I really do think it comes down to desensitization and a lack of learned sympathy. Imo it’s why cishetperisex white abled majority men tend to react so badly when the protagonist of a game or movie or whatever is a woman. I think when society more or less caters to you via media and representation you never have to learn to sympathize with people who don’t look like you, or at least not in the way marginalized people do. Black men and boys have to learn to see themselves in white ones, women in men, queer folks in straight, disabled in abled, we do not get catered to, so we learn to find ourselves in places we don’t exist and we learn fast. It sucks, and it never feels 100% natural, but we learn.
And yes, we all are supposed to learn to see ourselves in others by default, that’s an important part of being a person and also engaging with stories, I should be able to understand why my lesbian neighbor is upset that her amazon package got dumped on someone else’s porch even though I’m not a lesbian, and I feel like Clark Kent and I could talk about growing up in the middle of nowhere and find common ground even if I’m not a white male alien superhero but like, it’s different when you HAVE to do it ALL the time JUST to engage in media and feel represented and seen. And that’s what we do and we get really good at it because if we didn’t we’d never enjoy anything.
Quick obligatory disclaimer that plenty of men are perfectly capable of learning to do this, as well as everyone else, and do it all the time, this is not a natural state of white manhood this is something chosen that can be discarded–but your average white dude who grew up with all the media around him being about him just straight up does not have years of hard training in “seeing myself in the other” because he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to try to find himself, he’s Luke Skywalker, John Wick, Superman, he’s always seeing a reflection of himself.
So what happens when suddenly he’s looking in a mirror and sees someone else? He gets uncomfortable, angry, confused. Which at it’s core is understandable, this is a skill that you have to learn and it’s normal for your brain to respond with discomfort or anger when you don’t know how to do something, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to let it fester into resentment and bigotry and hate….which is what these dudes do. He can’t relate to this person, he doesn’t know how to look for things that are similar like where they grew up or shared interests, things that we look to when connecting with a character to relate to them enough to be invested in their story. And some are so bad at dealing with that discomfort they lose it at the thought of having to think that hard about relating to a story, get pissed that they’re being asked to consider that humans exist who aren’t like them and who also deserve to be in the spotlight sometimes, but I think at the core it’s insecurity born of a lack of a skill our society necessitates everyone but these men learn. They don’t know how to do this and they have no idea how to handle that.
That’s similar to the logic of the horror stuff, women and minorities spend so long learning to like horror despite us being the fucking bad guys and victims in everything, but I remember I thought of this originally after people got mad at the Charlie’s Angels remake having the biggest male character turn out to be a villain. These guys weren’t just mad that there wasn’t more men, they were mad that they were specifically being painted as the bad guy, and I was like…confused? At first, because like yeah dude that doesn’t actually say much about you as a person, sometimes the bad guy looks like you….and then I was like oh. Oh. The bad guy never looks like you, does he? And you don’t know what to do now that you’re looking at a character you’re supposed to hate and seeing yourself.
Because the other thing we as minorities have to learn to do is love the bad guys because WE’RE the bad guys. The torn queer kid who wants to be Aladdin but sees so many of his mannerisms in Jafar and has to just…deal with that. It’s like horror for me, I love horror, but I’m disabled and mentally ill. I am almost always the bad guy in horror. The face in the mirror is my own, and I like horror, so I and everyone else in the same place learns a delicate act of like, sympathizing and seeing yourself in the characters but also not and trying to root for the good guys who aren’t like you or just not doing that and rooting for the bad guys the whole time, like I’m not describing it well, but it’s hard to articulate despite being something again, almost all of us have to go through at some point.
And god I remember Ghostbusters 2016 having the bimbo be a himbo instead, dudes were SO fucking uncomfortable and I was just laughing because yeah wow that….that sure is just how some men write women!! And they do it all the time, and it’s really fucking stupid and sexist and weird especially seeing it come from a male character, but like dude fr me @ these men do you seriously have absolutely 0 tolerance for a depiction of a person who looks like you in a story being negative??? You literally never learned how to deal with that???
But they didn’t. They never had to. Because even when the bad guy looks like them there is always a good guy who does too. Charlie’s Angels and Jenifer’s Body and Ghostbusters make them uncomfortable and angry because the bad guys look like them and the good guys don’t. They have no tolerance for that discomfort, they are not desensitized to their only representation being the villain or the victim or the idiot, and they also seemingly have no idea how to not internalize the idea that the bad guy looking like you doesn’t mean the story is saying you are the bad guy.
I mean they do to the rest of us but for majority white men it doesn’t because:
I mean fuck half the horror movies out there explicitly just say “all mentally ill people are crazy dangerous murderers you should never trust” and I learned to live with that somehow while Charlie’s Angels just says “this one particular dude sucks” and it’s the end of the goddamn world to every white dude who suddenly forgets other people aren’t them. Almost funny if it wasn’t so infuriatingly immature and deeply bigoted.
It plays out in smaller ways, white people failing to see themselves in folks of color, skinny people refusing to humanize fat ones, hell it even plays out in adults refusing to attempt to relate to children, every axis has a side that is not asked to see themselves in the other as often and it leads to this disconnect and discomfort and anger and lashing out when you actually do get asked to do it. To learn to like a story even if the bad guy is wearing your face, to relate to a hero you know has nothing in common with you, seeing yourself in the other is not something asked of everyone, and not being able to do it messes you up.
I think that’s why it’s so uncomfortable for men to see themselves as the victims of women or as the bad guys, they never have to learn to be okay with being treated like shit by a narrative, or at LEAST just not being the main character, and they hate that.
But they’re just experiencing what the rest of us have been for all of human fucking history and we’re perhaps a bit too exhausted by it to humor it for long and just gotta give a firm
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