ok actually i did some real human tasks today so i am going to talk about this more because i have time now.
This line bothers me. I don’t like it. I don’t like that they included it.
It’s not that I’m saying like, “I, Scout Casey, hate it when books are feminist,” that is not what’s happening here. If anything, it’s more like… okay, starting from a baseline here.
Sexism doesn’t exist in Warriors. I mean, it does, but it doesn’t. What I mean by that is that the patriarchy as a social superstructure is not extant within the worldbuilding, from the perspective of the authors. It still is very clearly there, and even very obvious from the perspective of anybody who knows, like feminist theory 101, but it is not there because the authors want it to be there, it is there because the authors tried to present an egalitarian society, and fucked it up by virtue of being from a non-egalitarian society and having (seemingly mostly unexamined) internal biases of their own which caused them to think certain things were ‘equal’ when they were not.
But like, if you examine the rules of Clan society as presented, there are only two cases of clear structural sexism - the ‘medicine cats cant have kits’ thing, and the ‘female leaders/deputies shouldnt have kits’ thing. In the case of the former, it seems very clear to me that the authors do not realize that this rule is sexist, because they are stupid. In the case of the latter, it only crops up with Bluestar and Leafstar, and in both of these examples, it is implicit that the Erins actually more or less agree with the rule because in both cases, the characters’ leadership is impaired or hindered by their having children, because the authors are sexist and lack imagination and therefore literally don’t know how to write an egalitarian society even though they seem to want to.
Before we move on, a couple of notes:
Yes, I know I’ve pointed out before that Bluestar’s story is Vicky’s self-insert feminist vent fic about sexism in the workplace, and yes, I know I’ve argued before that the ending to that story - that Bluestar made the right choice in giving up her children - was an anti-patriarchal statement on her part. But she also set it up a situation where a character has to choose between her children and her career because she is incapable of handling both, and the reader is to understand that the reason this is true because of her gender. People are complicated and so are stories.
I’m talking about structural sexism here because we’re talking about worldbuilding. Social sexism (like, person-to-person discrimination) is also a thing, but it’s more of an individualized thing and so less relevant to the conversation and also less my area of interest/expertise.
Anyway, back to the main thread of this whole thing. My point is: Clan society is meant to be read as a gender-egalitarian society. It’s clearly not, but that is the author’s intent, in my belief. Even if there are moments where the sexism is obvious, the story functions better if the reader suspends their disbelief and pretends it isn’t there.
So right off the bat, it bothers me that they collapse this worldbuilding. Your suspended disbelief is snapped, and because you have to stop suspending your disbelief, you also have to consider all the moments of sexism that you’ve encountered in these books in the past. They literally shine a spotlight on it. And then they don’t address it. You just have to live in this world now, where the story no longer works because sexism does exist and it’s a clear issue that they just won’t acknowledge. But because you, the reader, have a brain, it’s all you want to think about now, but they refuse to talk about it even though they just forced you to look at it.
And like, it would be one thing if they did this for the sake of setting up a shallow aesop about sexism. I would be fine with that; it’s the sort of thing that’s pretty typical for a children’s book, actually, to have supposed egalitarianism and then introduce sexism solely for the purpose of quickly defeating it and then going on pretending it doesn’t exist. I mean, I don’t love that kind of writing for a number of reasons obviously, but it’s typical of the genre, and it at least has an ostensibly good moral. Like if they had had Toadstep say something like “Dovepaw is worse at hunting because she’s a girl” and then Dovepaw proves him wrong and he learns his lesson, that’s fine, whatever, I can live with it. It still sucks, but it sucks for the sake of making an attempt, however poor, at teaching children not to be misogynist little shits.
But that is not what this is! This is a joke. They toss their own worldbuilding out the window for a moment of comic relief that isn’t even fucking funny. You have to stop suspending your disbelief because they wanted to make Millie slightly more sympathetic by giving her a shitty, shallow quip.
And then it doesn’t… go anywhere? It doesn’t set the characters up to talk about sexism. The conversation doesn’t even linger here - Millie’s line is the most throwaway of all throwaways. The rest of the conversation is just about the dumb border dispute without even a transition away from the topic of gender discrimination. So like, again, they make you think about the sexism and then immediately outright refuse to acknowledge it.
What lesson is this teaching? Well, let’s break down the scene real quick. What happens is:
Firestar uses the ‘he’ pronoun as a default/gender neutral pronoun for an unknown third party.
Millie pointedly uses the ‘she’ pronoun as a default/gender neutral pronoun for an unknown third party, passively criticizing Firestar and Lionblaze’s gender bias.
The narrative moves on as though Millie has said nothing. Firestar and Lionblaze do not apologize or acknowledge her criticism, and learn nothing. The issue never comes up again.
I want to be generous, but I think the best you can get from this is, like, maybe a weak “you should stand up for women’s issues even when they seem petty and small.” That’s me really trying to defend the text here. I could argue that that’s what is being said in a paper, probably. But it wouldn’t be very honest of me.
If I’m being truthful, I think the messages you get from this scene, in order, are:
Men are sexist, habitually.
Women resist sexism habitually, but it affects nothing in the long or short term.
Sexism is an exceedingly petty concern, especially in comparison to Real Problems like when other kitty cats step over your imaginary xenophobe piss lines. Men being sexist doesn’t actually negatively affect anyone.
It’s okay when men do not apologize for being sexist, or even realize that they are being sexist; they can still be, from a narrative perspective, perfect heroes. Hell, they can even be actual Christ figures. (Because note that it’s Firestar of all characters who uses the default ‘he’ first.)
The women who resist sexism are not very pleasant women anyway. (Because note that it’s Millie, the shrewish, overprotective mother, who gets this line, and not a molly the narrative has deemed as sweet and kind and feminine like Leafpool or Poppyfrost or somebody.)
So in short, they ruin their own worldbuilding, make one of the more tired The Doctor Was His Mother-level feminist jokes ever made, and force you to think about how sexist they are… all for the sake of being even more sexist. But it’s under a veneer of Hashtag Girl Power, so it flies under the radar and even gets presented as a feminist argument.
I would literally prefer them not to acknowledge the misogyny at all.
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