Boris Johnson, who is a vocal leader of the campaign to leave the EU, gave a polarizing pro-Brexit speech. Now uploaded by the throwaway Pornhub account BrexitVote, the video has a ridiculous number of views.
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I’m increasingly convinced that the real problem with the “Mary Sue” trope has nothing to do with fiction as such.
If you look at the types of characters who are popularly decried as “Mary Sues”, it’s not strictly that they’re good at something, but that they’re good at something without justification. Any sphere of competence exhibited by a female character must explicitly be justified within the narrative as something she “should” be good at, in a way that satisfies some arbitrary threshold of plausibility, or else she’s a “Mary Sue”.
In short, female characters are assumed to be incompetent by default.
But then, isn’t that exactly how we treat women in real life? Excepting a few narrow spheres of “women’s interests”, ignorance and incompetence are treated as the default attributes of femininity pretty much across the board. A woman practically has to pull out a goddamn PhD to be credited with the same level of knowledge and skill in a given sphere that would be expected of any random man off the street, and sometimes even that won’t suffice.
Basically, the problem isn’t that female characters in media have to pass some special test in order for us to accept that they’re allowed to be good at something. The problem is that female characters in media have to pass exactly the same test that women in real life do.