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#v-bobafickle
kingofthewilderwest · 4 years
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v-bobafickle replied to your post “Do you think Mabel gets too much hate? I noticed when a female...”
Gender had nothing to do with Mabel's overall character arc... Criticisms on Mabel are about her actions in the story. Let's not forget what 'character' is, for any genre concerning writing. If it does happen to be about her gender. Then it's obviously a problem.
One of the first famous experiments I learned about when I began sociolinguistic research was an experiment in which students listened to an audio lecture recorded by a native (ergo, non-accented) English speaker. While they listened to the recording, the students were shown a photograph of the “professor.” One group saw a photograph of an Asian woman, and another group saw a photograph of a European American. Although they listened to the same lecture, the group in the experiment that saw the photograph of the Asian woman reported they had difficulties understanding her due to “her accent”. They also demonstrated lower comprehension of the material than the group that saw the European American photograph. The perception of that one audio sample changed, with measurable comprehension differences, based upon the demographic of the person they were looking at. One person ended up being judged more harshly for the legitimate same thing, just because she was Asian.
Another well-known study that comes to mind is about music: how orchestras used to hire more men than women during auditions. Even when they tried to do blind auditions, more men got hired... until they realized that the people conducting the auditions were hearing the auditionees walk in and out of the room, and the people who you could hear walking in with high heels ended up getting lower ratings. When they no longer could hear the auditionees walking in and out, and had the blind audition, then the hiring of musical performers became a more even gender split.
I feel like those experiments do a good job demonstrating how demographic-specific biases happen. Sometimes they’re intentional discrimination and sometimes they’re innately trained inside us. Especially in cases like the sociolinguistic lecture experiment, people even subconsciously perceive something differently based upon the demographic information they have before them. You’re absolutely right: gender isn’t a critical part of Mabel’s character arc, and criticisms against Mabel are based upon her personality and character arc. Her gender is irrelevant to those plot elements. However, the question becomes whether or not there is disproportionate negative judgment in relation to the character’s actions (bolding just to make my point stick out more ^.^). If two characters in a story demonstrate similar flaws, similar levels of flaws, and a similar number of undesirable choices in the storyline, but only one character gets hated upon by fandom and that character is the woman, then there is a legitimate question to be asked: if that harsher judgment is on account of the subconscious gender biases we’ve all learned and carry inside us. It often is.
In the analysis I posted, I quickly mentioned I don’t think that peoples’ aversion to Mabel’s personality and plot elements are primarily sexism, but that I’m not sure I can rule gender biases out either. I’m agnostic leaning toward a “no, not sexism”. Nevertheless, whether we agree or disagree that there’s a sexist nature to how people respond to Mabel, I think it’s important to consider that even when the character’s arc has nothing to do with their gender, how we perceive the character’s actions will be colored by their demographic characteristics. If two groups of people watched the exact same scripted Gravity Falls but one group saw a male Mabel and hated her less, then that would be gender bias.
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