http://sharkodactyl.tumblr.com/post/165166952339
totally, obnoxiously, horribly uncharitable:
can i want to fuck the monster girls tho
because i’m like them and they’re like me and we both need someone
also like
“every kind of woman is sexualized”
no, they really aren’t. and the insistence that they are is very typical of a certain kind of abled feminism. the kind that insists that all women are drowning in catcalls when some women would give their left tit to be considered someone’s, anyone’s, lust object.
Hmm. I agree with you, but I also sort of agree with the OP, and on reflection it’s because I sort of glossed over the problem because I recognize it as an imperfect version of a stronger argument, but you’re right, that specific comment was pretty out of line.
The steelman version, I guess, is that it’s not so much that all women are sexualized as that almost all acceptable, legitimate women (by prevailing social standards) are sexualized, that sexualization and womanhood are so intertwined that a woman who can’t easily be sexualized is disproportionately likely to be invisible or vilified as broken. It’s a post about media representation, about what media communicates women are allowed to be and what it means for them to be those things, so I guess I took it as not so much about how society treats actual women as about how the onscreen mythology of gender plays out, and how that informs that treatment. That seems like it has room to dovetail with the criticisms raised abovethread: wanting better representation for the kind of women who want to be sexualized but can’t, and wanting monster women whom you might want to fuck but whose monstrousness isn’t subordinated to or a metaphor for their fuckability seem compatible with the OP’s desire for more breadth of representation generally.
This dynamic actually plays out in a very predictable culture loop, right?
STEP 1: The sentiment being advanced in the linked post, or some rough equivalent. “We need non-sexualized women in our media! We need compelling female figures who don’t fit into the box of conventional femininity, who aren’t largely defined by their hotness!”
STEP 2: The sentiment being advanced by @fierceawakening, or some rough equivalent. “I actually find those non-conventionally-feminine women hot.” Or – better and more pointedly – “It’s important to remember and represent that non-conventionally-feminine women have sexuality too, and that sometimes people are attracted to them, and that this matters. They’re not just villains or monsters or whatever, they’re people with love lives and sex lives, just like the conventionally hot chicks.”
STEP 3: The media-makers take note of all the people expressing the Step 2 sentiment and say, “oh, OK, we have to emphasize the desirability of these monstrous / weird / non-conventionally-feminine characters.” And, because our culture has an extremely sophisticated language for emphasizing desirability…
STEP 4: …the characters in question become more conventionally feminine, and you end up with another brand of Slightly Oddball Outre Hotness, and everyone rejoices except the people who actually cared about all this in the first place.
The clearest example I can think of is Brienne of Tarth in A Song of Ice and Fire. This is a character who is explicitly described in text as being very ugly, whose arc largely revolves around the weird dynamics of romantic tension between a Gorgeous Golden Man and a Totally Unfuckable Woman. And of course all the fans love her, because she’s awesome, and because she provides a counter-stereotypical story that a lot of people really want. So the HBO producers got the message, and made sure that the fans would be able to properly appreciate Brienne – and that’s how we we ended up with Gwendoline Christie, who may be kinda tall but is certainly no one’s idea of a Totally Unfuckable Woman.
But, like, this is also more or less what’s happened with every breed of monstergirl ever.
I’ll believe this cycle happens, but I’m not sure it applies to monstergirls. As far as I know, monstergirls started off as anime waifus for perverts on 2chan.
I mean, sure, maybe with traditional female monsters-who-are-also-girls, like harpies, but those seem the exception, and I expect the first time anyone thought “what if you had a slime, you know like the JRPG monsters, except it was a girl”, they were already thinking about fuckable ones to fulfil a kink and not a point about unconventional femininity.
OK, it’s a fair cop – there is also the Japanese-style moe-tan “what if we took every single thing in the world and turned it into a cute girl?” impulse, which is, uh, different.
But there is a long Western tradition of first using monsters like gorgons / harpies / sphinxes as stand-ins for frightening nonconventional femininity, and then finding them alluring because untamed strength or whatever, and then reacting to this by saying “OK, so what if they were, like, actually super hot?”