resembling sad or emotional it's "dear god please shut up and stop whining." Not all double standards are related to immorality and such in my opinion. It's about personality traits as well. You can have a story sans flirting and such where two characters with similar traits are held in different regards solely because of their sex. I could care less what the similar trait is, it's wrong to hate one for something you love the other one for because of their gender. I've had people tell me they hate a strong female character because she's too "selfish and thought too highly of herself" because she didn't take crap from her family who had a tendency to pit her against her cousins grade wise or accomplishment wise and defended herself against their snippy unwarranted comments. There was no love connection, there was nothing flirty or adulterous or just downright immoral going on in the story, they didn't like her because she dared stand up against her family who had ridiculous standards (and yes, families with stupidly high standards exist, one of my closest friends lived with that her entire life, nothing was ever good enough and there was constantly a "oh well did you hear what your relative did? Why couldn't you be more like them?") It's not always stretching the truth into immoral grounds or unbelievably ridiculous characters it happens with.

Even with no love interest or anything of the like in a story characters can still be discriminated against; it isn't all fueled by flirty story lines and such. I don't believe that all of the double-standards are fueled by racy stories or characters with promiscuous attitudes (although those do lend to some of the double-standards, but hey, if they can make it a good story I'm not going to bash their characters for having sexual tendencies, especially if that isn't all the story is about or that particular personality trait is something that is reasonable and well developed for a reason i.e. a promiscuous female whose actions stem from being informed as a late teen she is sterile and can have no children and therefore not only lacks the ability to get pregnant but also tries to use men as a way to fill that painful void in her life, she's not a good character but it makes sense because people cope with pain and actions like that in different ways and that is in all honesty how someone could handle it. Or the character of James Bond for another example. If a woman were to do the exact same thing he does there would be no end to it, that character wouldn't be accepted nearly as well as he would because as opposed to seductive her actions would be deemed "slutty" and she'd be a bitch rather than a smartass.) other types of material fuels the same unwarranted double-standards. Traits can be overdone and quickly sink into annoying or just bad writing of a character's personality. Way back at the beginning of the "Things You Hate In Stories" thread in the forums there were a plethora of posts that read like this or something similar: "I just really hate female characters because they're female, no real reason." It just shows that no matter what type of story you write or the content people are more likely to be discriminatory based on your character's sex. It really isn't all about what's necessarily "wrong" to us in my opinion. It's just that there are more nonexistent "Guidelines" for a female character to follow for her to be considered acceptable.

Double-standards against females happens all the time, no matter what you do. They can be "too independent" or "too dependent" because no matter what they do their actions are going to be judged more harshly than that of a males simply because society has set forth so many standards for women that make them "perfect" or "acceptable". Female characters do not get acceptance as easily as men no matter what the circumstances in real life or in movies and works of fiction. They are always under harsher scrutiny regardless of the rating or content of a story. It doesn't all stem from what is truly "acceptable" or "unacceptable", generally it begins with what society tells us we should hold as positive or negative. And there is so much more considered "flawed" with female characters in their eyes.

Ugh, sorry. I've had a long day at work and I'm more or less just exhausted.

Adulterous characters. They have no beliefs except filling a-described as by the authors as-animalistic desire. They usually don't talk about much else and don't have any other significant plot. I've seen too many stories like this.. And I don't even read rated R.

But in general I want more meaning in life and stories. I believe there shouldnt be such an obsession, it leads to extremes like these annoying double standard characters you talk about. And this level of cliche is ultimately lame and too boring to read.

I wasn't talking about you. This story/blog of yours mentions double standards and I'm saying that it also has to do with the increasingly common topic of sex and constant flirting in mibba stories. With characters like this it's easy/ cliche for authors to talk about all the gossip and flirting and backbiting and stuff they want. Anything that's sexy sells right? So what they like to read they'll write as well and this leaves lots of stories with double standards. We all like to imagine society and those things around us and try to manipulate them in our stories, so they want to see how far people would go in cruelty, how kind or evil they can be and what could leave them to falling in love... Strangely it's usually what you shouldn't love- lies and deceit and sleeping around-in a man.. Or woman. They just take the basic flirting to a whole darker level so as they go farther and farther some of us get a little horrified with the lack of morals and life meaning. And sometimes hypocrisy too. We like continuity and character development and strong writing skills without crossing all the limits. So what's bugging you and me perhaps is that the focus is too shallow and it's getting shallower. Only drops of humanity and character remain in these stories. The authors also usually justify these reasons somehow and the characters usually accept these huge Devilish flaws and dont even try to help their-usually- seemingly mental and morally corrupt friends that have psychopathic tendencies. They just dont care and have no purpose in life and it seems strange and wrong.And at the end of the day they are just stories that people write for themselves and friends, but we do have to consider why we accept so easily these twisted beliefs. There is an obsession with only flirting, only gossip, only lies. There's nothing to balance it. So it becomes too clear to us that something is wrong. That we can't love these characters, we don't want to be like them and we certainly don't intend on passing on or internalizing any life lessons these stories seem to send us.

The problem, dear Normandy, seems to be that our hearts don't like it.

@ discoveringclouds
I've had one story dealing with adultery and i told you which one it was..
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Aside from that one i dont really have any stories that are "adulterous" by the definition of it: 1. voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone other than his or her lawful spouse.

Yes, Tides of the Broken revolves around a cheating spouse but the others don't. Too much flirting...? Is this for stories in general, or mine? Julian and Teal banter at this point; Aften and Nova don't flirt, they're still trying to figure each other out; Maggie and Simon are stuck together and their interactions are all negative at this point.

I'm vaguely confused on that front. The natural progression of romantic relationships will lead to that though, so yes, eventually there will be flirting as the characters' affections for each other grow.

@ discoveringclouds
Adulterous authors....?

Yeah seriously. I would prefer both weren't so flirty and adulterous. Your story basically shows that people talk wayyyy too much about these certain things to the point they are recognizable and annoying to people. But I don't know if meaningful talk will fill the voices of the made up characters soon. Although Teal has pretty good dialogues so I think your one of those authors trying to work the mess.

@ Phil's Baby Hina
You can do what I do and ask them why. Someone flat out told me they wanted to "punch Maggie (one of my MC's) in the face" for how she treated the male character. I had to just look at them for a moment before querying as to why. "I don't know, she could just be a little nicer and give him a chance." All the while the character that was being treated badly was acting with the same and slightly worse if you ask me, treatment of her. Especially when one considers the loss she suffered only a few days prior.

So what we can do is try to talk to them about it and show them how truly illogical their thought process is on such matters. It might not help, but then again you never know, it just may.

I agree. -_-" Guys seem to have more respect from society than most women. But there's nothing we can do about it really - sadly.

I second that.

Three words. A-FUCKING-MEN.