r/menslibIndia 101: Androcentrism

Alrighty then! Let’s kick-start the new year of 2022 (2021 can go to hell for all I care) with a very delayed return to Lefty Stuff 101. Before we start, I’ll put up some trigger and content warnings.

TW and CW: Both male and female infertility and sterility, mentions of trauma stemming from this, androcentrism (and anything that could stem from this meaning misogyny, sexism and so on), and abusive relationships.

You’ve seen the title. I’m sure you’re already thinking about what it means and if you have a vague idea of this concept, you’d have some assumptions. Tell you what, let’s take all of that… ALL of that and set it aside. Just take everything and toss it aside. Focus on these two questions for me and try to answer them honestly, yeah?

1. Do you think women have the same kind of vivid and rich internal life that you lead?
2. Do you think women have the same agency that you have?

Take a minute, they’re just yes-or-no questions.

Take an hour even… Take however long it takes to understand the questions and write your answer down. Go on. Write it, say it aloud; do something to actualise the answer.

You done?

Consider the answers. Are you going to be surprised when I’m going to say that the answers don’t matter that much? If you are, well, you’re new around these here parts. Give this a read, you’ll need it.

So, what was the point of that little exercise? Well, if the questions are pertinent and the answers not wholly relevant, the possible relevance of the exercise would come from the train of thought you took to answer the questions and that reveals the worldview you have. Why is that important? Let me explain.

We human beings are unique amongst living creatures. We possess consciousness, a theory of mind, and most importantly, we have a high degree of self-awareness, something I’ve mentioned previously. Add to this, agency, and you begin to see how different we are compared to a lot of our planet-mates.

It’s easy to see that everyone has this, be it the drunken man you see trying to hail a cab in the middle of the night, that annoying man on the subway who’s playing music very fucking loudly, that other annoying man on the subway who’s yelling into his phone, and the person you see when you look into a mirror, all of y’all have rich, vivid, and wild internal lives that you can’t fully share with someone else.

And so, it PAINS me to have to say this, not because it’s something grand but more so because it’s so fucking obvious it hurts: God-fucking-dammit, women possess all of this! Mind-blowing, right? … No.

ANDROCENTRISM:

Let’s start by establishing the basics, which let’s be real, is the shtick of this series. Androcentrism can be defined as follows:

It’s “the propensity to center society around men and men’s needs, priorities, and values and to relegate women to the periphery”. Androcentrism also positions men as the gender-neutral standard while marking women as gender-specific.

We see this most often in language. Think about genres like “chic-lit, chic-flicks” or professions being referred to as “female professor, or female MMA fighter”. How many times have you seen these kinds of modifiers when the thing people are describing applies to women?

Funnily enough, the ‘Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon’ means you’ll see more of it than you used to before and so do me a favour, look at things a bit critically when you have the energy to do so. Now, moving on, if you’ve read any of my articles here, you’ll know I like using movies as a way to talk about things. You get a pixel cookie if you can guess what I’m going to do now.

THE TALES WE TELL OURSELVES:

There is an argument for androcentrism in stories (which means, we’ll be talking about books, TV shows, movies, pretty much any form of fiction that can be consumed) which is that the writer is a male writer. Toss that aside. It doesn’t take a lot of fucking effort to add some nuance.

That’s why you’ll get the classic dudebro excuses in the form of either

• “Ripley from Alien is a strong female character” Can’t we ask for more, you idiot?
• This quote about writing women from “As Good as it gets” featuring Jack Nicholson This is extremely funny because the entire point of his character is that he’s a raving misogynist and a homophobe.

What follows is a bit of a ramble about movies, writing tropes, some expanding on my previous post about perspective (yes, all of this is connected) and a lot of links to r/menwritingwomen.

First, let’s pick at Avengers: Age of Ultron:

Avengers: Age of Ultron is the follow-up ensemble movie to 2012 ensemble superhero flick, The Avengers. Written and directed by Joss Whedon (who as we all know has his faults and by golly are there a LOT of them), the movie could be considered a pretty decent follow-up to the original Avengers.

We’re going to focus on one of the characters in the film, Black Widow. Portrayed by extremely talented Scarlett Johansson, Black Widow’s character had grown from eye-candy spandex-wearing assassin in Iron Man 2 to well, an eye-candy spandex-wearing damsel in distress in Age of Ultron. This, I feel, is mostly on Whedon. Better critics than me have deconstructed Whedon’s body of work with a feminist lens and so I’ll leave you to look them up.

What I’m particularly wanting to talk about this: how Black Widow, who has been written as a cold and heartless assassin, is humanised when she tries to connect with Bruce Banner, who is conflicted about being The Hulk and their shared ‘future’.

Does Whedon and team:

• a) give a compelling backstory to Natasha where she murdered people in cold blood, connecting the story with the “red in the ledger” comment from the original Avengers in 2012?
• b) give Natasha an empathetic side where she listens to Bruce and lets him talk about his unique ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ situation showing that Natasha is far more human than she seems? or
• c) make Natasha say she’s a monster as well because she can’t have a baby.

Now to the three (or even fewer) women reading this article, I sincerely apolgise in advance for what I said and what I’m going to talk about.

Being infertile in a society that has conditioned men and women to define women ‘by what organs they have’ and ‘how many kids they can produce’ is incredibly traumatic and I would never make light of that. It is so much that we have women and men (aka TERFs) who exclude transwomen just because of their genitals and their inability to have a baby. All this over social constructs.

Between how dangerous pregnancies can be, how careful y’all have to be, how much mental and physical effort it takes to get through one (both before and after), the responsibility, the restrictions because of the patriarchal ideals in our country (which is its own ‘can of worms’ in relation to pregnancy, femininity, and womanhood), and so much more that I can’t possible condense into a list, I will never fully understand it. It’s daunting.

But I must continue and so I apologise again.

Avengers: Age of Ultron | Natasha and Bruce:

The setup to this exchange between Natasha and Banner is janky. Ignoring any directing criticisms I might have, Banner and Natasha engage in a conversation about the aftermath of the incident in Johannesburg where Wanda pushes Hulk to lose control and go on a rampage. Banner wants to run away and Natasha wants to join him, which is when this scene turns to a blundering mess.

The scene is dripping with heteronormativity. Banner gestures to the room they’re in (The kids’ room at the Barton farmhouse) and says “I can’t have this… kids,” to which Natasha responds with option C, saying that he’s not the only monster in the room.

Now, on its own, the scene seems to work because Natasha’s comment comes at the heels of Banner’s own comments and add to that, Banner’s horrified look, you’ll get a scene that works on a surface level, which you could see by the numerous positive comments on that YouTube video.

However, the problem is the context.

The Marvel cinematic universe is notorious for its connected-ness aka intertextuality. When people speak of “the monster” in relation to Bruce Banner, they will always think about The Hulk, not his infertility. You have Loki specifically mentioning “monster” in the original Avengers flick.

So to put it very fucking clearly, when you have Natasha saying she’s a monster because she can’t have kids, people don’t connect that they have a shared pain because of their inability to have a family but more so that Natasha is a monster because she’s unable to have kids in the same way that Banner loses control and turns into an enormous green rage monster.

This is a result of the medium. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message”. As we discussed in my previous post that featured the Transformers, the visual medium of film means that subtext is lost.

In this case, it’s exacerbated by the fact that sterility and infertility is used as shorthand to give women a “tragic backstory” in media and writing so many fucking times that it’s very easy for people to quickly jump to the conclusion I mentioned above. I’ll leave a link to this Reddit post here that talks about the qualms I have with this scene and this writing trope.

One could argue that this scene’s muddled metaphor is a result of improper scripting and direction, since the text is pretty straightforward and there is no subtext that’s hidden away in nooks and crannies. So, how could we fix this fault? Since the text is clear.

Re-shoot the scene?

Stop being heteronormative?

They’re all great answers, yes. But the simplest one? Talk to a woman.

Whedon isn’t one (duh!). So, all he needed to was ask a woman (or I mean, ask anyone who has had a feminist thought in their head) and this could have been avoided. But, considering his lack of creative output after Age of Ultron, his mention of burnout at the time, I’m not going to be too harsh on him for seemingly missing this.

It still however stands that the movie was released with this scene meaning, the fault is shared with the entire team behing Age of Ultron and everyone okayed the scene. This is a part of a bigger problem we’ll talk about now.

WE ARE THE STORIES WE LIVE:

Sometimes, I wonder if I make it intentionally hard for myself. I could have easily chosen a movie like Transformers with its misogyny, or a genre like romantic comedies with its stereotypes and saved myself a lot of effort.

The bigger problem I mentioned earlier is how all of this, all of what we’ve talked about so far, stems from a worldview that has been established, asserted, and reinforced for millennia. This androcentric worldview is prevalent to the point where women engage in it as well because they’re consciously or unconsciously working with an androcentric perspective.

Is it impossible for a man to write a woman? Terry Pratchett would say no and Hayao Miyazaki would also say no.

Instead of men striving to be better writers, you get abject objectification along the lines of this, this, and finally this. This causes two problems, one being a dearth of positive representation and the other being female tokenism (or The Smurfette Principle as TV Tropes likes to call it).

Positive Representation and Role Models:

In talking about fiction as a whole, a major point of discussion is the idea of a ‘role model’. Think about news articles, opinion pieces, interviews that have either praised or derided a piece of fiction for having good or bad role models.

So, I’ll ask you one question here. How many of you can name more than 5 female characters who can be role models for kids to look up to? Bonus points for every role model after 5 and half points if they’re fictional. Now do the same for male characters and see how easier it is.

I mentioned earlier that filmic media is good at establishing world views. When these world views are patriarchal, the cultural, economic, and scientific influence of women is lost to time or worse misappropriated by men.

How many of you know that it was a woman, Mary Anderson who invented the operational wind screen wiper? How many of you know that Hedy Lamarr, an American actress invented the radio guidance system (something the American Navy refused to use initially)? How many of you know about Ada Lovelace and her contribution to Babbage’s Analytical Engine?

This is why the “I’m not like other girls” trope exists. Popular media has a tendency to frame women as being nothing more than hollow shells, nothing more than trophies to be acquired, and nothing more than a homogenous blob. And when you are repeatedly told this by the media, by family, by society, by culture, you will have women and people identifying as women thinking that they have to be “unique” and if they’re not careful, they’ll become just like “them” without realising that it’s a lie peddled by a patriarchal and androcentric society.

There is an incredibly dark outcome of how popular culture is defined by the shorthand that writers use to create their stories. I’m not sure about y’all but I’m a filthy fucking millennial and so I grew up with Disney movies and if you know them as well as I do, you know that a lot of them peddled the “True love saves all” bullshit. In this article from Health Canal, Professor Hayes talks about how popular movies like Disney movies or the Twilight (ugh) saga “instill the message that women are nurturers and therefore the ones who should ‘fix’ a relationship.”

She continues by saying:

“Once the woman is sucked in, however, the façade will drop. When he starts being abusive, she is surprised because it seems so uncharacteristic, but because she is ‘in love’ she tries to fix it. She doesn’t perceive it as abuse. She sees her partner as ‘needing help’.”

Wisecrack also mention this in their video where they talk about how Disney ruined culture at this timestamp. They talk about Susan Darker-Smith’s paper that details how “girls who identified with Cinderella, Rapunzel and Beauty in Beauty and the Beast were more likely to stay in destructive relationships as adults.” You can read the Guardian article about her research here.

Now one can argue that correlation isn’t causation and one would be right. But I feel this is far too sensitive of a topic to take lightly. As media and fiction continue to evolve around us and as we’re becoming more and more online and insular (especially thanks to the pandemic), we need to consider the effect of the kind of media we consume.

The Smurfette Principle:

No, I’m not linking to TV Tropes, I’m nice that way. This trope (aka a writing device like an idea or a theme) is when the team has just one female character. Most of the times, the female character is there as a “don’t complain about diversity, we have wahman, shut up” defense.

Yes, there is a complicated history behind how advertising (aka capitalism) directs the way some shows are written and delivered but I’m not here to talk about that. But if you want an example, I’ll give you one here.

To give you an example, look at the DCEU. I’m talking about the DCEU for a specific reason and if you are a DC fan, you’ll know exactly why.

In Justice League, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Diana Prince is the only superpowered female character on the roster. And in the Knightmare Future, Mera is the only one alive (Diana is shown to have died and Harley Quinn is told as dying in Bruce’s arms). In Man of Steel, Faora (portrayed to perfection by Antje Traue) is the only female Kryptonian on Zod’s army.

The DCAU (aka the Diniverse aka everything that stemmed from Batman: The Animated Series) came out in the 90s and did a better job at this. The founding members of the Justice League had both Diana and Shayera and both were extremely well written and complex characters whom I still remember and honestly look up to. (Alright alright! If you’re like me and you grew up with B:TAS, here you go. Thank me later.)

What does this do? It artificially creates an imbalance in gender representation right off the bat (lol, didn’t intend to use that after talking about Batman). In all of these films and a lot more that I haven’t mentioned, there is a noted preponderance of male lead characters, which doesn’t accurately represent the real world gender ratio.

If we’re creating a fictional world you guys, how hard is to make some awesome and badass women in lead roles? Seriously? Instead, women are lucky if they have a female character in a popular media franchise and luckier still if they’re well-rounded and not a walking pile of cliches.

There is a more insidious aspect to this. The Male Gaze. And no, I’m not talking about the discussion of Male Gaze in films. I’m talking about something like this. The post has so many comments that shine a light on how incredibly fucked the system is (which is why we should burn the patriarchy) but the one thing that stands out is this comment by Impulse882 here.

Yep. I was working at a college and we were hanging anatomy posters in the hall. One of them included a vulva.

I went to hang it and my supervisor said I couldn’t put it up. When I asked why I was told it was because sometimes children walk down the hall.

I asked why the penis poster was allowed up and was told “that’s different”

Both posters were only about anatomy and made by the same publisher.

But apparently even in Biology a penis is “normal” and a vulva vulgar

The Male Gaze also needs to fucking burn. And I hope to talk about this in the future. This article is already too long.

To finish off this section, the situation is truly and deeply fucked.

REAL WORLD INSTANCES:

It would be awful of me to just leave you with just analysis of fiction. Let’s talk some realistic problems caused by androcentrism. I’ve briefly talked about a few of them in my article about perspective and since this article is already over 3k words (I started out wanting to write one that was 1.5k words woo), I’ll talk about them in a little more detail but not be as exhaustive.

Androcentrism causes something that people refer to as the gender data gap. This data gap exists in all kind of fields, be it news, economics, politics, and so on. The result of this woman-shaped hole is that anything that arises as a result of these fields will continue to show those biases and causes problems for literally half the population (if not more).

To use an example that I’ve seen and also seen in the article above, let’s take cars and showcase some stats from the article,

[W]hen a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seatbelt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die.

Let’s switch to an aspect of cars. Seatbelts. Life-saving devices, sure. But are they designed with women in mind? More often than not, the answer is no. We still don’t have a seatbelt design that fits pregnant women, going by the Guardian article.

The average Indian man stands at 5'4" and the average Indian woman stands at 5' even. Now, this comes from a self-reported study here and so I’m not sure how accurate it is. Most results seemed to correspond to this apart from one article that talks about the a research article published by the National Institute of Nutrition that talks about the ideal weight and how they used the 95th centile values for the heights (from a well-nourished population). In this case, the heights were 5'8" and 5'3".

In either case, there is a significant height difference between the average man and the average woman, and this causes a significantly different experience while wearing the seatbelt. My mum complains about how it just cuts into her neck and while I was wondering if we could make the seatbelt “receptacle” on the car’s frame adjustable, it was a bank exam (that I spectacularly failed) where I read about how seatbelts are designed with the gender data gap.

Honestly props to the tester for that bank exam for making people read that. Hopefully it helped a few people move away from the androcentric viewpoint but that’s wishful thinking saved for a rainy day.

Medicines:

Designed for men. I’m no expert here and I’ll let the experts talk instead. Caroline Criado Perez says:

It’s always been this way. And it comes from the fact that the male body has always been taken as the standard human being. The female body is seen as the atypical body. You see that going all the way back to Aristotle — he refers to the female body as a mutilated male body — and you see it in textbooks today, where the male anatomy is presented as the anatomy.

I don’t think there’s some giant conspiracy and medical researchers all hate women and want us to die. It’s just that this way of thinking is so pervasive that we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

That’s partly because of the excuses we still get [from medical researchers], which are outrageous — like the excuse that women’s bodies are too hormonal and too complicated to measure. Male bodies can be very variable, too. And women are 50 percent of the global population!

There is a syndrome called Yentl syndrome that quite literally is a result of this androcentrism. As mentioned in the Vox article linked above,

>[It] is the different course of action that heart attacks usually follow for women than for men. This is a problem because much of medical research has focused primarily on symptoms of male heart attacks, and many women have died due to misdiagnosis because their symptoms present differently.

IN CONCLUSION:

We’re living in an androcentric world. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (yes, the author who wrote The Yellow Wallpaper) pointed this out way back in the early 1900s when she published her essay that you can read on Project Gutenberg. The essay is titled “OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE, OR THE MAN MADE WORLD” and was published in 1911. When we see it, we NEED to call it out, and push for change.

It’s why I pointedly used a reference to Assassin’s Creed Revelations. I chose the dialogue from Subject 16, Clay Kaczmarek “We are the stories we live, the tales we tell ourselves.” If thousands and thousands of years of culture and storytelling exclude an entire gender and entire subgroups of people to just favour the already dominant group, we’re telling the wrong tales and we’re living the wrong stories.

We are alike in more ways than one and the sooner we see it, the better.

I’ve been noobhemingway.

Read this post on Medium here, and you know if you’re interested in reading more of this, let me know.

Post-Script:

• This post was never meant to cross the 1.5k word threshold. I can’t even trust Scrivener for the wordcount now since it’s honestly being a ditz. Word on the other hand is showing a total of 4013 words (including this bit, yes, this bit too). And by the time I’m done, it would have beaten my original massive article on Woke Brands on r/librandu. I thought I’d add a few notes at the end to finish this out.
• I have some tangents about Avengers: Age of Ultron here. (Reddit link. Will export it to Medium later this week).
• I think I might be an idiot considering it’s 3 AM in the night when I’m writing this.
• I’m honestly too tired to add references and future reading this time around. So, honestly, use your Google-Fu my random internet friendo. The future will thank you for it.
• And well, you know, stay safe, stay healthy and wear a fucking mask.

edit: Of course, Whedon had to be a dick after I wrote all of this. I think I’ve ended up coming off a bit lenient. He deserves it all.

edit 2 electric boogaloo: After some very insightful critique, I decided to rework one of the first sentences in the article. I can’t exactly be preaching for all that I stand for if I use sexual violence or androcentric sexually violent terms as the point of a shock-joke, even if I despise 2021 with my heart and I basically have trauma. There’s a time and a place, and this wasn’t it.