Rant of the Month — Male Character Abuse

By Leigh Dragoon
March 1, 2006

I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a well-adjusted teenager. 10 years' distance allows me to look back on my adolescence with a sense of humor, but at the time I felt awful. Recently transplanted from a place best known as The Middle of Fucking Nowhere, I knew much more about building tree-branch forts and identifying deer poop than being a socially-acceptable teenage girl. With my hair cut short and a tendency for hanging XL T-shirts off my 100lb frame, I was often mistaken for a boy.

Writing, which I had enjoyed since the fifth or sixth grade, kept my sanity intact. I would come home from a day of being my school's social pariah, lock myself in my room, and write. Looking back at my old writing, I think I managed to escape the sucking void that is dealing with a Mary Sue, but there was definitely a degree of wish fulfillment in my writing. My main character had the hair and eye color I'd always wanted. That aside, the most important thing about her to me was the fact that she spoke her mind. Unlike me, when someone pissed her off, she didn't just lower her head and glower. She mouthed off. In retrospect, it's obvious that, at a time when I was afraid to use my own voice to defend myself, she was my way of shouting back.

I noticed one other thing about this old story. Something peculiar about her male best friend (and, of course, future love interest). He got hurt. A lot. It seemed they couldn't go 10 feet without someone throwing him through a window, off a cliff, or beating him up. All this wouldn't have been quite so amusing were it not for the fact that my female character remained miraculously unscathed. In my early 20's, I would stumble across the story from time to time and re-read it, and I always wondered at this disparity. I assumed it was something peculiar to myself.

A few years ago, I became addicted to X-men Evolution, back when Cartoon Network was rerunning the show (many thanks, Cartoon Network, for never running Season 4, by the way). When the WB cancelled the show, I was frantic. Under-whelmed by the official companion comic series, I stumbled across FanFiction.net one day, which contains a veritable treasure-trove of X-men Evolution fanfics (10,151 at last count!). Imagine my surprise when I noticed that a fair number of them, mostly written by women and about Nightcrawler, featured our favorite blue elf having the tar beaten out of him. Nor was the phenomena limited to X-men. I discovered similar stories with the boys from Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lord of the Rings. Just about any series, movie, or book that featured a heart-throbbingly lustable male character was fair game. Often, it was the tortured, waifish, naive males who received this special attention. Aliens reading these stories would have assumed that teenage girls are complete sadists. And yet, I think the explanation requires a less literal reading. While I'm sure many people, asked to explain this trend, would assume the male characters were being injured in order for the female characters to nurse-maid them, and though this was sometimes the case, an overwhelming majority of the stories were written from the male character's POV.

The answer, at least in my own mind, and drawing from my own experience, lay in the relative youth of many of the authors. When I was that age, the truth was that I was scared of boys, and scared of myself, and of being a young adult. I was quickly becoming a sexual being, and that frightened me as well. At the same time, I was intensely curious about the things that scared me the most. Writing from the point of view of a male character allowed me to crawl inside a male mind. It made men and boys seem less scary, less other. I think it no accident that, in my story, the male and female main characters were roughly the same height. For me, keeping the male character in a state of constant injury took away the male benefit of greater strength and made the character more human and identifiable — almost as if he were an honorary girl! I think that is what many of these young authors are attempting to do. No wonder that, as a teen, I found the delicate, bad-boy genius Raistlin, of the Dragonlance trilogy, far more enticing than his good-hearted, beefcake brother, Caramon.

A recent study discovered that American and Japanese women tend to associate less masculine looking male faces with honesty, compassion, baby-saavy, and warmth. The study's tenuous findings were that women tended to look for more masculine appearing men for affairs and as boyfriends, but went for the less masculine men as long-term partners. Is it so far-fetched, then, to think that a teenage girl might identify more readily with a male character who is less threatening, and a little more like herself? Keeping a youthful male character injured, often by other men, allowed me to express my fears and worries about male violence, the cloud of which unquestionably hangs over teenaged girls in this country, and at the same time explore my curiosity about men, in a way I found safe. It made him less like them and more like me, or at least, more like the way I felt. While my female character was my strength and my anchor, he was a way for me to express my actual fears and worries, while at the same time keeping it removed from myself by one degree of separation. While my female character was what I aspired to be, I have to admit that the male character is a better representation of the way I actually felt.

This personal theory of mine has only been strengthened by the rise of m-preg storylines in the fan fiction communities. For those unfamiliar with this term, an m-preg is a story featuring a male character who, through some sort of magical interference, becomes pregnant, usually with another male character's off-spring. As with the Injured Male stories, the vast majority of these appear to be written by young girls. An m-preg story could be seen to address two concerns at once — a young girl's uncertainty and nervousness around boys, and teen pregnancy (another issue I found fascinating as a teenager).

Though it would not look like it on the surface, I think these types of stories are ultimately positive. They show girls exploring gender and relationships, and trying to see the world from a different perspective. At the same time, these girls allow their male characters to be fallible, sometimes frail, and ultimately human. To me, it seems a rejection of our society's obsession with the rock-hard, emotionless He-man. I think what is at work here is an expression of curiosity, and a refusal to accept stereotypes.

First Science Study
FanFiction.Net