There has been a lot of concern and fuss made about the depiction of women in fiction. I think these concerns may have had some validity to them…about 75 years ago. But if you look at media since then, it’s done a lot to address this: Alien, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Last Unicorn…all these stories have positive female representation. However, one thing which I think has never been even slightly addressed is how men are treated in media. So I decided to compile a list of ways men are treated in fiction (tropes) and show why they are harmful (if you wish to do more research, type these titles into the website TVTropes)

1) “Women are Wiser”

This portrays women as more rational and intelligent than their male counterparts. This has the negative effect of instilling the idea that men are inherently stupid or foolish brutes and that women are born superior to them: interestingly, this can have negative effects on female enjoyment too. People like to complain that the “boys are quirky” meme is sexist, yet it you are going to encourage a culture where women are inherently more rational and wise than men, then you can’t get all upset when men start to be portrayed as silly and immature.

2) Double Standards of male abuse and rape

This is likely the most sinister of all of these issues. Rape against women is CORRECTLY portrayed as one of the worst imaginable crimes in any kind of media, whereas rape against men is much more likely to be portrayed as comedic or positive. Now that I really think about it, I can’t think of any examples of male rape being portrayed as the unambiguously abhorrent and vile thing that it is… but I can think of many examples of male rape victims in media being treated either as a justified or, at best, morally grey instance of someone getting what they deserved (“The Boys”, JK Rowling’s “Troubled blood”) or at worst, actually comedic. (Fucking hell, typing this out makes me feel nauseous.)

3) “The Unfair Sex”

This is the idea that a man doing something such as adulatory is portrayed as evil and wrong but a woman doing the same is nothing to be concerned about, and not worth any negative repercussions. This can even be applied to things like a man looking at a woman, which created an idea that male sexuality is something to be ashamed of and suppressed.

4) ”Higher Education is for women”

Women already outnumber men in the vast majority of university fields. There is no justification for this that does not use either supremacist thinking or spite. If anything, we need to be encouraging men and boys into higher education.

I was planning to cover more but, as someone who probably has an overactive sense of empathy, this post (especially the “rape” bit) has left me feeling drained and sick. It’s at times like this I wish I was better at “suppressing my emotions” which is supposedly oh so “toxic”…