Asymmetric comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (1254)
Tags: lw_women gender

Comments (1254)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 November 2012 12:23:09PM 8 points [-]

I suggest male readers ruminate on this aspect of the show until it seems a bit disturbing.

Er... what if it still doesn't seem disturbing after rumination?

The positions of power are occupied by females.

Discord is male, more powerful than the Princesses, and evil.

Er, I don't seem to be finding this very disturbing either.

(Admittedly, I haven't actually watched the show, only read fanfiction based on it.)

Comment author: Asymmetric 27 November 2012 02:03:43PM 4 points [-]

If male readers feel uncomfortable with the lack of characterization and stereotyping of male characters, and subsequently realize that female readers can feel similarly uncomfortable with all media that fails the Bechdel test (a significant amount), then they can conclude that it's disturbing to think of a world where a gender is reduced to those kinds of stereotypes.

Of course, it's possible to miss one of those elements of the chain -- not feeling uncomfortable in the first place, for example.

But then, it's also possible for them to recognize that some people feel uncomfortable while experiencing specific media and feeling enough empathy to relate to them, even if they don't feel uncomfortable themselves.

Comment author: Bugmaster 27 November 2012 04:58:41PM 3 points [-]

I agree with Eliezer, though. I'm a man, and I don't find the lack of fully realized male characters in MLP particularly disturbing (*). I think it would be unreasonable to demand every work of fiction to forgo the use of stock characters. MLP is a show about female ponies and their female pony overlords ("overladies" ?), and that's already about 7 characters right there, so it's reasonable that the rest would end up as stock archetypes. There's only so much attention to go around.

(*) Though I only watched the first season plus the s02 pilot, so I could be missing something.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit