Wow, OK, I had kind of conceptualized that Joss Whedon post along the lines of “here are some random thoughts that I’m gonna store behind a cut in case a few people are interested,” not expecting so many people to reblog it. But since there was so much interest, I ended up thinking about it more. And the direction my thinking took me in was this: what is it that women find attractive in male and female characters, and to what extent does this match up with what men assume that women find attractive in these characters?

Here’s the thing: I honestly do not believe that Joss Whedon understands himself as writing for an exclusively male audience. I believe that he thinks to himself: “Wow! This is so great! I’m writing for girls, I’m writing to empower girls, I’m writing the characters that women want!” (For one thing, this is the line that has been fed to him by the media as a positive and important aspect of his work.) There are tons of male writers/directors who are very open about the fact that they are not interested in the female audience. (David Goyer comes to mind.) But Joss Whedon is not one of them. So what is going on with the disconnect between what he understands himself to be doing and what we see him doing?

This disconnect doesn’t just have to do with female characters, either. I’m reminded of that Tumblr post that compares two magazine covers featuring Hugh Jackman: a men’s magazine on which he appears bulging-veined, huge-muscled, and sort of terrifying and weird, and a women’s magazine on which he appears as a slim, athletic guy smiling and wearing a sweater. Anyone who reads comics is familiar with this weirdness: comics heroes are often depicted as nightmarishly hyper-muscled, enormous man-mountains. (Interestingly, this trend grew more and more exaggerated as women became more and more nominally liberated– that is, as they should have been more and more able to communicate what they wanted, including what they wanted from men.) Hyper-masculinity is almost always framed in terms of being attractive– to women or, for gay men, to other men– and sometimes even talked about in the same breath as “the female gaze.” Yet, as that Tumblr post points out, while “the female gaze” is attracted by things like a naked, sweaty Chris Evans or Idris Elba, it’s also attracted by things like: men smiling in sweaters, men crying (DON’T LIE TUMBLR), barefoot fragile Sebastian Stan in the rain on Political Animals, men holding babies, men speaking foreign languages, Mark Ruffalo, and a whole bunch of weird stuff on Ao3 that I don’t even wanna get into. And that’s just “the female gaze as it pertains to men."

But think about whether men would agree that this is what women find attractive in men. Imagine a men’s magazine that offers tips on being attractive to women that include: looking fragile, being a bumbling scientist, acting like a helpless meatball, expressing affection to tiny children, blushing, being intensely interested in gorgeous clothes, etc, etc. This is hard to imagine. In fact, these are characteristics that are typically characterized as not ideal for men, because they are coded as feminine. Yet they’re also not only traits that are commonly attractive to women, but are generally accepted as commonly attractive to women, if one looks at "women’s” entertainment (romantic comedies, chick lit, anything in which Hugh Grant appears).



What I’m getting at is that there is a division between what attracts women and what men accept/permit as attracting women. Men are engaged in a constant enforcement of heteronormativity, a policing of women’s desire and their own accession to it. What women want is subordinate to what men decide that women want, and the latter is then culturally broadcast as the ideological “what women want” that becomes accepted.

This is true also in the case of female characters. What do women want in female characters? Well, I mean, a lot of us just want female characters for the love of God. But specifically: some of the most popular current female characters in comics/MCU fandom are: Natasha Romanoff, in a movie (Cap 2) where she only briefly appeared in a sexy bodysuit and instead spent most of her time wearing jeans and a hoodie, wisecracking, having a complex narrative about salvation, and hacking computers, not to mention the down-to-earth Phil Noto comics depiction, who even (GASP) sometimes wears a ponytail; Peggy Carter, a 1940s secret agent with little patience for men; Kamala Khan, a teenage Pakistani-American girl who writes fan fiction and wears a modest homemade costume; Darcy Lewis, who’s full-figured, socially awkward, and not a superhero; the lady scientists of the MCU (Jane Foster, Maya Hansen, Betty Ross)… I could go on.

But what do men apparently believe that women want in female characters? Well, going by Joss Whedon: superheroines who wear catsuits, beat up men, are secretly very vulnerable, and are sexually threatened, fragile and unstable girl-women with superpowers beyond their control… oh, wait. That’s it. Expanding beyond Whedon, the most common characteristics tend to be: aggressively sexy, sexually threatened, beats up bad men but is secretly vulnerable. I discussed already one potential reason this is attractive to men (see my previous post); my issue here is: this is not what women want, but it is what men believe that women want, because it is what they have been told by other men that women want.

Once again, what women want is ignored (or, more accurately, invisibilized– in that men deny or are oblivious to its existence) in favor of the ideological construct of “what women want,” which is determined and enforced by men. Men genuinely believe that they know what women want, and are earnest in their attempts to explain “what women want” to women. They are deeply confused, because of course they know what women want! Right? They are unable to see that they are selling a version of “what women want” is essentially “what it would be attractive to men for women to want."

That is the center of this thing: everything revolves around what men want. What type of female heroine would be most attractive to men? If she has to be strong, what type of strength would men find attractive? How can she be "feminist” but still attractive to men? This seems obvious, yet men seem to find it invisible.

One of the most interesting angles from which to consider this is that of the queer/lesbian woman. That is the viewpoint that is most invisibilized in this discussion, because it simply has no relevance or importance to men’s desires. The woman who is not sexually available to men does not exist within a system that assesses women’s value based on sexual availability to men. The gay male gaze is comprehensible, because it can conform to existing ideas about the male body’s desirability (though it does not always). Indeed, the gay male gaze is often preferable to the female gaze, because it sidesteps the problematic female perspective. The lesbian gaze, however, is fundamentally incomprehensible. It is the divide-by-zero point of the system. What does a woman want if she doesn’t want men and doesn’t want what-men-want-from-women? This is the perspective from which it’s easiest to see the bizarreness of what’s going on, the degree to which it is all centrally tied up with men.

This is, not incidentally, the reason that it's so important for women to have creative control over projects. For women to write, produce, direct. As long as men dominate these positions, representations of what women want will be filtered through them. It’s not accidental that two of the most popular female comics characters among women (Kamala Khan and Captain Marvel) are being written by women. We need female creators; we need female voices. It’s the only way to end the invisibilization of women’s desires.