Tim Curry is still my idol.

And the misogyny debate rolls around again! Why do I feel like I’ve done this particular portion of the debate before? Oh, right! Because I have. In fact, it was remarkably similar in situation. The big difference being that Elena actually got 15 minutes of an episode before fans went wacko about her appearance. In SPN, people are going wacko at just the hint of new reoccurring female characters.

It’s funny the way the debate comes up right now.

See, I’ve been semi-marathoning Ugly Betty this week. I just finished episode 19, so I’m almost finished with S1. I have great love for this show. I also have great disgust for this show.

Ugly Betty is awesome in its explicit portrayal of relationships between characters, both platonic and romantic. Betty herself has had two primary love interests in the series so far: Walter and Henry. Neither character has much in the way of background or, well, character beyond what’s necessary for their relation to the plot as love interests. I love Betty/Henry. I would ship Betty/Henry all day long. I think they’re adorable. I also think Charlie/Henry is adorable.

But I am also leery of the show and this relationship in particular because it really just reinforces ideas about being “worthy” of a partner. Daniel and Betty would make an awesome couple, for example (though I think they have one of the greatest examples of a platonic female/male relationship on tv too). But Betty is either not “worthy” of Daniel because she’s ugly (and I could rant all day long about how they took a very beautiful actress and put her in glasses and braces and clothes that look like a color-blind cat threw up on them and that’s supposed to be “ugly” but, uh, we’re not going to go there or I’ll be late for work) or Daniel is not “worthy” of Betty because he’s occasionally a jackass. Though, given the show, it’s the former, not the latter that would be portrayed. Betty handles his jackassery with amazing gumption and pluck and aplomb and total mastery.

So my question is, for the love of god, why do the writers have to justify a character — especially a female character’s — “worth” to be a love interest?

That bothers me more than anything when this debate comes up. Either you love someone or you don’t. Either you have reasons for it or you don’t. The whole reason Betty and Walter lasted so long was because staying with him was logical, even if she wasn’t happy. (Which is such an interesting contortion of the abuse trap it’s no wonder Betty stays with Daniel.)

The point is that when you even start talking about a female character having to prove their “worth,” you’ve dipped into misogyny. Male characters just get to exist. Female characters have to “prove their worth.”

I use Ugly Betty as an example because this is the entire point of the show. “Don’t get above your place.” “Like should be with like.” It’d be fine, if a little worrying, if just Betty saw the issue this way. But this is the entire latent meaning of the show. You hear it explicitly, through Betty and Hilda, and you see it over and over again just in the reactions to relationships. Henry has no character whatsoever except to be a nerd, which is somehow “perfect” for Betty. Walter had no character except to be loyal to Betty to the point of stalking her (barring the Gina Gambarro thing). Ted LeBeau, a love interest for Wilhemina Slater, breaks the mold a little. He’s “Texan” and Wilhemina’s “Milan.” Yet when she gets involved with him emotionally (besides physically), he leaves her for the wife he’s been separated from. Jerry O’Connell has a guest starring spot as a random guy in a sports bar type place who hits on Alexis. Alexis gets interested in him and it turns out that Jerry O’Connell is a jackass who was bet he couldn’t get the “trannie’s” number. (Wilhemina comes in and punches him out in one of my favorite scenes of the show so far but the point is still made.) Don’t mix. Over and over and over, that’s the point they’re making. Don’t get above yourself. Don’t lower yourself. Geeks for geeks, beautiful people for beautiful people. They’re not our kind of people.

Let’s move it beyond just the idea of class status. (And yes, there’s a huge class element to the show in terms of beauty, right up to the actions of Grace Chin and Sofia Reyes.) Let’s take a look at Angel. Gunn is a love interest character too. Obviously he didn’t start out that way (he was the “Black Muscle,” which is an issue all of its own) but eventually that became his purpose. He was Fred’s love interest. And he and Fred eventually break up because Gunn did something Fred was actually going to do herself. And it’s an interesting thing that she eventually ends up with Wes.

Let’s look at Gunn and Wes. They’re parallels, even in their mistakes. In S3, Wes steals Connor and gives him to Holtz. Connor does eventually return, but not in the same form he left. In S5, Gunn does the same thing, sparking the transformation of Fred into Illyria. In the end, of the two, Wes is the one welcomed back into the team and valued. In fact, his entire mistake is erased. It’s essentially retconned so it never even happens. Gunn just literally… goes to hell.

This is another place where you get those problematic issues of “worth.” Metatextually, Angel was telling us that Wes and Gunn were unequal, despite taking parallel courses. We can really only point to their differences in terms of class, race and education to tease out what makes Wes better than Gunn. So are we supposed to be taking this message at face value here?

It’s the same when you start talking about “worth” in romantic relationships. As soon as you declare someone “unworthy,” you’ve automatically valued one character over another.

And while there may be exceptions (I’ve seen people point to Lorelai and Rory’s love interests on Gilmore Girls, for example), by far you’re only going to see that word, “worth,” associated with female characters. And as soon as you make that statement, especially when the female character hasn’t even appeared on the show yet, saying that a female character isn’t going to be “worthy” of a male character or a show, you’ve already internalized view that men are inherently better than women. You’ve already accepted it as a cultural fact.

Okay, now I’m hungry. Hmm. Toast sounds good.

In which I display my postmodern analytic bias.

I really absolutely hate this new meme running around in which people list the stories they’ve written featuring minorities. Of course, the meme never actually says minorities anywhere but it asks about character gender and race (and in some cases age, disability, sexuality and class), which are several of the defining qualities of a minority group.

Now, I like the idea of the meme. It’s a good exercise in consciousness-raising of our prejudices and biases in what we choose to write and (presumably) be interested in and promote. I think the concept is good (though the first couple of posts with the meme were notably lacking things like, oh, disability, age, religion, sexuality, and class. Hell, as far as religion, they’re all lacking that, I think. Jewish characters, anyone?).

No, what I question is the validity of the method.

It’s easy to talk about racism or sexism or ageism or whatever-ism within a culture itself. We’re talking about the thing and the whole of the thing. Talking about isms within a media source gets a heck of a lot trickier. You have a dual problem facing yourself here: are we talking about isms contextually or metatextually?

Contextual isms take place within, and only within, the canon source. This may take the form of a more familiar ism, such as the blatant racism we see in Life on Mars. The entire male cast save Sam is racist, homophobic, ethnocentric, and seriously misogynistic (Gene Hunt being the biggest dick of them all when it comes to this). In a more modern setting, you have Richard Tyler on The 4400 dealing with it in the past and in the present, both personally and in terms of his two relationships with white women. Or the episode Route 666 on Supernatural which deals with not only racist people but a racist ghost.

But an ism may not be so clear cut as this. There’s canons in which skin color is no indication of social class. In the anime/manga Ai no Kusabi, society is stratified by (ostensibly) hair color. Within the society, a supercomputer named Jupiter genetically created a ruling caste (the Blondies), characterized by their blonde hair. The lowest caste is the people with dark hair (brown or black) and stratifies up until you reach the ruling caste. Of course, the real divide isn’t really about hair color, it’s naturally born vs. genetically created. So is the minority the more obvious divide along hair color (paralleling skin color) or are we looking deeper to the social class segregations which are the true indication of status within the society?

was doing the meme some before I left for work. She asked me if I considered River Tam, from Firefly and Serenity, as a minority character. My first response was on the lines of, “oh, hells no!” The Tams, Inara and, to an extent, Shepherd Book are the oddballs of an already extremely odd crew because they’re all from middle/upper class, educated and privileged backgrounds. That automatically excludes people from being considered a minority in my book. But said something that made me think about this (and my own personal working class based anti-rich biases). She said that the upper class, contextually, in that universe is Chinese based. The written language is almost solely Chinese (or at least a character-based language that presumably evolves from Chinese), the spoken language is ubiquitously peppered with Chinese, and a lot of the dress is Eastern-influenced. We talked about this a bit more and the final conclusion was essentially “cannot be determined.” The point of the story here is that “classic” signs of minority status may not actually be applicable within a contextual universe.

The flip side of this is the metatextual side. Shows don’t exist in vacuums. If they did, no one would be watching because the gravitat — Okay, bad joke, I know. But there are three key ingredients to fandom: source creators, the source canon and the fans of the source. Classic isms, classic minority markers might not exist within a canon universe in and of itself, but they certainly do for the fans and the unconscious (or conscious) biases they bring in when watching/reading a source. has to scold me in discussions and cry foul sometimes because, since I come from a poor working class background, I have a very strong bias against the rich and wealthy (that seems to get stronger the older I get). That bias influences what I prefer to watch or read, what characters I like, even what types of stories play best with me (god forbid someone show me a Horatio Alger story). This is problematic for me as a viewer/reader in particular because most sources are geared toward a comfortable middle or upper middle class setting since that’s what most people consider themselves as or aspire to.

Because I’m hypersensitive to presentations of class or caste status within sources, I judge sources that deal with this issue (or not) with a stronger critical eye than I might others. It’s the same with any other ism. Does a show have subtle racism, by showing all black characters in support of a single white character? Are women conspicuously absent in this source or do we see them as lead characters? Etc.

What exists on screen and what we see on screen can be two different things. Take Stargate: Atlantis, for example. Within the canon, Teyla and Ronon are not presented as minority characters within their respective civilizations; Teyla is a leader and Ronon’s shown as fairly high up in the military structure. Both are high level operatives on Atlantis as well; when Elizabeth leaves, it’s Teyla that is left behind in charge. (I suppose you could argue that all humans are the minority in Pegasus galaxy, with the Wraith being the dominant ruling class. In the end, all humans are oppressed by the Wraith. However, most of the show focuses solely on human-human interactions and not Wraith-human, so for the purposes of this essay we’re also talking about human-human oppression.) But metatextually, in the eyes of the viewers, both characters are “black.” I use the quotation marks because the term “black” has become sort of a catch-all denoting anyone who looks as if they’re from African descent. Jason Momoa, who plays Ronon Dex, is half-Hawaiian and half-Caucasian. Rachel Luttrel is half-Tanzanian and half-Caucasian. Both are still considered “black,” even if the category isn’t necessarily accurate and thus are minority characters.

So while you can’t really call Teyla or Ronon, contextually, “minorities,” as viewers we see them that way. Same with Teal’c on SG1. The Jaffa are distinctly not a minority. If anything, they’re the majority within human societies in the Milky Way. But because we see so many ethnic Jaffa (not just African-descended, we see Asian-descended Jaffa too. I don’t remember if we see any Hispanic-descended ones off the top of my head, though) in subservient positions to white complected actors, we see this as racism. Maybe it’s right that we see it as racism. Maybe it’s wrong that many, many fans excuse it as ‘well, they’re limited by the actors in Vancouver’ and other statements. Maybe the show’s creators — and the actors, such as Christopher Judge’s much publicized view that the Jaffa should not be played by white actors — are displaying their own biases by casting the actors of the colors they are in the roles they do. But whatever biases the producers, casting agents, and writers have, whether those biases are consistently displayed as racism within the canon depends on the canonical universe.

Does that excuse it, if the actors of color are consistently cast in non-main roles? No, of course not. That’s a true and obvious metatextual bias. However, if those same roles are treated with respect and those characters “of color” are not treated as having a particular, oppressed status, then can the argument really be made that the canon is racist in and of itself? Should Teyla and Ronon, thus, be read as “black” just because their actors are partially non-Caucasian? And, if so, is the bias that all non-full Caucasian looking characters must be read as “characters of color,” any better?

Let’s take this and bring it down to a few examples. How many of you watch Gilmore Girls? Did you know Alexis Bledel (who plays Rory Gilmore) is first generation American? She’s half-Mexican and half-Argentinean. She apparently didn’t even know English until she went to school and her first language is actually Spanish. Supernatural and Veronica Mars fans probably remember Alona Tal (who plays Meg on VM and Jo on SPN). She’s blonde and blue-eyed. She’s cast as the pretty young girl-next-door type in both shows. She’s not actually American. She’s Israeli. The flip side is someone like Edward James Olmos, who plays Commander Adama on the new Battlestar Galactica. Olmos is Mexican, but within the context of BSG, Adama is about as white as you can get without using paint. Or Cote de Pablo, who plays Ziva on NCIS. She’s from Chile and plays a character that’s actually Israeli. For years, in Harry Potter fandom, the character of Blaise Zabini fluctuated between male and female but was almost always white English regardless of gender despite having a specific-to-region Italian name in a series in which the name is pretty much everything. (And you don’t want me to get started ranting on what I think of Memoirs of a Geisha.)

As viewers, as creators, we know all this. But that’s because we exist outside of the canon, not within it.

So how can we accurately dissect our own prejudices when we can never be quite sure if we’re looking through the contextual lens or the metatextual one?

I think the point there is that everyone has bias and, if they’re lucky, they have people around them with different biases and so are exposed (and can expose others) to different views. But often, even with work, the bias remains. It’s especially going to remain if we’re relying on memes like this to expose our true prejudices about race or gender or class or any other master status. What we think is minority status may not necessarily be a minority status and this meme simplifies what’s really an incredibly complex issue, either contextually or metatextually. It’s easy enough, in a meme like this, to say what gender a character is. But it’s not so easy to say if that gender accurately reflects a minority or oppressed status. And when you begin to classify their color, when it’s not established in canon, you have only your biases and metatextual knowledge to rely on.

(The observant will note I haven’t really talked about how fandom vs. source views age, class, sexuality, gender, religion, or disability. Those are, trust me, essays all of their own.)

The other serious flaw in methodology here has nothing to do with bias and everything to do with story construction. The meme is geared toward point-of-view characters. That may skew results because, in the end, the point-of-view the story is written from is not necessarily the main character. Take the book/movie Silence of the Lambs. The point-of-view character is Clarice Starling but, arguably, the main character of the storyline is not Clarice and, instead, Hannibal Lector. The entire storyline revolves around Clarice’s interactions and observations of Hannibal and Hannibal’s manipulations and toying with her. The 4400 features Tom Baldwin, a point-of-view character who participates in every storyline but has none of his own. They revolve all around and are motivated by the people he interacts with. The new Dr. Who is particularly egregious with this as the point-of-view characters are the companions (Rose, Mickey, Jack, Donna, and Martha) but the show is all about and driven fully by the Doctor himself. He’s the main character.

So, yes, I have nasty issues with the methodology of the meme and somehow it devolved into a long drawn-out essay. I guess I was really bored at work and the scientist in me strongly objects to bad methodology when it comes to something geared toward finding statistics?

[Props for this go to , who was forced to be my fact checker and all around sounding board for ‘Does this make sense?’ or ‘Oh my god, I forgot that actor’s name! What is it???’ and ‘how do you spell ubiquitous?’ while I was at work and lacked browsing ability to do it myself.]

Can anyone point me to discussions of religion and religious oppression within fandom and analysis of media? I’m kinda curious and the pickings of what I’ve found on seem… sparse, if this search is anything to go by.

Also a topic (not) to write for another day: imperial Stargate, or, How I Learned To Be A Benevolent Dictator From Watching Stargate: SG1 and Stargate: Atlantis.