zenosanalytic:

orestian:

tmirai:

This is such an interesting dissection of a very common trope in writing female characters that I never really thought about before, but it’s so prevalent and so obvious and so fucking disgusting.

it’s called infantilization and i hate it but “born sexy yesterday” is such a good way to put it

Yeah, though I think there’s another thing going on here too that the vid mentions but could focus more on, which is the male fantasy of “making” a woman precisely as they wish her to be, including her ideas about what is acceptable treatment and romantic/sexual behavior.

One of the HUGE inaccuracies in this, which is to say one of the major fantasies it embodies, is that because these women are naive on a particular topic, they have no self-image or dignity/self-possession, nor instinct/intuition on the particular topic, or on how the world ought to work. Take Celeste(Kim Bassinger’s character) in that My Stepmother is an Alien scene. Who gives a damn whether you know about sandwiches or not, what frigging interstellar traveler is going to let some schmuck yell at her, browbeat her without explanation or even basic interpersonal respect, into doing anything? Why would a professional, an individual accomplished enough to be sent by her planet’s government to investigate a potential attack on their world, someone responsible and respected enough to be entrusted with reality-warping technology who has traveled across the cosmos to confront a potentially hostile alien world and put an end to any threat she finds there, acquiesce to that treatment? Why would she find being insulted and ordered around and treated like she can’t be trusted to make her own decisions acceptable? In reality she wouldn’t, and therein lies the fantasy.

In the movie, because she doesn’t know about Earth and Food she has no concept of the sort of treatment she, as a person, deserves. That’s fundamental to the fantasy in this trope: these women never know how they ought to be treated, because they don’t know some specific thing they apparently have no concept at all of the treatment they deserve, and because of that these men get away with bullying, manipulation, and taking advantage without being caught, and without having to feel guilty for their behavior since there is no chance to get caught(which, of course, also presents their behavior as normal: if only men didn’t have to worry about censure, it says, they’d all treat women this way, which is the sort of mendacious bullshit creeps tend to tell themselves).

But it doesn’t stop there of course; not only do they not get caught out and called on their dickery, which is presented by the movie as “proof” that the woman doesn’t mind it, their dickery is celebrated and admired as “helping” the woman learn her place in the world and become a full and “real” person. That last bit of the dynamic is particularly notable in Tron(where the guy literally brings Quorra into the real world and a flesh-and-blood body) and The Fifth Element(where the movie ends on Leelo and Dallas having sex, after the climax where Dallas teaches Leelo “the Fifth Element” of “Love” and saves the Earth, through kissing her, without her consent, while she’s having an emotional breakdown. A particularly strident stating of the trope’s core thesis).