Fans and women characters, again (and again)

Check out this blog post by s.e. smith, which opens a discussion about why so man people "just don't like" female characters. Which may seem like old ground to some of you, but it lays the issue out so simply and well, and there are some good perspectives in the comments.

It appears the above post was inspired at least in part by this really great article about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the fact that Buffy's character is dismissed by many fans as "whiny". The article makes the (should be obvious, and yet somehow it isn't) point that if half the things that happened to Buffy happened to a male character, the fans would be filled with hugs and sympathy.

I find it telling the way that we are willing to hold Buffy to a different standard. She is a different sort of superhero than we are used to. She is young, and a woman, and was the longest superhero of her kind on the telly. But it just doesn’t seem that we are willing to give her the human space of emotion to hurt the way we do some of our other superheroes.

Why is that?

Yes, why is that? I wonder.