There was a moment in Jessica Jones’s second season that floored me, despite its seeming mundanity. It was when Trish Walker, former child star and Jessica’s best friend, turned down a marriage proposal from all around-great-guy and super-reporter Griffin. As Trish tries to handle the blowback from her toxic mother (who keeps insisting that Trish is throwing away her life by refusing the engagement), she finally puts her angst into words: “I don’t want to be with Griffin—I want to be him. I want to do what he does. And that’s not love, and it’s not fair to either one of us.”
This problem, this exact one, is wrapped around me like cling film, impossible to spot and harder to eradicate. I took a moment to try and count up the number of times I had been told that my admiration or emulation of a man (even a fictional one) amounted to romantic interest or sexual desire. I could not find an end to that number.
[Spoilers for Jessica Jones season 2 below.]
My entire life is comprised of comments, rejoinders, and teasing where people mistook my fascination or ambition for something they could easily pass off as cute and immature. Because I was raised as a girl, and girls get “crushes.” They effectively lose their minds over the things they love. Madness is not wrong to invoke here; I can remember approaching adolescence and hearing warnings from every corner about the dangers of becoming “boy crazy.” Crazy, as though hormones are physically capable of stripping a person’s mental soundness from them for a period of six or so odd years, before you came out the other side a misshapen adult who hopefully has more sense (and a boyfriend). It sounded terrifying, some sort of pagan curse I would have to endure as punishment for daring to grow older.
To tell you the truth, I don’t ever remember being boy crazy. (This might have something to do with being queer?) I remember liking guys and thinking they were cute sometimes, but I had no desire to launch myself at one like a live missile. Yet every time I thought someone male was fascinating or even just kinda cool… oh no. I like liked them. That was the narrative. If I went against it, I was just too confused or embarrassed to admit the truth. How cute! Poor me.
This isn’t to say that there’s no truth to this concept whatsoever. Sometimes it is hard to separate what we want from who we want. It can be easy to think that we’re enamored of traits that we wish we could have for ourselves. People seek out what they lack. They search for people who can help them achieve what they cannot on their own. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, so long as we’re honest about why we are looking for it in the first place. If you wish you were more gregarious and end up with a partner who is chatty and lively, it’s perfectly healthy to experience a little of that congeniality vicariously. If you love painting but lack that eye for color or time to hone new skills, it makes sense that you would be drawn to someone who possessed those skills and the same enjoyment that you did.
But seeking out a partner who might be able to offer aspects that you crave is not the same as being told that your every fascination is a crush or a flirtation. And that is often the explanation that is forced onto girls and women. It occurs in realms of both reality and fantasy, making it harder and harder to figure out who we are and what we’re truly after in life. It allows others to dismiss our desires as something frivolous. It promotes romantic relationships over mentorships and solid friendships. It turns us into addled factories of emotion—the only acceptable version of female lust that the world is willing to accommodate without insult. And it can really mess you up over time.
As a child, most of the fictional characters I related to were male. I spent my time imaging that I was Aladdin, Luke Skywalker, Ford Prefect, Batman, Boba Fett, and Billy the Blue Ranger. Part of this was a numbers game—there are far more male characters to look up to, especially if you’re into sci-fi and fantasy. Part of this was down to genderfluidity on my part, which I hadn’t really reconciled at that point in time. But the older I got, the more that relationship changed; suddenly I was told that I liked Obi-Wan Kenobi because I liked him. Because he was handsome and I was a girl, and having a poster with Ewan McGregor on your wall was a very specific tell in the late nineties and early aughts. It was deeply puzzling to me, because on the one hand, they weren’t wrong—Ewan McGregor was and remains a very attractive dude. But Obi-Wan Kenobi was precious to me for a completely different list of reasons. He was sarcastic, and he was a Jedi, and he was kind of a mess in a way that I found incredibly relatable. John Crichton from Farscape was another one. Yes, he was a gorgeous guy, and I noticed because people generally do notice those things. But John was also funny and responded to stress with nerdy pop culture references. He was smart, and he was a soppy romantic, and he was insanely adaptable. I wanted to be that, not marry it.
But no one believed me.
Or rather, the only people who did believe me were other female friends who also hated being assigned the token girl role on the playground due to the happenstance of their gender. We loved Princess Leia, but we didn’t see ourselves in her. We raged against being told to pick the only girl avatar in the video game because the boys refused to let us try anything else. We tried to explain that if we weren’t Peter Pan, then we were definitely Captain Hook. And when we weren’t allowed to branch out, we just kept to ourselves. We played Star Wars. There was a Batman stunt show. All roles were filled by girls. It was rarely commented upon, and no one was ever accused of liking their alter ego.
Later, I would look for fun nerdy t-shirts (signaling with clothing is incredibly useful as a nervous teenager who wants to make friends), but everything cut for women was made in the form of a love letter: Mrs. Bruce Wayne. Han Solo with his shirt half open, gazing at you. Spock with hearts surrounding him. Even when I could find a plain old tee with a simple picture on it, the questions stalked me: Oh, so you have a crush on Aragorn? (I mean, Viggo Mortensen’s a babe, but I’m definitely more of a hobbit…) Which Batman would you want to take you out on a date? (I would rather take his place on the streets of Gotham, I already really like wearing black.) Why would you like Obi-Wan at all when the Star Wars prequels were trash? (Rude. Also, irrelevant.)
And the worst part is, there’s nothing wrong with having a crush, if that’s why you’re into something. If you want to draw doodles of Harry Potter in your notebook with hearts around them and write a fanfic where you go to Hogwarts and sweep him off his feet, I am five-thousand percent here for you. It’s just not me. And everyone kept telling me that it was.
At what point do you stop trusting yourself about yourself? I did, and for a long time too. People told me over and over that I liked what I was trying to become, so I absorbed it and regurgitated it. I would blush and look away when people asked if liked Obi-Wan Kenobi or John Crichton. I stopped arguing and let people construct a narrative around me that suited them. Sure, I was weird because I liked watching the SciFi Channel and I came to class toting Bradbury and Tolkien along with my textbooks. But I was “boy crazy” just like the rest of them. So there was good reason for me to be embarrassed about my interests, just like all the other teenage girls they knew. And I was embarrassed, constantly.
People might assume that this doesn’t continue into adulthood, but it does, and often more insidiously. Cosplay has been one of the biggest cues for me in that regard. When I dress as Luke in Return of the Jedi, most people think I’m a Sith lady because I’m wearing black and carrying a lightsaber. I put on Captain Kirk’s uniform, but a woman can’t be Jim Kirk, so I’m just some command officer. When I’m disguised as Hawkeye, fans’s eyes light up: “Kate Bishop!” Even though I’m wearing Clint Barton’s vestments. And I have nothing against Kate Bishop—I freaking love Kate Bishop—it’s just that she’s not the one I want to be. Point of fact, my husband is the one who wants to be Kate Bishop. We are not guaranteed to align with the person whose bodily silhouette we vaguely resemble. And trying to explain that, to put words to it, feels somehow selfish and grandiose of me. How dare I want people to see me more clearly.
There’s a weird parallel here that I felt while watching Trish in season two of Jessica Jones. It kind of put all of these feelings into perspective.
See, Trish Walker is constantly told by everyone who she is supposed to be, too, or rather, who she is to them. She also has a heap of trauma she hasn’t worked her way through yet, between her substance abuse issues and her mother’s persistent gaslighting and manipulation. And while she bears responsibility for the mistakes she makes, the same as everyone else, she is still blockaded from her own potential because no one is interested in seeing her as she would like to be seen. Instead, she holds a specific value to everyone around her; to her mother, she’s opportunity lost and then renewed in the form of a child; to Jessica, she’s a sister who needs saving; to Malcolm, she’s a fellow addict trying to recover; to her listeners, she’s that cute lifestyle reporter who used to be a cute child star. When she tries to step outside any of those boxes, she’s dropped into a new one—a romantic leading lady.
When Trish tells her mother that she wants to be Griffin instead of being with him, she is told that she is spoiled and that she is arrogant, and that she can never be more or better or different than what she is. And as a result, Trish spends the rest of the season circling the drain in an effort to be worthy of anything that she deems of value.
This is common I think, for women. It is just another way that society puts up weird invisible barriers for us, then forgets them and acts surprised when we run headlong into the block. The world limits its imagination in regard to what we can be and do. Trish runs this gamut through the current season, reliving the menial tropes that her life is built upon and being rejected by the ones she wants. She gains intel for Jessica by dressing up and singing as Patsy at a kid’s birthday party. We learn she tried to break away from her kid star persona by moving straight into hit-single-pop-stardom with a predictably terrible song and music video to match. We see her rally against the treacly talk show gab that her network wants her to stick to on her radio show. We find out about a forty-year-old director who took advantage of her when she was a teenage star in need of a new break. We follow along as she breaks off an engagement to a wonderful man, tumbles back into addiction, hooks up with Malcolm because she has nothing better to do. We watch her fail an audition for a major news network after walking away from her radio show.
The world won’t make room for Trish Walker to be anything more than a walking cliche, and so she performs it with the terrifying gusto of every good-little-girl-gone-bad the media loves to obsess over. People reading the tabloids and watching the news will decide what caused this backslide into hell, but no one will guess what’s really behind it—that Trish isn’t happy with the role the world has picked out for her. That dating a man who was the kind of person she wanted to be made it obvious that her own life wasn’t up to par. What’s more, no one will care about the why. They want her to be Patsy. They want her to be a twee blond celebrity with a serious reporter boyfriend. They want her to be a fluffy talk show host. Maury says as much when she’s hidden in his morgue in critical condition: “I told her she should have stuck to lifestyle…”
But here’s the kicker: This isn’t a story about how Jessica Jones’s best friend flushed her life down the toilet and fell victim to every stereotype on childhood stardom.
This is Trish Walker’s superhero origin.
I am getting the impression that fans of the show aren’t pleased with Trish right now. But this arc made more sense to me than dozens of origins narratives stretching back over the decades of the genre. Because once you realize that all those people who are riveted to your “crush,” who miss your teeny-bopper style, who file you with easy-to-reach labels, are putting you in a box?
You break the damn box.
And it makes sense that doing this is painful, and that it bars her from the people she cares about. It makes sense that it almost costs Trish her life, and that it leads to terrible mistakes, and that it isn’t nice or clean or bursting with happy endings. The process of refusing to be what everyone says you are—sweet girl, starlet, mess of a sister, lifestyle guru—is often less than fun. No one wants to be disappointing, and learning to live with that discomfort is strange, even for the most well-adjusted among us. But Trish Walker makes that choice anyway, because she knows who she is, or at least who she is supposed to be. Knowing that takes an extraordinary amount of courage. Being willing to do whatever it takes to realize that person takes more. I really hope I can figure out the trick to that someday.
One thing is certain—I’m never going to let anyone tell me I have a crush on someone who I want to be ever again.
Emmet Asher-Perrin will eventually cosplay as John Crichton for Comic Con. Her husband plans to be Aeryn. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
There’s no trick to it, really. Just be who you are. Otherwise, you have to get a very big wagon to drag all that angst around.
Okay, I never comment on articles, but this really struck a cord with me. Once, I was admiring this absolute genius person in University Challenge (long-running British quiz show with hard questions), and I told a female friend. I gushed about this guy’s genius brain, his ability to hold a wealth of knowledge in his head, how he could calculate maths stuff immediately, etc… I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, I’d never seen anything like it.
She was so convinced it was sexual attraction. I mean, it really boggled me that I couldn’t like someone for their intellect, or even aspire to be similar to them.
Just like when men look at another guy and see a version of themselves, women need to be able to look at others and find aspirations. Why are we only allowed to be romantically/sexually attracted?
I remember that sort of thing from school. I was in school when the LotR movies were coming up and people would ask me who my favorite character was and I’d say “Gimli!” (I have a long pitch for Gimli and how great he is.) I’d get this blank look and then “I meant do you like Vigo Mortesen or Orlando Bloom.” I’d put them off and say whoever that guy who played Merry. It was years before I figured out what asexuality was.
Thanks for this, Emily. You so perfectly sum up everything I have gone through in my life as well. It’s especially poignant for me having just read a review of a historical that takes place in the 60’s during the Space Race. Aside from the realization that my lifetime is now considered “historical”, while I remember vividly being let out of school early to watch the first Freedom flights, and sitting up all night to watch the moon landing, I remember even more vividly the number of people who told me I could never be an astronaut because I was female. I wasn’t crushing on Spock, I wanted to BE him. But I did learn techniques from him that helped me deal with my family’s dysfunction, so there’s that.
Brilliant. Yes, this.
One of the reasons why Spider-Man’s origin has always resonated is that moment in Amazing Fantasy #15 when Peter Parker, newly empowered, says, “I’ll show them, I’ll show them all,” referring to the jocks who made fun of the nerdy kid and wouldn’t let him play in their reindeer games. He gets a massive comeuppance when Uncle Ben dies, but his first instinct when he gets powers is to show everyone that he’s actually worthy and not just the dorky kid they’ll make fun of (at least until they need a math tutor).
Trish is going to become Hellcat in Jessica Jones season 3 because it’s who she wants to be, not who her mother or her sister or her listeners or her erstwhile lovers think she should be.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This. I love this. Now see, I get the idea that there should be more well rounded female fantasy heroines, and that whole argument but this is better. This is talking about how cool some of the guys in fantasy are and explains how you want to emulate them instead of be in love with them. This says that its okay to really like a character of the opposite gender in a non-sexy way. This is what people need to focus on.
Excellent article. I relate to your sentiments a lot, but in a slightly different way: everything around me seemed to say that girls having celebrity crushes was frivolous and something to be embarrassed of, so I always felt very critical of myself when those things did pop up. Though outwardly I didn’t give anyone a hard time, I also found myself judging other women for talking about big crushes on celebrities or fictional characters. I just kept thinking that I was better than this, it’s childish, these people aren’t real to my life, etc. When it really doesn’t matter! Harmless crushes are nothing to worry about.
Also experienced embarrassment when talking about other celebrities that I never had a romantic crush for, but just have a strong desire to be friends. Not a lot of people get that, though. Oh, or my ex that got huffy and jealous when I was explaining my admiration for a male ballet dancer. The dude had HUGE thighs and could do these amazing leaps, he must have worked so hard to get to that point! I wished I could leap like that! But ex assumed I couldn’t just be admiring someone’s skill, even if that was literally what I was saying, and got mad.
Great article!
I see so many young people today who buy into “it’s all about sex and attraction” so I can’t agree that your journey is the same as everyone else’s. The sex and attraction mantra seems to be the sadly accepted norm for most.
Good, thoughtful essay.
I wanted to cheer while reading this. I always related far more to Luke than to Leia, and it annoyed me so much when people assumed I must automatically relate to Leia because she was a woman. One of the reasons I love Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain so much is that I could relate to both Taran and Eilonwy in equal parts. Aragorn is a similar case–I never wanted to be him, per se, but I would absolutely have followed him into Mordor, no question. In love with him? Unthinkable. I hate that our culture has taught us to look at everything in terms of romance and/or lust, so much so that we often find ourselves falling into that trap without even realizing it. I’m delighted there are narratives in popular media now questioning that automatic assumption, so that hopefully more and more we can move away from such a strict dichotomy of: girls relate to/want to be like other girls, boys relate to/want to be like other boys, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
Thank you for this — it’s freaking brilliant.
How girls’ admiration of excellence in another person gets redefined as romance — that drove me crazy when I was a kid.
And ambitions trivialized as cute, passing fancies — is there any better why to teach a girl that she is irrelevant to the world? Is there any better way to kill creativity, drive, focus, hope?
I too was stunned when Trish said;”I don’t want to be with him — I want to be him.” I didn’t expect anyone to actually say that onscreen in a TV show, to have a female character admit to an ambition not related to her body (prettiest, sexiest, snag the best boyfriend), and admit to preferring achievement over romance.
When I wrote my first novel, a friend of mine (who I otherwise greatly respected) actually said to me, “But there’s something missing here — [the heroine] doesn’t fall in love.” I sputtered to explain that the book was not about that — and to this day I don’t know if I got my point across to her successfully.
The expectation, the assumption, that a woman’s life consists of her relation to someone she loves, and that nothing else matters —Well. I survived the battle, but I’m definitely among the walking wounded.
It’s uplifting and gratifying to see that the culture has shifted enough that a TV show will actually dare to have a character’s story-arc hinge on the issue.
Thank you for laying this out so clearly.
Marion Zimmer Bradley described Eowyn as having to get beyond the “Heroic Age” before she can fall in love with/love Faramir. That’s all the Bradley I’ve read, though–that article on Tolkien which I found in an anthology. From what I’ve heard, she’s so not the person to look at as per how to have the proper respect for one’s fellow human beings (respect on the level of common humanity is a thing, y’all . . . toleration is for long grocery lines, drivers who zoom around you or tailgate you, etc., however much you want to encourage those drivers to move to the city and ride the subway and never drive again for their own safety as well as the safety of the rest of us . . . rant over).
Yes! So many yeses! The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out when I was in middle school and had already absorbed the narrative about what it meant when a girl was interested in a fictional male character. I decided I *liked* Captain Jack Sparrow. I think I said that whenever the inevitable celebrity crush questions came up. I knew full well that I didn’t *like* Johnny Depp, so I did have that much self-awareness. Took me ten years to figure out that I’d never *like*-liked Captain Jack Sparrow, I just wanted to be him.
Chills here: I thought *I* was the only one who ever said “I Don’t Want to F*** Him, I Want to BE Him“!
It began as my way of explaining my relationship to Francis Crawford of Lymond in the Dorothy Dunnett books . . . but it was true for most of my life, really, and I’m so glad to see you writing about it here. And thanks for mentioning Peter Pan ;)
Lots more to say on this – LOTS more! – but gotta run – maybe more later? Meanwhile, sending massive aether hugs to you, Emily! To be continued….
I could swear that Gloria Steinem said about the same thing a lifetime ago. Maybe it was Jane Fonda? “We’re becoming the men we were supposed to marry”?
Clearly it’s going to take a while to get through.
I was never boy crazy, but it was something that was so ingrained in our society that there were times when I felt compelled to pretend that I was. I automatically became “interested” in the same boys that my best friend was interested in, because I didn’t know what else to do, and I was already a target of bullying for being a nerdy bookworm, so I didn’t want anything else making me look “weird.”
I started going to a new school at the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I didn’t realize it right away, but I found out around my junior or senior year that because I didn’t date or wear makeup (and possibly one or two other things), some of the kids at my new school had come to the conclusion that I was gay. They didn’t say anything obvious about it, they weren’t mean about it or anything, but one day an offhand comment was made that only made sense to me if the person who made it assumed I was a lesbian.
I wouldn’t have had a problem with this, except that I was fairly sure that I was not a lesbian. I wasn’t interested in boys, but I wasn’t interested in girls, either. Frankly, I didn’t know what I was. At the time, I didn’t know asexuality was a thing. I spent most of my teenage years wondering if there was something wrong with me. It doesn’t help much when your grandfather “jokingly” asks you how many boyfriends you have every time you see him, as if that’s more important than your straight-A grades or your ambitions to be the next Stephen King.
Fantastic story, Emily! I was not planning to add more because those above have said so much of what I thought, but….the beginning, and Trish….hmmm. As you quote it:
“I don’t want to be with Griffin—I want to be him. I want to do what he does. And that’s not love, and it’s not fair to either one of us.”
On one level that’s such a great thing to say but its just not true. Trish doesn’t want to be Griffin; she wants Griffin’s fame. She’s obsessed with the world knowing how great she is and how wonderful she is. In that way she’s so much like her mom. Still. What Trish values is fame. Griffin’s fame. Jessica’s fame. She wants so badly to be a hero but not pay the price for it.
I want to add my YES! to this.
My sense is that there are at least two pieces to this. One is the assumption, as Louise says @11, that boys can only relate to/want to be like other males, and girls can only relate to/want to be like other females. That assumption does apply to males and females equally. (Happily, yes, it is breaking down somewhat, as Martin Freeman’s young son wants most of all to meet…the actor who plays Okoye. And not because he has a crush on her!) This assumption is only more limiting to females due to the fact that women/girls have been much more restricted in the roles they’ve been allowed to play. So if a girl can only identify with the female characters, she has fewer choices (maybe only Leia), and a more limited range of options of what kind of a person to aspire to be. Speaking of cosplaying…one place where this assumption really shows up is at Halloween. You can be anything you can imagine yourself being! You can be any one of the Disney princesses! Boys are funneled into guy costumes, girls into girly costumes. I’m happy at the movies “Wonder Woman” or “Black Panther” because the neighborhood girls will have some non-frilly options for Halloween…but still, they’re generally restricted to the female roles, as the boys are to the the male roles: usually a broader spectrum of options, though mostly muscly, superpowered or scary.
The other piece is the idea that the meaning of a female person’s life is found in romance with a guy, and nowhere else. So romantic feelings are the only feelings she has of any importance. That’s where she finds fulfillment, that’s what she aspires to, that’s what motivates her. A story focusing on a woman should have the happy ending of her finding a guy. This mindset leads to the interpretation of any and all female interest in a male (not in a clearly fatherly or son-like relation to her) as romantic/sexual interest. Unlike the first piece above, this mindset is definitely something affecting females only. Male humans are people, who can be drawn to or admire other people for all sorts of reasons. Female humans are partial people, who are drawn to the guys who might make their dream come true–the only sort of dream they are supposed to have.
When asked which Beatle I “liked” when I was a kid in the 1960’s, I was supposed to say either John or Paul, and it was supposed to be romantic/sexual attraction. I would say George, just to get them to stop asking. It worked, but at the price of making me a bit of a weirdo. Not as much of a weirdo, I suppose, as I would have been if I’d said Ringo. I knew better than to do that. I didn’t want to be actively mocked, I just wanted them to shut up and let me enjoy the music. Yes, I sometimes felt strongly attracted to a guy, but that was not my main concern when listening to the Beatles.
I’ve personally never had anyone assume that my admiration for a male fictional character was sexual/romantic, though, AFAIR. Maybe since high school I’ve always run in more explicitly feminist circles (including women and men)? It’s interesting to hear that a lot of girls/women have experienced this. That must be seriously annoying, indeed.
I’ve never watched Jessica Jones, but this essay title caught my eye because it’s so true for me — infatuation and idolization are so often entwined, and it can be hard to determine their border or know which one (or both) I’m feeling, as you describe near the beginning. From Seanan McGuire to several of my middle-school classmates, many of my crushes have been on people I thought I wanted to be — people I considered similar to me in some ways, but more talented, confident, smart, physically abled, successful. I wanted to be with them in the light of their glory, and wanted to be them because my infatuation inflated their seeming wonderfulness. I wept when I read Seanan’s “Fifty Thoughts on Writing” and saw the statement “You are not the next Stephen King. You are not the next Emma Bull. You are not the next anyone. You are the very first you.” A simple reminder that we can each be a great and unique person, not just a pale imitation of someone greater, but it meant a lot coming from someone who seemed to have written every story I ever imagined, better than I ever could.
Tangential rant, sorry.
That’s not what this essay is about. And I also relate to what it is about. If I speak praise of a man (or a woman, to people who know I’m bi), I’m likely to be accused of having a crush on them. When I told my mom that blogger Mark Oshiro is the sweetest, funniest guy I know of, she responded “Ooh, sounds like a good partner for you. Is he single?” (Answer: No, he’s not single, and he’s gay). It can be annoying, for the reasons you state. I can like and admire someone, even consider them a role model, without crushing on them! Occasionally.
@3: Dang, I would have loved for high school classmates to ask me my favorite LOTR character, in the many months when I thought constantly about Gollum and was silently desperate for any chance to proclaim my adoration of him. I would have been delighted if they doubted me because I like to shock and puzzle with my weird tastes, though more delighted if they didn’t doubt me because they saw our similarities. Actually, most of my crushes on aquatic humanoids are rooted in the desire to be one. Conversely, my crush on one fictional wannabe aquatic humanoid comes from feeling that he and I are the same person. Aaand I’m ranting again.
@19: Interesting. I wasn’t alive in the 60s, so have rarely if ever been asked my favorite Beatle. But if asked, I would say Ringo. He wrote “Octopus’s Garden,” the most alluring love song I know, and tha’s all I care about. I don’t love him, just the song. I didn’t know that was such a stigmatized preference to voice, though I think anyone who knows me would understand it.
Two things, if I may. One, I know precisely what you’re dealing with, in spite of gender inversion. I took a theater class in high school in 1999, and one of the assignments was to lip-sync a song. Girls were allowed to perform to any song they wanted, but boys could only perform to songs sung by men. Why? I have no idea, and I fought it, unsuccessfully, because I was huge fan of Alanis. Maybe the teacher, a man in his 60s, would see it as creepy, but it was still a BS double standard. I have always been a fan of female singer/songwriters, but as a man, It’s not because I appreciate the talent or the words, it must be because I want to sleep with them. That didn’t just come from friends and online randoms, that accusation was levied at me by my ex-wife. So I get it. And in recent years I decided to say “screw it” and perform supposed “girl songs” at karaoke bars. Some things are universal.
Second, I don’t think this season of Jessica Jones was Trish’s superhero origin. I think it was her supervillain origin.
Wow. Yes to this, a thousand times over! I also wanted to be Han Solo, and John Criton, and Spock, and a score of others. Not the love interest, or the background female character who shows a bit of spirit or competence but is eventually overshadowed by the main male character. I think this is one of the reasons I love games like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Knights of the Old Republic. I get to be the person the story centers on.
@18 – ursula: I don’t agree. Trish has her issues, but she wants to be a serious journalist, not just for the fame of it.
@21 – JasonD: I’d hate it if this was Trish’s supervillain origin.
Very insightful :)
There is certainly some overlap for me in between ‘characters I want to be’ and ‘characters I want to be with’ in part because the types of traits I respect and aspire to for myself are also the type of traits I value in a mate – so, being a straight woman, they often go hand in hand with male characters I like (example alpha: Luke Skywalker). There are also some characters I find very attractive physically but could understand in ‘real life’ would make a horrible match. And of course there are men (fictional and real world) that I admire/respect or have ‘friend crushes’ on but am not attracted to in that way (funny that people are bringing up the Beatles, because George and John are my favorite, but it was never about who was ‘cutest’ to me). But I definitely hear your main point here regarding the assumption being that all adoration/attraction must be romantically/sexually based.
I wonder what experiences men have with this – if a man (assumed to be straight) expresses enthusiasm about a female character, do we make the same assumptions? In fact, I wonder if it’s even worse – there seems to be a little more cultural leeway regarding women liking (or cosplaying as/pretending to be) men, possibly in part because there are so few female options (thankfully getting better) and in part because of the double standard regarding girls who are more masculine and boys who are more feminine. But the idea of a man picking a girl to go as for Halloween or something like that still I think meets some resistance. And as for guys having a favorite character who is a girl, I think in some ways we stereotype men even more when it comes to sex drives. My son is still too young to view anything in a romantic lens, but right now he has several female favorite characters (Ahsoka Tano from Clone Wars, Hermione from Harry Potter, etc)….hopefully this trend continues.
@24 Lisamarie–I’d say we do not make the same assumption about a man who is expressing admiration for a woman (unless we’re a particularly jealous/insecure partner). The old idea that a woman’s whole desire is for a male partner (and to have children) is operative here, as I said @19. And of course, another thing that feeds into this is the cultural stance that almost any man could be seen as sexually attractive, whereas there’s a narrower range of appearance that would qualify a woman as a potential object of attraction. So if a man expresses admiration for, say, Margaret Thatcher, it’s highly unlikely anyone’s going to read that as sexual/romantic interest.
Part of what you and JasonD @21 are referring to is a different sort of limitation put on males, having to do with the need to define masculinity over against (and status-wise, “above”) femininity. So it’s OK to some degree for a woman to dress like a man or for a girl to be a tomboy, but not OK for a man to wear clearly feminine clothes (or sing a song made famous by a female singer, or like a chick flick) or for a boy to do something girly. There are more serious strictures against a boy being girly or soft than there are against a girl being boyish or aspiring to male roles. After all, the male roles are higher status than the female roles. And masculinity is more defined in terms of repression of the soft side or weakness (crying etc.), while females have not been thought to have the masculine traits so as to need to repress them.
I do NOT think these attitudes are completely operative in our culture, and I believe we’re developing more flexibility and humaneness on these matters. But I do think the strictures on male and female identity and desire are not symmetrical.
Wow, this article made me realize how fortunate I was growing up that I got to “be” Batman, or the Blue Power Ranger and cosplay as Inu Yasha and nobody batted an eyelash (or at least tried to force me back into the damn box of how a girl is supposed to act). Having a crush on Male Character A but wanting to BE Male Character B were two completely different things. It reminds me when I saw a pink T-shirt that said “Training to be Batman” and I completely missed the word “Wife” underneath until it was pointed out to me, and then I was hella pissed. It startles the crap out of me when I hit those invisible societal barriers. Let your girls be Batman. Let them be the Night.
What’s described in this post is exactly why strong female characters should be made from scratch, so to speak, and not poured into already-established male characters!!! Looking at you, Chris Chibnall!!! And Steven Moffat who could’ve made River Song into a great character who showed up in the Doctor’s life whenever she wanted, helped him whenever he needed her help, and called for his help whenever she needed his help, but who mostly had her own independent adventures . . . and instead they made her into his “bespoke psychopath,” therefore reinforcing the demon part of the angel/demon dichotomy that’s often used to describe women.
As per what I described in an earlier comment about “Heroic Age crushes,” I think those happen (at least happened in my case) from a need for confidence and also independence in travelling. And I also think those crushes are more difficult to get over than an ordinary crush; my last ordinary crush broke my heart (and he and I being close friends made it more difficult) and my girl squad did a lot of listening to me, but still in some ways it was not as difficult as “Heroic Age crushes,” maybe because there’s no closure with those and there was with him tho’ I didn’t tell him he broke my heart (and we’re not really friends but I still copy edit for him occasionally, and when we talk alternative energy occasionally if he calls me “hon” I’ll call him “bae” . . .).
Ok that was silly . . . thinking about the show and not putting in my username correctly . . . it’s @drcox . . . duh . . .can’t proof my own stuff well . . . . . As per characters I identify with in Doctor Who . . . I can’t think of any . . . no points of contact but Nefertiti’s comment about idiots denying the evidence of their own eyes accurately describes the people who have told the alternative energy guy “that won’t work” after seeing the project work, and I can understand it and I don’t have a science background.
@25 – oh, yes, I think it’s definitely all rooted in the idea that to be feminine is ‘lesser’ somehow. So if a girl wants to be “masculine”, maybe some people might perhaps want to put her back ‘in her place’, but in general it will be fine. But for a man to be ‘feminine’? Perish the thought!
That said, I suppose I should have amended my thought experiment to be a conventionally attractive woman – for example, what would the idea be about a man who really likes, I don’t know, Wonder Woman. I feel like there’d be at least some assumptions that part of it would be about how ‘hot’ she is (or that they at least would be expected to comment on it). In part because of the way we make appearance/sexual value to men such a key part of a woman’s value.
I’ve never watched Jessica Jones. Maybe I should.
Identifying with male characters was also true for my basic CIS white girl self. Girls have a few more options now. But still not enough.
Spare a moment for the young boys who are fascinated by female characters. The social expectations of what they *should* like just because of their gender hold them back as well.
I once dressed up as Brandon Lee’s character from The Crow for Halloween, everyone thought I was a generic zombie. I was the girl who hung out with her younger brothers, caught frogs, toads and snakes, and who wanted to be those heroes in the sci-fi and fantasy novels, not marry them. Glad to see I’m not the only one. ;)
This. This. and THIS! Yes, and thank you for writing this article and pointing this out. As a female bodied human in STEM, I’ve often tried to take up conversations on fascinating topics in my field of research with anyone, men and women, and the constant thing that drags me down is when people think that there is a romantic interest when I’m merely trying to enthusiastically engage with a male colleague on some such topic. I’ve been bullied and harassed at work for apparently appearing “flirtatious” when I’m just trying to shoot the shit with a male colleague over research. I think that I’ve suffered permanent brain damage after smashing my head repeatedly against this damned invisible glass wall.
This season of Jessica Jones just effing nailed so many things; it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
As a male (albeit a gay male), this was an eye-opening read! I love that Jessica Jones keeps pushing my assumptions. It is such a good show! And Trish’s storyline this season has been a truly fascinating watch. Thank you for this article!
“I put on Captain Kirk’s uniform, but a woman can’t be Jim Kirk.”
Tell that to Janice Lester.
(Sorry. Too soon?)
@19. Saavik: “Unlike the first piece above, this mindset is definitely something affecting females only.”
Surely not to the same degree for males, but maybe not exclusively for females. One small example: watching a singing competition and making a remark about liking a female singer’s voice got this response from my girlfriend: “So you wanna sleep with her?” There’s other examples I could probably dig up, perhaps suggesting insecurity in the relationship partner. This by inference would be true of any men making such comments.
@20. AeronaGreenjoy: “Actually, most of my crushes on aquatic humanoids are rooted in the desire to be one.”
Have you seen The Shape of Water and what’d you think fit?
@34 It is always going to be too soon to remember Turnabout Intruder exists, always.
@35: I haven’t watched it yet. It appears to be the Creature From the Black Lagoon remake I wanted nine years ago, before I learned that I don’t like seeing aquatic humanoids romancing other people and that I am unlikely to even get as close to aquatic as my scuba diving friends can.
I think you make a lot of good and fair points.
However I would argue this really has nothing to do with gender or roles and more to do with society’s (read: American’s at least) really awful hangups with sex/romance/what have you. The weird obsession with celebrity’s love lives, gossip, the generation raised on Disney-esque romances where everything is simple and basic, society’s general acceptance of jealousy and stalker-like behaviors when it relates to loved ones… yeah it’s no surprise that any general friendliness or admiration between opposite genders is taken as some kind of sexual/romantic interest instead of just platonic. (re: @32)
As for Trish, I 100% understand her arc in this season, I think it was written pretty well, I get her motivation–but I still think she is just about the worst person. Not to say that I am not sympathetic to some of her problems, but she is a hypocrite and a horribly selfish person. I don’t want to go into spoilers though, but suffice to say that if you watch the way her mother treats her, then the way she treats Jessica… yeah, the parallels are there for a reason.
You know I wonder if this why I feel so god damn directionless right now. That growing up I was too busy being what I was expected to and never learned who I was.
Agree with this & the same angle inverted for male admiration of females. I never really had crushes on female pop stars when I was younger (that’s not to say I wouldn’t have got it on with any female that was conscious & up for it, cos I was a teenage boy and hormones etc.) and I still don’t get the idea that people have the hots for celebrities. But there are people I see in TV, films and, importantly, real life who I think are awesome and amazing – and most of them are female. And yeah, I don’t fantasise about having sex with them, I fantasise (a little) about being them. Needless to say, it’s not something a middle aged bloke is going to talk about much. :-/
I’m not sure if this relavent, or not but in terms of characters of the opposite gender that I relate to so much they are my favorite in their series but aren’t sexually attracted to go there is Steris from Brandon Sanderson’s Wax and Wayne novels. Particularly how she started to be portrayed around Bands Of Mourning. What really got to me was when in the process of reading it I started to realize we both had Asperger’s Syndrome simply because she had so many character moments where I could see myself thinking, that sounds like the way I would think in a such a situation. There were differences of course. Being that we were raised differently and different experiences, but the way I was able to see myself as her, and identify with problems with social ques, on a personal level really hit home with me.
Like I said I don’t know if this is relevant or not but thought I’d include it in case it was.
Thanks so much for this article; it speaks to a female experience that is nearly universal but that’s pretty much invisible. Good on you for making it visible; now we have something we can point to and say, “It’s like this!
It’s also true that both things can happen at once; we can have a crush one someone AND want to be them. I’ve identified with Spock since 1969, AND I’d love to drag (TOS) Spock into bed. Just because the latter is true doesn’t mean that the former isn’t ALSO true.
“Also me, beset by tribbles.”
That’s me at the age of 12!
I love your captions.
@6/Wardbreaker: Both are important. As long as I can remember, I’ve been looking for good female characters in stories. When there weren’t any, it made me feel unreal. But at the same time, even when a story has great female characters, I may still identify with one of the men.
Its not just external role models. I went to an all girls school for most of my education, but attended a mixed gender school for one year of my A-levels. My previous school had a good reputation for science teaching and the faces I saw everyday in my science lessons were female, so my mental expectation of science students was that they were female. When I attended the mixed gender school, it seemed like I had attended a boy’s school by mistake — I was one of only a handful of girls in both chemistry, physics and further maths and the only female student in the astronomy class I took as an optional extra. Towards the end of my first term, the male astronomy teacher took me to one side and basically gave me a lecture about not being silly with the boys: he outright stated that I was flirting with the other members of the class and distracting them, and also implied that I was only on the course to meet boys anyway. I loved astronomy, had found him a great teacher and had been really inspired by the course: to this day I can remember things I learnt on the course, but not his name or any information about the boys in the class (other than 1 of them threw up on a field trip and I ended up cleaning up his vomit, because no one else would — not sexy, btw). I was young for my year and a slow starter towards sexual maturity: I didn’t really start being sexually interested in other people until I hit university and I had never thought of my other classmates as anything other than people who were learning astronomy too. It had never crossed my mind that anyone could think that I was crushing on someone and being stupid as a result. I started modifying my behaviours in that class; felt self-conscious and awkward, and eventually dropped out because I felt too uncomfortable. I have never really fancied astronomy since.
That is an awful experience, per astra, sorry you had to live it.
This really resonated with me. In middle school, classmates and teachers alike would always tease me for having “crushes” on male comedians, authors, directors I liked. It’s 25 years later, and it still happens. Why do people (men AND women) find it so hard to believe that a woman can be a big fan of a guy, but have no interest in boning them?
@44. Per astra: Adults projecting their hangups on young people can be horrendous. They think they see bad and lascivious things in kids that aren’t anywhere near the conscious awareness adults ascribe to them.
My example would be from the church I was raised in till I left in my mid-teens. So much of what me and those near my age heard from sermons and pastors was just nonsense. They were accusing us of lewd behaviors we hadn’t even thought or conceived of… till they put the ideas into our heads. If you tell someone, “Don’t think of flying pink elephants,” they’re going to see flying pink elephants. That’s the irony. They instigated the behaviors they found abhorrent by initiating our interest in them.
I took calculus in high school because I thought, somehow, that Spock would approve of me if I did (also, to show up my older brother, but you can want something for more than one reason).
One of your best articles yet! It’s frustrating how often women have to deal with hearing that their interests in male characters are sexual; I’ve seen it over and over and I am so very, very tired of having to explain myself and others as human beings who like human characters. When I was little, Qui-Gonn Jinn was my hero, a mentor-like figure. Later I was drawn to Ewan Macgregor’s Obi-Wan as someone I empathized with, perhaps because we had had the same mentor. My favourite film was the Princess Bride, but I never cared for ‘Sweet Wesley’ – I wanted to be Dread Pirate Roberts or Inigo Montoya. By taking up fencing, I managed to do so. It was never about attraction.
Wonderfully, wonderfully written article; you’ve given me new respect for Patty. This season was a little aimless for me, but I can’t wait to see the next regardless.
I am sure that I have come across the line “I didn’t want to marry him; I wanted to BE him.” in my fiction reading, and since I read very little mainstream fiction, I am thinking it had to be either “The Women’s Room” by Marilyn French, or one of Rita Mae Brown’s novels.