MrFalconfly said:
CrystalShadow said:
MrFalconfly said:
I'm looking forward to the day when a character being of a certain gender isn't newsworthy.
Seriously. An all female superhero team shouldn't be a sensation. It should just be one more in the pile.
That it is just shows for just how long the reverse must've been going on, that this can be considered a rarity.
Oh well, seems we have to go through the motions of swinging the pendulum completely the other way before this ever really gets balanced out and stops being a thing anyone even cares about...
Yeah sorry.
I just have the opinion, that gender should never ever be a reason for something to be awesome. If someone sites their own gender as a reason to hire/vote/support them, then I wont as a matter of principle.
If they site capabilities or work-experience (or even just promise of something awesome), then sure. But I'm not gonna support someone just because they happen to have a particular part of sexual characteristics.
In short. I think for something to be accepted as normal, you should try and use it as a reason to pick you out of the bunch.
EDIT:
I'll give you an anecdote as an example.
Once I was in a group whose purpose was to elect representatives who should take care of some party.
A woman who applied for one of the posts sited her "being a woman" as a reason for us to vote for her. I didn't. Not because she was a woman, but because I thought you should use previous experience as a reason to be voted in, not your gender.
Yeah, I get you. But more often than not this stuff gets held against you, and other stuff.
Besides, what you're saying has rarely been true when it comes to groups that are historically under-represented.
People find reasons why them being a woman (or black, or middle-eastern or whatever) is a good reason NOT to include them.
That's happened for many many decades, if not centuries. Just because it isn't admitted to openly doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Let's look at an example of the very subject we're talking about
We get an all-female superhero team, and look at the discussion. Some people make a big deal about how great it is it exists, others complain about it's existence, immediately leaping to the conclusion that it only exists for the sake of being a team of women.
Nobody on one side cares if there were better male characters around, and on the other side nobody even considers the possibility that these characters have some innate merit beyond simply existing for the sake of being a team full of women.
Meanwhile, if we had a team full of men, would we be having this conversation? It would be taken for granted that the team members were chosen for some innate merit. We wouldn't even be asking if there maybe were other candidates who were better getting (silently) excluded for not being men.
That's where this stuff gets to be a problem. Nobody remarks on or questions why a team full of men exists.
But oh no!, a team full of women can't possibly exist except for some bizarre 'equality' reasons, and not, say for reasons that are basically the same as how all-male teams happen.
It's one of those things.
We won't really be equal until neither point is worthy of mention.
And what you're saying, while understandable, isn't there either. Because rather than just accept an all-woman team, you appear to be finding reasons to question it's existence.
In other words, you're pushing back at the concept of it as if it's something weird or exists for questionable reasons.
Would you be doing that if they had announced (another) all-male team? Would it even occur to you to question whether this was based on merit?
That's why we are where we are. Because a 'team full of women' is still a note-worthy thing that everyone (including people that claim they believe in 'choosing things on merit') feels the need to comment on as though it's something special or unusual somehow.
(Whether it's saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, you're still talking about it in a way you more than likely wouldn't do if the genders were reversed)
We have a long road ahead of us it seems. Pushing back like this just perpetuates the status quo. It does nothing to remove the basic cause as to why this is noteworthy in the first place.
So now we have a swing in the opposite direction of usual (all male becomes all female), which likely happened for cynical reasons, and is being resisted for equally cynical reasons.
If this keeps up, all that will happen is we'll end up back where we started and start the process all over again.
It will never really resolve the underlying issues.
When it's no longer worth mentioning (either in a positive OR negative manner) that an all-female superhero team exists, that's when this will be over.
But otherwise, we just get perpetual arguments...
