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Sexual Objectification of Male Characters and How it Impacts Women

Alright, this is something that has been on my mind for a while and I finally have the balls to write it down and make sure everyone can see it. This post is biased, and extremely emotional, as I am writing about my personal feelings on this subject. If there is any lack of clarification or incorrect use of a word/description, I will do my best to correct it.

Warning: Sexual abuse/assault/violence is mentioned.

So. I am a long time lurker on popular fan sites and platforms. So I have seen many of the nitty gritty, the truly toxic and beautiful, and utter sadism that people are capable of creating when it comes to characters we take a liking to. But the more recent stuff has really gotten under my skin, and I wanted to talk about it.

This has to do with two characters that have become extremely popular this year. Miguel O’Hara from Across the Spider-verse and Simon “Ghost” Riley from Call of Duty. I’ve seen depraved things happen when people like characters. I like these two for similar reasons. I find them attractive. Their stories are captivating. And the movie and game they take place in are some of my favorites. But the things I have seen being written about these two specifically make me very nauseous.

Both of these characters have become extremely popular on fan sites because of how sexually appealing they are. They are tall, muscular-built men with dark backstories and darker attitudes. And what infuriates me is the amount of sexual objectification is happening to them. Yes, they are fictional characters. Yes, they don’t exist. Therefore no harm is being done. Wrong.

I have been writing fan fiction for a long time, only a fraction of it actually posted publicly. And the thing about fan fiction that I take extreme pride in is the art of characterization. You are creating a story about a character that is not yours. They already existed, have their own lore and role within their story. So when one is writing fan fiction, I think its incredibly important to pay attention to the specific lore of the character. This helps you build on who they are and flesh them out as people. How would they react in this situation? What foods/drink do they like? What face would they make if you said this? What would they do if this specific thing happened to them? These are important questions you should know the answer to when writing your own material for any given character.

Yes, AUs exist for this reason, so that subversion of a character can take place to satisfy those that fantasize about a character that canonically would not play into their interests. That still still does not excuse some of the utter disrespect I have seen.

For the two specific characters above, I will summarize their VERY similar backstories. Both were heavily abused in their childhoods (by their fathers). Both have taken on an “anti-hero” role with a grisly attitude to accomplish good things, aka protecting the public/people they care about. Ghost was sexually assaulted, tortured, buried alive, and witnessed a close friend/colleague try to assault someone. Miguel was used and abused by his own company, leading to his abilities and hatred of his role as Spider-Man 2099. Horrible atrocities were committed to these men. And yet, I have seen nonstop fan fictions portraying these men as violent, perverted, sex-driven monsters for the satisfaction of readers. I think this is an affront to the very idea of fan fiction and an insult to these characters.

So with that said, I think it is absolutely disgusting how people have been writing the two characters above. And that is only the start of the problem. The over sexualization of male characters in media. For a long time, its was always female characters. People have spoken about the over-sexualization of women in media for years. And now with the internet at its height, male sexualization has also become extremely prominent, and yet I don’t see people raising enough concern about. Women have tried so hard to push back on male-centered media in order to protect themselves, with advertisements, games, movies, and entertainment media with female characters. The cliché roles of damsel-in-distress or female-warrior-love-interest to male main characters are still extremely prevalent.

And yet, it horrifies me that many women (and people in general) are now taking a lead in the sexualization of male characters in the near exact same way that men do. Only difference forms. Men sexualization through art: games, movies, p*rn, etc. Women do it through our own art, and especially writing. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with writing smut and p*rn. The horror lies in the characters being portrayed and the acts they are committing. Between these two characters, I have seen more violent smut fan fiction than I have seen actual love for the characters themselves. I have lurked through the fandoms centered around these two characters since they first started gaining popularity, and it disgusts me how many writers portray them.

This isn’t even the main issue. The biggest issue has to be how this is still pushing toxic male fantasy. R*pe. Sexual violence. Sexual abuse. Verbal abuse. Mental and emotional abuse. Non-consensual acts. The romanticization of sexual violence and depravity. The amount of viral videos I have seen of men openly displaying their belief that women enjoy stalking, sexual harassment/assault, and sexual abuse, and all because there is media of it being portrayed that way. P*rn has portrayed women as sexual objects for men for years, giving men the idea that any and every woman in the world would enjoy being a victim of these acts. And now, writers are doing the same thing here. They are portraying women/people being abused by these characters, and enjoying every second of it. This is not healthy. It is sickening. (This also applies to everyone, not just those who do not identify as female. Anyone is capable of being a victim of abuse).

This is a horrible double standard that has been created by people: That sexual harassment is bad when committed by someone we are not attracted to, BUT okay when committed by someone we are attracted by. STOP. Right now. Sexual harassment/abuse is bad no matter who commits it. And flirting does not equal harassment. Flirting is an open, two-way communication between two consenting people. Harassment is the continuous disregard for someone’s personal space/preferences through sexual/verbal/physical actions that the victim does not reciprocate.

Let me clarify that I am not shaming anyone for their personal sexual preferences and kinks. BDSM is not abuse when it is between two consenting adults. Violence-play is not abuse between two consensual adults. But when the media about certain characters is specifically tailored to indicate that such acts are everyone’s fantasy, it is not okay. What pisses me off is that it is always fit to characters who would most likely never agree to such things. Continuously portraying toxic, manipulative, and abusive behaviors as romantic and normal is extremely unhealthy and can warp the way people view healthy relationships.

After researching the background of Miguel and Ghost, I am one thousand percent sure that these two characters are not/would never do what they are portrayed as in these writings. Both men experienced horrible abuse, and are shown to strive to be better than the ones who abused them. I, for one, believe they would be the exact opposite as they are portrayed sexually. They would not be violent verbally or physically. They would not be abusive in any capacity. There could/would be toxic and manipulative tendencies that come from growing up in an abusive and stressful environment. But when one goes through such things, they are the opposite of this when they acknowledge their wish to be better. Both characters would most likely fear committed relationships, out of the fear that they could turn into the people who hurt them and hurt the ones they love. The fear of losing everything they care about all over again (both lost their families in tragic ways). PTSD would shape the way they interact with people, especially significant others.

I can vouch for this characterization on a personal level. The beauty of writing characters is being able to take their lore and apply it to real human qualities and experiences. I often use my own in my writing. My personal experiences with abuse and harassment are what drive me to write this post and speak out on this surge of romanticized violence, as well as for these characters. People who have survived these experiences and who strive to better themselves often acknowledge that it was not these experiences that define them. It is who we choose to become afterwards, and how much we allow it to affect us. While Miguel and Ghost are people who will continue to be haunted by their pasts, they strive to be better in their own ways, even if not everyone agrees. And the over-sexualization and violent portrayal of their characters in many fictions completely contradicts their canonical characters.

I am not putting creators who have done this on blast. I just urge many of you writers/artists to think about what it is you are creating and who you are portraying. Is your content curated by your audience? Is it curated specifically for you? Or is it for the character you are writing about? Maybe its everything and more. I just want you to be aware of what you are writing and how it may affect others as well as the characterization of said character.

I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface with vague explanations. So if anyone who sees this feels the same, and wants to add or feels like I missed something, please do. This needs to be talked about more.

This is mostly just soft world-building and a writing exercise (not that I’m much of a writer? But alas, what else to call this). But very HASO, so figured I’d share [:

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There were plenty of reasons it was assumed, by the general community if not officially, that a sentient predator species would never reach space. Several scientific minds argued that sentience was not possible in predators at all, though this is generally an idea rooted in ⧭ปΦ∸яism and has some troubling connotations, especially for species with scavenger roots like the Tumªolut and the Kkaრ೮ಊs. But in general, it was considered at best an improbability. Any erudite or academically minded individual could give you a reason. Predator species had not been found in the over 1,300 sentient species recorded in galactic history, suggesting it was statistically unlikely. Predator species only occurred on death worlds, and few species developed past infancy in such conditions. Individuals that had grown up from predator-laden planets would submit that predators were too instinctual to gain rational thought. They argued that a sentient predator would starve as it lost the cruelty necessary to hunt, or that no god would allow the gift of a mind to fall into the hands of a predator. Ecologists submitted that a sentient predator would not be able to survive: they would simply eat themselves to starvation. They would not have time to advance enough to set up truly sustainable food sources before they decimated their homes, and would subsequently never survive, or at least be stuck in a perpetually diminished state. The ∴።፨፨•, with their unique cultural appreciation of their homeworld and its other facets, occasionally disputed this idea. They themselves might be able to support a predator species on their otherwise peaceful planet, as they worked diligently to prevent the extinction of any species, even those bothersome to themselves. However, this was generally concluded to either be a cultural stance too rare to be statistically significant, too kind-hearted for a predator to develop, or too cultural for a predator-species to develop before it was too late.

The Media and Entertainment industries had their own perspective on the hypothetical. Naturally, the idea of a flesh-eating, shadow-stalking killer was too good to pass up, once introduced by the likes of popular Kkaრ೮ಊs myth and fable. And as scary as they were as threats of nature, they were tantalizingly terrifying when they became sentient villains. They also had the additional benefit of being unlike any known species on the market: there was little risk in ostracising an audience or, as was assumed, any future audience. Media outlets on the less scrupulous end cherished flashy articles that warned of hazy figures on newly explored planets. Even official GC sources occasionally indulged in calculating the chance that a predator species would be discovered on planets set to be explored next, with comically infinitesimal numbers listed beneath the statistics displaying the chance of another sentient species, life at all, or the presence of water or mercury. Doomsday cultists of various sects listed the discovery of a sentient predator (an event commonly titled as ‘The Birth of the Weapon’) in their timeline to the end of known existence, claiming that such a species would herald, or bring about, the end times.

All of these sources provided the space for people to set aside suspicion and fear and truly hypothesize what such a group would look like, however. The visages they drew were wicked. The hulking, camouflaged behemoths of “Coldest Ice”, the slithering, silent shades in Buer-Mak’s various sculptural works, the clawed, voracious maws illustrated in Kk⇟ꜿ Illustrated’s conspiracy surrounding a supposed super-predator underneath the ℋi⤕lei colony. It would be, with strange accuracy, the literary works of Juarl Mೊ who came closest. Mೊ’s works took a clever spin on the Predator Villain in his series “The Remarkable and Solitary Survival of L.C. Tanne”. Mೊ portrays a sentient predator not as a physically imposing figure, but one of remarkable skill and endurance. An enemy that was nearly impossible to kill, and infinitely motivated. The unnamed villain of Mೊ’s story captured the fears of a small cult following, but did not become an archetype for new sensationalized stories. So, when that fateful discovery was made in the 1st quarter of 3409 GCY, it was to the delight of those few who had unexpectedly out-predicted the intellectuals of our time, and the horror and trepidation of all.

[Excerpt from “Sentient Predators: The Entrance of Humanity to the Galactic Stage” by Gaamorrnnck’ luuoi, transcribed from audio recording by Tamurӕck Passei, Translated into Terran common English by Automatic Translator ver. 1309]

About to make myself cry in class from a scene I made up in my head, more at 8

i dont fucking know

I hate when no one is around to appreciate that I not only look like a goddess, I feel like one too.

We should be fine as long as we do not reblog bread.

“Hi.”

Cause that was the only thing you could say. Really, you didn’t have a right to say anything. But you needed to. You needed to be here, back in this empty world again. “I know it’s been a... a really long time. You’re probably really angry. I don’t blame you. But I’m here now. I want to do something...I want-“

You want to help?

The sharp chill of the words made you shiver. But it didn’t surprise you. Why should it?

You want to do something...now?

Every emotion in those words is what started the tears. The accusation. The betrayal. The disgust. The despair. Nothing but the emotions of a person long forgotten and left to die. The person you once were.

“I’m sorry-“

You’re SORRY?

Black dust and curtains of dark matter whirled to life around you. You felt the anger in the sudden action. The hurt.

Why have you decided to come back? You left me for them. You abandoned me. You chose to become something you weren’t for them. And you dare to show your face to me again? Wanting to HELP?

The darkness suddenly lashed out and you went flying across the great, empty expanse. Your head hit the ground hard, but you felt nothing. Nothing could be felt in this place. That was the point.

The black winds swirled around you once again, striking wildly, unable and unwilling to stop. The fury within uncontainable.

“Please...” You began.

No.

They made themselves known, a black figure with glowing eyes appearing from the dark storm like a car appearing from a fog. Eyes that were dimmer than you remembered. Much dimmer.

Do not beg for mercy. You know how pathetic it is.

“Yea,” you coughed. “But I wasn’t.” The figure tilted its head.

Then you saw it. The light.

The light in their chest, trapped behind a thousand dark chains. It was barely flickering. The chains were cracked in some places, some were simply hanging from being broken long ago. But many were brand new. Shiny, harsh, and black as the darkness that was you.

“I’m sorry I left.” And that was it. That was all you said. All you could do as you lay there, weak and pathetic in front of the shadow that was once you. The real you. The person you forsook to please the ones you thought were more important than yourself.

The tears came down harder.

“I’m sorry.” Your voice wobbled. “I will never forgive myself for leaving you.”

You began to lift yourself to your feet.

“I will never forgive myself for thinking that I needed others’s approval to be whole.”

The figure began to back away.

“And I will never forget what makes me happy.” You stopped in front of them, shaking and humble, their eyes wide.

What makes you happy?

“Being you.”

...

“Being...

Being me.

Slowly. So slowly, the chains began to shake.

And began to break.

Another thing I hate:

When you fuck up and people try to tell you didn’t.

Because I very obviously fucked up.

Like BIG TIME fucked up.

In front of 30+ people.

And they still have the audacity to tell you “you didn’t do bad” or “no one could tell”.

I just want someone to look me in the eye and say “yea, you fucked up. That was absolute shit. But you’re gonna kill it next time. So when you’re done crying, let’s go get waffle cones.”

I just really need some honest, passive aggressive support.

reblog if youre an idiot. reblog if youre just a fucking fool.

I don’t know if I’m mentally sick.

I just know that I’m really done with my emotional bullshit.