I’ve seen a couple posts over the past few days trying to answer the question, is X work of fiction more feminist than Y work of fiction? Which really made it clear to me why feminist* media criticism is such a disaster.
[*my larger point applies to other types of media representation, but this is an issue I see most directly with explicitly feminist-labelled critics.]
Most of the feminist media criticism I’ve seen is all about dividing fiction into categories of “pure” and “impure”. Is this work Objectively Good For Women? Compare to this checklist of Optimal Female Character Tropes and find out! Hence, the bitter debates about Game of Thrones or Age of Ultron: Both have their good points and their bad points (although I felt AoU was pretty innocuous from a feminist perspective and I’m not sure what all the fuss is about), but that makes them hard to systematize. “I dislike this specific aspect of GoT” isn’t controversial. “GoT is objectively good/bad for feminism” is.
And then you get questions like – should we portray worlds where misogyny and sexual violence are a regular fact of life, because that’s a reality for lots of women, or should we write escapist fantasy that gets away from all that? Should women in feminist works of fiction have stereotypically female weakness provided that they’re already well-rounded characters, or should they subvert those tropes even when they have some basis in reality? And the problem here is that the answer to these kinds of questions is, obviously, yes. Give us everything.
No book or movie or TV show can be all things to all people. Nor should it. Some women want to read about fantasy matriarchies, and others want to see characters with their life experiences portrayed in a positive light for once, even as they’re victimized, and some of us couldn’t care less about gender as an axis of representation and are perfectly happy playing in the corner with our unnecessarily complex world-building. There’s no point in asking if the approach one things takes is Objectively Best For Women. No such animal.
And every time you tear something down for being not feminist enough, even if it has real problems with the way it portrays women, you’re probably hurting someone who did find something meaningful and important in it.