Who’s Afraid of Feminist Pony Fanfiction? · 7:03pm Mar 31st, 2017
The week before last, I did something new for me. I managed to write a widely-disliked story. Seriously, after being on this site for over four years and writing twenty-five stories, until now, I never achieved a lasting upvote-to-downvote ratio of less than 20:1. Crystal Glass Ceilings currently stands at 64:15, putting it right at the bottom of my list (when ranked by rating); and near the bottom of the list for the contest, only above those with too few votes to draw reliable conclusions. Fifteen neigh-sayers is, of course, pretty small compared to the size of the readership, but this is still a significant result.
This story is my usual slice-of-life style—light-hearted and fun, but which also reflects something in the real world. Probably the closest other story to it in my repertoire would be Breaking News and Weather, which achieved over 200 likes, and briefly occupied the No 1. slot before getting its first dislike (currently at 393:7).
Of course this has very little to do with the quality of my writing, it is because [SPOILER ALERT!] this story is about feminism. It is no secret that there is a small, but significant, subset of our community with such an intense hostility to feminism that it is hardly surprising that something with this title and short description would get such a rating.
I could attribute this unusually high number of down-votes as just the action of anti-feminist trolls, who would do the same to any story that hints that patriarchy might anything other than a delusion of the feminazis. I could take this as a badge of honour. A sign that I have written something really controversial and interesting. But I don't think it’s quite that simple. Take a look at the story. Is it radical feminism? Hardly. It is partly following the old trope of the independent princess—a female who rebels against tradition, decides her own path, and takes particular delight in doing unprincessy things. It explores the challenges of female leaders in a man’s world and mocks the media obsession with focussing on the bodies and clothes, rather than the actions and policies, of our female politicians (and royals). [Did you see the Daily Mail this week?] Then it gets a bit meta by addressing the impact of ‘princess culture’ and restrictive toys on girls, contrasting the previous generations of MLP with the present.
None of this is particularly controversial, and nobody chose to challenge any of these ideas in the comments. Instead the negative comments on the story just kept repeating that the idea that sexism could exist in Equestria was just too hard to buy. Too contrived.
Seriously? Too contrived? More so than Rock Farms and Nuclear Reactors (760:18)? More than Fluttershy Defends Scotland Against Invasion by Alien Squirrels (84:4)? The idea that a magical crystal kingdom could suddenly disappear then rematerialize after a thousand years is perfectly natural and believable. But the idea that the society of that kingdom might be a bit old-fashioned and paternalistic compared to the modern pony world was too much for some readers to believe?
As I made clear in my responses to the comments, I do not believe the claim that my story was excessively contrived was fair. But I do believe those comments were made in good faith. Those readers were being entirely honest, in the sense that they genuinely thought my story was putting too much strain on their limited powers of credulity. Maybe it was. Their imaginations are different to mine. It actually seems quite likely that the vision of sexism in the Crystal Empire society, which came so naturally to my mind, would not fit so easily into others’ worldviews.
I read a lot about feminist issues. And since I work in university admissions, I have been on training courses, which examine all forms of discrimination, and teach you to recognise your own unconscious biases. Therefore I think it is fair to say that I am better informed than the average reader about gender bias in society. Given that, it is perfectly natural that I am more open than the average reader to the idea of sexism existing in the Crystal Empire.
In universities, people frequently raise questions like Why do we not have more female leaders? and Why women are underrepresented in physics, engineering and computer science? The answers are not always obvious. There are differing views, and occasionally heated arguments, about the best approach to deal with this. But everyone is aware it is an issue. This is the view from the high ivory towers of academia, where a female vice-chancellor can head a university with an eight-hundred year history of discriminating against them, and where super-smart young women, with the ambition and potential to be a future US president, study beneath an effigy of the dead male white-supremacist, whose legacy funds their education. Some people may find this a bit surreal, but it is my world, and it is not unique.
Out in the wider world, things are a little different. I can tell this when I talk to new students. Some come from schools that are fully aware of gender issues, but I have also spoken to students from schools where nobody seemed to know it was an issue. Maybe they had vaguely noticed that hardly any girls sign up for physics and computer programming classes, but they just treat that as normal. They are not (usually) actually against the idea of girls doing physics. But because they don’t see this as a problem, they are not asking why this is. It’s just the culture. Because no one is asking these questions, it never occurred to anyone that they should worry about the answers.
If I look back to when I was at school, the gender balance in my final year physics class was pretty typical. But did anyone talk about it? No. It just didn’t seem important. I only started asking these questions when I became a university teacher.
I’m currently reading Girl Up by Laura Bates. At one point, she explains,
When I was growing up… I wasn’t particularly aware of sexism. If you’d asked me at the age of twenty whether I thought sexism was a major problem, I’d probably have said no.
After two pages of personal stories of unwanted comments about bodies; being treated as invisible, insignificant and inferior; feeling a hand slide down to your bum in a club; being watched closely by a man on the bus masturbating… Being cornered late at night by two men who laugh ‘We’re gonna part those legs and fuck that cunt… [Actually it is closer to four pages]… she says,
And then, because you’re seeing it everywhere, you start talking about it. You can’t help it. You’re seeing this massive phenomenon you’ve been living in and yet somehow hadn’t realized existed, and you want to talk to other people about it too.
But when you talk about sexism, someone tells you it doesn’t exist anymore.
Judging from the title of the second story, I think the main problem of your 'too contrived' argument is that you're comparing two crackfics to a story that makes a very noticeable effort to appear plausible and within the show's logic. There's also the fact that your usual fare of 'real-world stuff in Equestria' stories mostly just uses ponies as a lens through which to try and educate the viewer about light waves and stuff, whereas Crystal Glass Ceilings actually takes a decidedly non-soapbox approach and tries to have a plot.
Personally, I do think the concept of feminism and sexism existing (and in the case of the former, needing to exist) is somewhat plausible within MLP, but the Crystal Empire just felt like the wrong place to do it. As I said in the comments, the fact that their last patriarchy was Sombra and your demonstrated loyalty to the comics within the story prevented you from just creating a history of patriarchies instead of Princess Amore seems to stretch plausibility for basically anyone who hasn't actually read theory and done complex studies of this (read: the vast majority of readers on this site who aren't you).
If, for example, the story had instead been about Princess Cadence going to Yakyakistan or Griffonstone, two kingdoms that have a demonstrated-in-canon patriarchal governing system that functioned perfectly well (note: Griffonstone failed because of the theft of the Idol of Boreas and the greed-centric nature of griffons, not any incompetence on the part of their king), I would honestly wager money that it would have gone over better. You'd probably be able to keep half the beats of the story, and if you did it with the griffons you could even have Gilda give the 'Revolutionary Club' line, and the audience would probably receive it better because it wouldn't come across like you were inventing conflict where we had no reason to believe there was any.
4478671 Huh, didn't read the story as of yet (I've got more than a bit of a backlog...) but I was originally thinking that if you ignore the comics (and I tend to), the Crystal Empire makes sense for that story to happen in. Of course as the quoted comment said, it's not impossible to mesh the two, but it requires reading more subtlety into things and for a short story that can get tricky.
For what it's worth, Equestria proper seems more matriarchal than anything else.
Honestly I think the picture with the checklist might be part of the issue. It makes her look dismissive of the 'old colts', and that sets a tone in the reader's mind.
For what it's worth my ratios are reasonably high in most cases (excepting one that was admittedly a bit self-indulgent and one that I'm still mystified about), but I never have enough viewers at once to trend.
4478671
But if Candance went to another nation, that would be a different type of story right? This is fighting something from the inside kind of story, not from the outside. Different context and problems and solutions.
And this is itself a sexist trope, of course: applying a different level of scrutiny to and demanding greater rigor from anything that smacks of feminism. Like fantasy fans who have no problems with the existence of dragons and orcs but somehow think having a woman be a mighty warrior in that same fantasy is unrealistic.
I admit I did not read the comments, because I was afraid it would quickly turn into a right shitshow. I am glad to hear that didn't happen (still not gonna read them though).
Basically what 4478671 said. Your typical stories are like Magic School Bus episodes, fun adventures that celebrate the fact that they're educating the reader rather than trying to hide it. Crystal Glass Ceilings was... well, not. As I said in the review, you had to twist a lot to make that story work in that setting, especially when their last (and as far as we know, only) king traumatized the entire city-state to the point of memory repression.
I don't deny that sexism is still a woefully prevalent force in our world. That may even be the case in some Equestrian societies. But pony cultures are going to be hard pressed to consider mares weak when two of them are handling the sun and moon.
I have to consider that my school had a 75% female enrollment rate in Chem 2 and in Advanced Biology. There were four of us in the class. I was the 25%. I had to learn like a house on fire to keep from being left behind.
Sounds like you pissed off all the right people for the right reasons. I'd say job well done.
I agree with the sentiments, but I didn't vote the story up because it had an axe-grinding feel to it. Even if I agree with a story's message, I'm not fond of being beaten over the head with it.
4478734
Eh, a good part of that (not all of it, but a good part) is attributable just to the plain old "Everything Is Realistic, Except Where It Isn't" cognitive bias. In reality-as-we-know-it, humans are sexually dimorphic, and part of that is in ways that affect the statistical distribution of upper body strength, which in turn is highly relevant to most forms of brute-force fighting. Dragons and orcs get a bye because no-one has any real-world heuristics to apply to them, but humans expect humans to be humany.
And then that's compounded by lazy writers. It doesn't exactly take much work to counter that bias - if you want to sell your mighty female warrior, show us a brief glimpse of the intensive training and/or its consequences she goes through to sit in the tail of the bell curve (vide. Brienne of Tarth), or reference the fighting style that plays to her specific strengths (seriously, fantasy writers, if you have your Red Sonja-analog using the same fighting style as your Conan the Barbarian-analog, you're doing the equivalent of showing Mongol pony-riders using the tactics of European knights on heavy warhorses, and it's every bit as hilariously implausible[1]), or otherwise handwave that for background reason X her species/race/culture/magical universe somehow no-sells that particular dimorphism. But you can't just leave things at the default and then complain that people assumed that your default was default.
[1] Which example, yes, I did specifically pick because the Mongols wiped the floor with the Eurocavalry, entirely plausibly, just like you can get everyone to buy into River Tam Beats Up Everyone if you bother to spare a paragraph or two earlier hanging that gun over the mantelpiece.
4478773
I'm wondering distributions for girls in bio/chem vs physics now... Hmm... *Annoyed that I can't find a good thinking smiley... Quizzical might work...*
And I upvoted, but I basically upvote anything that has a good concept and has a good history with me. So... yeah.
Also on plausibility... What do we know about females in old Equestria? I guess a lot happens depending on Fanon of the genders of the Hearthswarmers and other things...
If those fics were written to reflect the real world issues of nuclear energy safety in the context of decarbonizing our energy sources to combat climate change, or the challenge of overcoming popular appreciation for charismatic fauna who are nevertheless invasive species in the Scottish highlands, we would rightly deride them for being far too contrived, as Equestria is just not a good setting for discussing those issues.
It's great that you are trained in recognizing your own sexism, and the unconscious biases that everyone carries around with them. College admissions officers need that training more than anyone. Of course, it's also a human trait to see patterns in everything, regardless of whether those patterns exist, at least in a fictional cartoon. I think this is one of those "you find only what you bring with you" situations.
4478671 I would love to see Gilda give that speech to her Grandpa Gruff when he tells her she isn't capable of wearing the Griffon's Crown..... Of course, we all know Gabby would be Best Princess of Griffonstone.
4478922
That's a fantastic point! It's why in fantasy role-playing games, I see people get really agitated when a fighter-type can jump 20 feet in the air and swing a sword 5 times in 6 seconds.... but have no problem with a wizard summoning demons.
+100
4479188
The better class of FRPG includes a suitable paragraph somewhere pointing out that regular human performance is represented by those level 3 mooks in the town militia, whereas as Epic! Adventurers! your performance is based off the larger-than-life performances of, say, Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Cú Chulainn, or Yu the Great.
(Whether that implies that you actually are blessed with the awesomeness of being cinematic characters in a simulationist world or whether it merely implies that the FRPG accurately represents the way you told the story afterwards over several flagons of mead is up to personal taste, really.)
4478922
I just want to stress that this doesn't disprove the influence of sexism. In particular this:
A big issue is that what western society considers default is pervasively gendered from the ground up. So very often "more explanation is required because this steps away from the default" automatically becomes "more explanation is required because now a woman is doing it". And the people asking probably do not see this as them being sexist, but as them being open-minded critical thinkers.
People are good at rationalization. We can always find other nobler, non-sexist-sounding reasons to support decisions and systems that, taken together, regularly disadvantage women. As the blog says, this story wasn't actually any different from Pineta's usual works in style or structure, only in subject matter. And yet from what it says of the comments on the story, it seems like when the subject matter is feminism, a lot of people suddenly find things in the style and structure to disagree with that normally wouldn't bother them.
4479351 I do prefer the explanation that protagonists are action movie heroes, basically. Certainly explains how they can take damage equal to 90% of their hitpoints and keep fighting like nothing's wrong.
4479428
Indeed it does not. Hence the disclaimer right up front.
But here's the thing...
This is a panchreston, a fully general argument. And the trouble with panchrestoi is that an argument that could be used to prove anything (of which "my opponents are merely rationalizing their real motives which I will now provide" is close to being the archetype) is both logically irrefutable and proves nothing. That people are, indeed, much better at rationalizing than at reasoning doesn't give you carte blanche to assume that anything that could be a rationalization (which is within delta of everything) is a rationalization. That way madness, dishonesty, and sporking lie.
That doesn't surprise me for two reasons, which I suspect are both true, and which - not having any notable ability to read the hearts of men - I decline to speculate on the ratio between:
1. Sexism.
2. It's a political topic, and whether or not they can express it in these terms, whenever a political topic is the topic, people are primed to expect massive deployment of dark-side epistemology. (If you told me that the sky was blue, I'd be inclined to believe you. If you told me that, as a Democrat/Republican/feminist/MRA/pro-choicer/pro-lifer/capitalist/socialist/etc./etc., the sky was blue, I'd be inclined to demand third-party-calibrated spectrophotometer records. 'Cause my priors say that people with these identities use arguments as soldiers, not as instruments of truth-seeking.)
tl;dr: A meaningful discussion, or argument in the technical (q.v. Monty Python) sense, requires the assumption of good faith. No-one ever got anywhere declaring the other side wrong by fiat, although it's been tried and tried and tried by both sides of all too many debates.
tl;dr more: Trust Twilight Sparkle. Trust yourself. Anyone else? Shoot 'em.
As a side note, incidentally - while I have no particular axe to grind, certainly not a downvote-worthy one, with the story - a key aspect of my own plausibility problem with Earth-type sexism in the Equestria of a thousand-plus years ago is that eventually, someone would have to explain it to Princess Luna, who at the time would appear to have been a graduate with honors of the Mustrum Ridcully School of Dealing With Impertinent and Stupid Ideas.
In that particular scenario, there is no way I'd lay my bets on said someone, or anyone else unwise enough to remain inside the Royal Canterlot Overpressure Zone.
4479692
Right. It was not my intent to argue with you, just to clarify something.
I don't really think it is. It's based on a particular observation: that when something turns to feminism, there will suddenly be people finding flaws with it that are extremely widespread, but which normally don't get anywhere near that kind of response. For example, consider how many people disliked Hillary Clinton because she was so ambitious, as though that were somehow specific to her and not true of every single person who has ever run for President. Likewise, here it seems like there are people who normally have no objections to Pineta's stories suddenly have issues with this one story about feminism, even though those issues are true of Pineta's stories more generally.
I was not questioning your motives or your honesty, if that's what you were thinking. But it's easy to look like that's what's happening when a discussion turns to how people think, and that is what a lot of sexism springs from. To return to the point of my original comment: anything smacking of feminism invites a higher degree of scrutiny than is given by default, and once you start looking for reasons to be sceptical of something, you usually find them. Even if those reasons are true of Stuff in general as well without anyone particularly caring.
I found this when looking through old pony pics on google images.
What feminism is and what feminism says feminism are very different things. Feminism is cancer.
Respond with a sufficiently smug "You don't have a good enough argument" response, and I'll explain why feminism is cancer, and why feminists lie about feminism with cards like "Any bad things feminism does isn't true feminism" and "Anyone who doesn't like feminism is a mysoginist antifeminist troll".
I like the story. The story also shows why Princess Luna let the NightMare corrupt her:
The storey mentions the White Princess beating King Sombra but did not mention Princess Luna.