The 'Other' Women, Part II

Once upon a time, when I was a wee undergraduate, I had a flatmate who identified as a feminist, and attributed this to having grown up with a certain breed of YA which featured a certain type of female protagonist. More specifically, the female character who draws her powers of awesome Specialness from rejecting stereotypically feminine things and embracing 'boy stuff'.  

Enter Yours Truly. It should have been a warning that I'd already butted heads with the campus 'feminist' publication, who had seen fit to print a rebuttal to a piece I wrote about non-Anglo-Western gender roles and folklore*. In response to me sharing some choice tidbits from my history classes, Flatmate decided to share her opinions on how other cultures do gender, and they were not flattering. I will spare you the details, but suffice to say she took issue with the fact that men in other cultures cook or are nurturing with children or do other things which Anglo-western culture deems 'feminine'. Going on the 'masculine means good' standard, this meant that various peoples around the world had, by her estimation, failed at gender. The screaming match which followed was the stuff of legend.

The long-winded moral of this story is as follows:
We need more representations of societies (real or fictional) which don't play by Anglo-western gender norms;We need more nuanced representations of gender and gender roles;Showing that girls need to be 'masculine' to be awesome isn't feminism, it's misogyny in disguise;Coding tasks/roles as feminine is questionable, and coding 'feminine' as 'demeaning' is gawdawful and insulting to everyone;The degree of violence which a character uses to solve their problems should not be proportional to how cool they are;Fiction has a huge influence on squishy young brains. Bottom line, we need actual diversity in our stories, not just safe lip service to difference. That means challenging the easy narrative-- in this case 'women throws off evil oppressive dresses and beats up monsters like a man'-- and find something with more complexity.

*Had it been a factual, academic disagreement, this could have been interesting. However, it was basically a snit explaining how my personal experience was invalid since it didn't conform to the dominant narrative (by dint of being from outside the dominant culture).