Love lesbian characters, hate gay males?

Hmm. I've always seen both jealousy and neediness to be fairly evenly distributed across the sexes, even stereotypically.

Stereotypical jealous male: Gets in a fistfight after the girl looks at another guy.
Stereotypical jealous female: Pouts after the guy looks at another girl.
Stereotypical needy female: Demands compliments.
Stereotypical needy male: Plants himself in a chair at the barbecue and waits for her to "fix a plate" for him.

 

@KaTrian... Oh Jack Rackham is part of a two girl, one guy threesome and hardly a word was said about that.

There may have been an element of not wanting to overdo it and upset the vocal, opposed straight male viewer, but like I said, Starz have not been shy about showing gay sex before, so I'm inclined to think they are actually trying to elevate Flint's relationship with the man he loves by not honing in on any greater sexual act. Like @Wreybies said, it's not about the sexual act, it's about who we chose to love.

In Spartacus there were three gay characters that come to mind. I think I saw them all going at it at one point or another, but the scenes I clearly remember were about the emotion not the sex. But they were in danger imo of taking the sex scenes just a little too far. Perhaps this time around the writers are thinking with their heads not their genitals. (Not to mention in terms of what they can get away with.)

 

A stereotypical jealous guy, such as with your fine example above, is actually just being possessive, another stereotypical male trait

Your neediness example is physical for the male and emotional for the female, which fits with traditional stereotypes

 

Thanks for clarifying. I couldn't remember anymore 'cause it's been a while I saw the episode.

Sounds cool. Basically what I was wondering about is that whether the makers of a TV show choose to deliberately desexualize the gay to "protect" the delicate minds of their target audience even when sexy would've worked -- while with straight (maybe nowadays even lesbian) characters it's anything goes, gratuitous sex, what the hell, since our hands aren't tied here.

 

Perhaps this is part of the issue. We are trained to look at these phenomena differently so we don't see them as the same. Like in Spanish where a human leg is a pierna and dog's leg is a pata, and one would never call one the other, though clearly, were one to remove the prejudice of seeing a human as different from a pooch, a leg is a leg.

 

I'd rather eat a lamb leg over a chicken leg...

 

First I gotta put things in context, so prepare for some backstory:

When I was still in school, a lot of my friends were quite homophobic. This created a difficult situation: should I, someone who was heavily bullied in the previous school just the previous semester, expose myself to bullying by speaking up against it when my friends e.g. tell jokes offensive to homosexuals? Or call each other or something they dislike "gay"?

As an adult, I'm confident enough to call bullshit even when it's a friend saying it, but as a very insecure kid whose worst nightmare was to end up systematically bullied again? To my shame, I have to admit I took the coward's way out and stayed silent or went along with it. It had nothing to do with belittling women or seeing gay men as inferior because their supposedly more feminine traits. It was about seeing them as inferior men as well as a way for insecure dumbasses to bond, as pathetic as it is, a way to belong. I know, we were vile and incredibly stupid; we didn't have the brain capacity to think that we make fun of male homosexuals because we think they're like women or some such (after all, we were still under 13).

Luckily I grew something akin to a brain in my late teens (at around 16-17) and started to question these norms.
My dad is very anti-gay, so seeking his acceptance as a kid also played a part in my homophobic behavior back then. Our family was never a perfect haven of peace and comfort, but even when things were a bit better, the next fight was one wrong word away, so the preteen/teen me pandered to my dad's ideals to get/stay on his good side since his dominance over the family meant your life really sucked if you crossed him, so I had some incentives to cater to his beliefs even if I didn't buy into them myself.

However, when I started to come to my own (around the time I turned 18 or so), I also started voicing my dissent among my friends and family.
So, sad as it may be, to some people homophobia is just another way to bond. I know, it's fucking pathetic and makes me ashamed in hindsight, but I kinda do sympathize with the younger me because I still remember what it was like to live in our home while my dad was angry with me. Don't get me wrong: he wasn't a monster, but he was a tyrant.

So yeah, often it boils down to simple cowardice, which is what the above story is ripe with, alas.

And when it comes to lesbians: the #1 reason among my friends was that when you watch lesbian erotica/porn, everything onscreen is awesome. There's no dicks or man-asses to cause eyeball sprains when you try to avoid them. So it had very little to nothing to do with the womens' (depicted) homosexuality, and everything to do with a bunch of horny guys wanting to see naked women and only naked women.

Oh yeah, about "effeminate" men being a threat to more "masculine" men:
In my experience in the capital area of Finland, the "effeminate" guys some men view as a threat are often guys like me who are seen as a threat. I have slightly longer hair (some call it a surfer haircut, others just say it's emo), somewhat androgynous features when I'm not twisting my face (like in my current avatar), and I tend to get along much better with women than men, so when I was single, sometimes some guys latched onto my less traditionally "manly" looks than theirs and tried to insult me that way if the girl they liked hung out with me (even if we were just friends) instead of them. And of course they were pretty much always surprised that I wasn't a pushove.

Needless to say, people who have different standards for gay characters (e.g. claiming you need some special reasons to have one), are fucking morons.

 

I see it as emotional in both cases. The woman "fixing the plate" is treating the man as higher status, acting as his servant, and also playing a mothering/caregiving role. It's not as if he can't walk ten steps and successfully grasp a serving spoon to get his own food; her getting it for him is, IMO, purely about fulfilling his emotional needs.

 

It's even something that is reflected in humour. I mean, it's really quite sad, but you don't really hear about lesbian sex being the subject of jokes, but male-gay sex is.

Something that happened today with my friends is as case in point really. A female friend of mine commented on how I was flirting with a girl at a lecture a few weeks ago, and I then said 'I'm just lonely' - then said how just last Monday I and another friend who just happened to be present had been learning about a gay poet, and that I had googled the guy out of curiosity and thought he was quite good looking. This was laughed at heartily by both as if it was a joke. I wasn't joking, I was being totally serious.

 

Yeah, I hear that. Here in the UK we have the same basic sort of thing though obviously it's not as culturally strong as in Russia called the EDL - or English Defence League. They are a nasty lot, I can tell you that. All about protecting 'English values' (whatever those are) and being 'real men' (whatever that is). I've been on the wrong side of them myself, being once a member of the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate for one thing, and it's not exactly a pleasant experience.

 

Haha! I know, right. Reminds me of that christian pastor in the states who contemned homosexuals and was eventually found in a motel with a male-prostitute. I think they doth protest too much.

 

Just watch the doors of that closet. I bet he's in there with a rent-boy.

 

Foster brother, yes. The woman who was caring for Sarah's daughter is their foster mother and tied to the plot in as of yet not revealed ways.

 

I think that has less to do with homosexuality and more to do with an observation I've made:
In general, men are really easy to portray in a silly, funny light or as pathetic loser wankers etc.
Women, in turn, are much more challenging to make fun of in a similar way. I mean, often what's funny and comical when a man does it, is different when a woman does it.

Example 1:
A "normal-looking" young man walks into an important meeting wearing only rubber boots and a silly hat, stands on the table and twerks at the people in the room. A lot of people would see it as a comical situation.
If a likewise normal-looking young woman walks into the same room in the same exact outfit and twerks on the same table, I'm willing to bet far more people would see it as more sexy than just purely silly.

Example 2:
A normal-looking but terribly shy and awkward nerd guy goes on a blind date and gets laughed at by his date, so he leaves and goes home to jerk off to his favorite comic book heroine to release his frustration and sadness.
Now, again, flip the sexes, and show the young woman getting rejected and then jilling off to her favorite comic book hero to ease her misery, and I'd bet that to a lot of people, she won't look nearly as pathetic as the guy, if at all.

@KaTrian and I refer to this discrepancy with the quote: "He leaps with the grace of a mountain goat." In one movie, the leading lady is at a pond, being fondled by three female models in a display of mild lesbian erotica while her husband is shown hopping from rock to rock elsewhere (fully clothed), blissfully ignorant of his wife's bi-curious exploits (as he thinks she's all too pious and shy for anything like that because they are a very traditional, religious couple), and as he hops to another rock, he says to himself "He leaps with the grace of a mountain goat," playing like an innocent, if a little simple/stupid, big kid who's too goofy to realize his time would be spent better participating in the fun at the pond.

That scene captures that difference between men and women, the way men are so easy to make look ridiculous whereas it takes much more care to do with women (and I'd claim the prettier the woman, the more difficult it is to make her look honestly and platonically embarrassing-silly instead of cute-sexy-silly).

I think e.g. Gravity Falls, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, and Avatar/The Last Air Bender do a pretty good job of showing both sexes in a platonically silly light for the most part, but it's pretty rare.
I'm pretty sure it's somehow's linked to the different ways men, as a sex, look at women and vice versa (generalizing here, so exceptions do exist), but I haven't given it enough thought to decipher what exactly are the reasons behind these differences between the portrayals of some characters.
But that's just a subjective observation.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this?


ETA: On a second thought, homosexuality does play some part in it because especially in the past, male homosexuality has been often used to milk laughs from the audience (even sexual harassment in movies like the Police Academy, in the gay bar scenes. I can't remember if rape was implied, but at least the leather-clad men blocked the exit and grabbed one of the male characters and wouldn't let him go before the scene ended, and it was all shown in a comical light because gay men. I've heard mainstream anime is also guilty of using a lot of male homosexual clichés and stereotypes for cheap laughs. I don't think female homosexuality is portrayed in a similar fashion nearly as often and I've never seen a comical portrayal of lesbian rape.

 

I have, and generally I find it annoying I must admit.

 

Yes repeatedly.

I was watching a review of Mamma Mia (don't ask why, and I can't actually remember who the reviewer was). The central part of the critique was that there are several potentially funny set-ups in the movie where the female characters fall over or embarrass themselves somehow, and instead of having a realistic reaction (which you would be more likely to see with a male protagonist) that might raise the stakes and create an awkwardly amusing pay-off, they all giggle like morons in some cutesy "ooh silly me" kind of way and all the tension is removed. Basically the thought process behind the movie appears to be that the target audience would be unable to cope with any real emotion so the characters all giggle like fuckwits when anything embarrassing happens; or more accurately that showing any realistic negative response to a situation would be a sign of emotional weakness and the target audience would not want strong, independent women to behave this way (the review also pointed out that the Sex in the City movie does a similar thing). The conclusion was that the makers of the film were basically demeaning women under the pretence of empowering them.

Now Mamma Mia is a steaming pile of nonsensical shit, but there were points made about this movie that I do see in other movies that are clearly aiming for a predominantly female target audience.

Also, The Last Airbender is one of the worst movies of all time, it seemed really strange to see it as an example of anything other than how not to make a movie.

 

Were you, by any chance, watching Nostalgia Critic? I remember he criticized the gigglyness of the women in his review.

My guess is he meant Avatar, although the same characters appear in the M. Night Shyamhsdgdsd movie. We haven't watched the live-action movie, just scathing reviews of it. The cartoon, however, is awesome.

 

That is quite possible, I'll have to jump on Youtube and check in a bit.

 

It can be done. Watch the comedy series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing even remotely sexy about the main female in the show, who is, a tall, skinny, blonde girl. She is absolutely hilarious and you will laugh at her.

What this says to me is that maybe we're not being taught to think this way about males/females, because, if you watch the show, trust me, you will agree with me about this girl. Maybe it's something else.

Oh silly me, Elaine from Seinfield is the same thing, only not as extreme.

 

Yes, she is funny, and I would say it is largely because her character is capable of self-depreciation and playing the fool. I think people underestimate how important that is in comedy. A smart-arse who never trips up just becomes hateful (female characters in comedy very often play the straight-man to the funny bloke).

 

It is abomination. I was (and remain) a devout fan of the original show and of Korra (who got her some Asami goodness in the end!) and was not just horrified at the film, but gobsmacked that the owners of that franchise would pay so little attention to it being properly handled. Never mind respect for the show's tone, themes, characters and all that fandom stuff. MONEY! How do you shit that much money down your leg from something that should have been a cash cow in triplicate, seething, frothy mouthed fans at the ready?? How?????????????