The standard western model of masculinity has such a lot of problems, and trying to hold women to that model doesn't really help anything. I mean, holding women to the standard model of femininity doesn't help either, but tossing one terrible model aside just to seize on the other terrible model is not going to get you very far in the long run. :-(
It's weird how deeply embedded those ideas get, though, even when you're consciously aware that they're toxic. Like, I have an unfinished original fic (Ashes) I was writing for NaNo a few years ago, and posting as I went. And I first had the idea for that story almost twenty years ago, but it took me forever to figure out how to approach it because I had no idea how to write a main male character who is genuinely kind, gentle, and as pacifistic as his culture would permit. There was a long period of failed outlines where I kept trying to make him more "genre-appropriate," which at one point degenerated into having him be an attempted rapist, for fuck's sake. *headdesk* Fortunately I realized I was going in the wrong direction, but it still bugs me that for a while I thought I had to.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-11 06:58 pm (UTC)It's weird how deeply embedded those ideas get, though, even when you're consciously aware that they're toxic. Like, I have an unfinished original fic (Ashes) I was writing for NaNo a few years ago, and posting as I went. And I first had the idea for that story almost twenty years ago, but it took me forever to figure out how to approach it because I had no idea how to write a main male character who is genuinely kind, gentle, and as pacifistic as his culture would permit. There was a long period of failed outlines where I kept trying to make him more "genre-appropriate," which at one point degenerated into having him be an attempted rapist, for fuck's sake. *headdesk* Fortunately I realized I was going in the wrong direction, but it still bugs me that for a while I thought I had to.