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I remember, when I was mostly on message boards, and I either hadn’t been on tumblr long or wasn’t on here at all, I stumbled onto a bunch of scifi stories. And the basic principle - stories where all the characters were women, and relationships between women whether romantic, platonic or familial - was a good one. But the way the writers went about it was whack.
Like, instead of having a culture of women on Earth, or even who had left Earth and went to another world without men, they were actually a different species that were just composed of “women”. Also, even though they were all women, there were still two types of women, more or less butches and femmes? And they were called Brunettes and Blonds. With only one exception, literally every femme character was blond and every butch character was brunette, and the exception was a girl from Earth who was visiting this planet. And it was treated as natural that femmes/blonds would partner with butches/brunettes. So while I’m glad they were thinking about how to get around equating any women to being masculine - since part of their philosophical standpoint was that even with similar personality traits, no woman was “masculine” and no man was “feminine”; women and men were just different types of feminine or masculine, respectively - they still fell into some weird gender essentialist bs all on their own.
I don’t even know if the site and stories exist online or if I could find them if I did. I mostly remember it because as a then very genderqueer person already questioning a lot of stuff involved with cis-sexism and the like, I had so many questions about the wtf-itude of these stories. (Like are there Redheads? Do you have to dye or bleach your hair if you don’t identify with your Hair Color Assigned at Birth (HCAaB)? What if your hair color changes unexpectedly like how some kids are born blond and become brunettes later?) And I do think that there needs to be way more media centered on women, but we don’t don’t need to base non-physical aspects on physical traits at all? We don’t need to make an entirely separate species for a women’s only culture to show up in books. Like it’s fine if you want to make an all female species that has little or nothing to do with males of other species, but also have human women. And remember that most binaries are fake.
I don’t know why I thought of this but it’s been on my mind. Maybe as a guy, it’s not my place to ask this, but if any women do write stories, please look at this and see where these writers went wrong and please don’t repeat their mistakes. You don’t need to write something for me, but please don’t dismiss or exclude your fellow women over trivial things.
Like, instead of having a culture of women on Earth, or even who had left Earth and went to another world without men, they were actually a different species that were just composed of “women”. Also, even though they were all women, there were still two types of women, more or less butches and femmes? And they were called Brunettes and Blonds. With only one exception, literally every femme character was blond and every butch character was brunette, and the exception was a girl from Earth who was visiting this planet. And it was treated as natural that femmes/blonds would partner with butches/brunettes. So while I’m glad they were thinking about how to get around equating any women to being masculine - since part of their philosophical standpoint was that even with similar personality traits, no woman was “masculine” and no man was “feminine”; women and men were just different types of feminine or masculine, respectively - they still fell into some weird gender essentialist bs all on their own.
I don’t even know if the site and stories exist online or if I could find them if I did. I mostly remember it because as a then very genderqueer person already questioning a lot of stuff involved with cis-sexism and the like, I had so many questions about the wtf-itude of these stories. (Like are there Redheads? Do you have to dye or bleach your hair if you don’t identify with your Hair Color Assigned at Birth (HCAaB)? What if your hair color changes unexpectedly like how some kids are born blond and become brunettes later?) And I do think that there needs to be way more media centered on women, but we don’t don’t need to base non-physical aspects on physical traits at all? We don’t need to make an entirely separate species for a women’s only culture to show up in books. Like it’s fine if you want to make an all female species that has little or nothing to do with males of other species, but also have human women. And remember that most binaries are fake.
I don’t know why I thought of this but it’s been on my mind. Maybe as a guy, it’s not my place to ask this, but if any women do write stories, please look at this and see where these writers went wrong and please don’t repeat their mistakes. You don’t need to write something for me, but please don’t dismiss or exclude your fellow women over trivial things.
