Sexism from laziness

Okay, so I think I figured out why Heroes appears to oscillate between strong women and traditional sexist tropes... and it's a simple reason that people have already figured out long before me and even coined an aphorism for: "always assume incompetence before malevolence" (with variations, of course). In a nutshell, sexism such as in Heroes isn't the result of deliberate intent; it's just stupidity and laziness.

The explanation came to me while watching last night's episode, when Caitlin or whatever her Oirish spelling is goes into stereotypically hissy mode upon finding her brother dead, while Peter tries to do the manly stoic comfort thing. Somebody asked why she did that, and I immediately said, "Because she's a woman!" (Note that the obvious answer would probably be "because her brother's dead", but I jump to the sexism. Of course, if it was a guy finding his brother dead I would be pleasantly astonished to see the same reaction.)

Upon further reflection, trying to reconcile the Jessicas and Angela Petrellis with the Mayas and Caitlins, I realized what the issue is. What Heroes thinks of feminism is "come up with a couple of obviously strong female characters that you can point to as such, and then write the rest using traditional narrative tropes". They pick a couple of characters to be the token "strong women" and then fall back (by laziness) on stereotypical characterizations for the rest. This is the problem with a lot of writing today (especially on television), where progressivism is ticking a box for the progressive element but keeping the rest of the narrative firmly grounded in stereotypes. It's lazy and disgusting.

Writing strong women isn't about picking a character to be the token "strong woman" anymore than writing strong blacks isn't picking a character to be the token black guy (something which thankfully doesn't happen as much anymore, although I find the whole New Orleans black community storyline uncomfortably close at times). Strong characters doesn't mean literally strong (Niki/Jessica) or even emotionally strong (Angela). It means well-developed, well-written, well-rounded, compelling, interesting, realistic. It means treating characters as human beings and not as plot devices. There are a lot of weak male characters as well, we just don't realize it as much because they're physically strong, good-looking, charming, whatever. They're still weak because they have no real personality beyond those idealized traits in the same way the female characters are weak because they have no real personality beyond their weaknesses.

I don't mean to sound alarmist because this isn't a big problem outside of television and blockbuster movies, mediums which aren't expected to be on the progressive side of things anyway. But the unfortunate reality is that a lot of people's ideas come from those mediums and a lot of our psychologies are based on the paradigms we learned from the things we watched in our childhood, when we couldn't recognize and filter out the stereotypes and tropes. That's why, as silly as it may seem, shows like Barney and whatnot exist, to create the right psychological paradigms (whether or not the paradigms those shows teach are actually the right ones is another story, but at least they recognize the importance of what they do).

As long as the tropes are perpetuated by lazy writers, future writers will fall back on them. It's a nasty cycle, one that both impacts and responds to cultural shifts. And cultural change is glacial, as they say. Sexism especially is here with us to stay -- even if we could change our culture, it's literally built into our DNA, as Campbell shows us in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (still working on that gender post about that). So the only way to avoid it is to stay vigilant.