Gender Ratios in City of Heroes

No they're not. It's true that there are plenty of dump, simple guys, but it's not like there aren't plenty of shallow, stupid women out there, and not a whole lot less, either. There is a little pitfall when reviewing this perception, in that men remember interesting women more easily than we remember interesting men, and that women in fiction have generally been regarded differently from men, both positively and negatively. Even credible authors who try to get away from the notion that women are simple housewives whose only purpose in an action fiction is to be kidnapped and rescued, still end up treating them differently in the opposite direction.

There is this phenomenon that a woman in an otherwise all-man team will be generally smarter, cooler, more complicated and sometimes even stronger than her male counterparts, as an overcompensation used to avoid treading close to representing her in a sexist light. Which, admirable as that may be as a practice, creates the feeling that women are always smarter and more complicated than the male characters, who in turn are usually either too macho or too stupid. Because making a female character is, for many authors, a little bit more of an "important" event than creating a male one, these females tend to get SOMETHING remarkable and memorable about them, whereas men can easily be painted in as the jackass of the group with no redeeming qualities whatsoever and no-one bats an eye.

A well-written eccentric woman can indeed be endearing. But then, so can a well-written eccentric man, only those tend to receive less care in their eccentricity, making them just plain weird a lot of the time. But it's not at all difficult to make female characters at all weird and creepy, and all one has to do is have even just a cursory look through a few anime and manga works. Granted, the genre has a few weird guys, but when it comes to weird girls, they threw out the rule book, and the weirdness is just off the wall in places. Sometimes it's endearing, and at other times it's just plain wacked out.

And again, this comes down to how women are viewed differently from men by the actual audience, at least the male section of that audience. A woman, especially if she is pretty, can be endearing in the absence of just about anything else, whereas a man can pretty much almost never be endearing at all. So a man has to be made an interesting character on his own merits, or he falls short. A woman can often be made an interesting character solely based on her being a woman, but with a quirk. This isn't necessarily a difference between men and women, but rather a difference between how easy it is to write for men and women.

Now, I want to end on a small note. All of the above isn't to say men are better than women or women aren't good enough or anything else of this sort. What I want to say is that this notion that women are always better, smarter, cooler and more interesting is just as manufactured as the notion that they're weaker than men and always need to be rescued. It's a prejudice in either instance, and while it CAN produce interesting stories as a once-off, as a general principle it just limits characters down from what they could be. They are all people, and they can all be interesting as people, before we evaluate how interesting they are as men and women. It's down to how they are written, not what they are written as.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.