Reply To: Gender in OUAT

So, essentially you’re all saying: instead of subverting existing gender stereotypes, as it promised to do, OUAT inverted them, giving the habitual female stereotype to men, and the habitual male stereotype to women, but doing nothing to challenge the underlying power dynamics. ? So as @RG is saying — it’s like the MRA’s pastiche of feminism that claims that feminists just hate men and think women are better (rather than, say, advocate for equal rights and access).

There is this interesting line in the movie The Intern in which the protagonist, a successful female entrepreneur, wonders if little girls being taken to work by their parents in the 80s and 90s made little boys feel left behind, which is why there seem to be so many men with Peter Pan syndrome (a real thing). I think she was suggesting that maybe women have been empowered too much so that men feel threatened. Yet, that dynamic raises the issue of why would promoting a strong sense of womanhood seem to threaten manhood somehow? It seems the world is full of heroic male characters, but not as many female ones. That is why OUAT in S1 felt like a breath of fresh air.

There is the example of Charming being the sword and Snow being the brains (although only until S2, after which Snow made some bad decisions). I actually don’t have any problem in the case where both parties are satisfied with that set up. There’s no “rule” that men have to have just as much, if not more, education or “power” than a woman. In fact, it might just work best for that couple. If Charming simply is not comfortable being a military strategist, because he grew up on a farm, then no big deal. That is why leaders have a general and a chief of staff. If Charming wants to let Snow make most of the political and diplomatic decisions because she was raised to be queen, then that totally works. I think it’s about finding that balance of power that works specifically for the couple in question. For example, one doesn’t have to go to college to be a good police officer; Charming is still rather capable of helping Emma be co-sheriff of  the town of SB.

I think the main issue with the show now isn’t that women have more power than men on the show, since it’s totally great if women want to have authority (e.g. as sheriff, mayor or queen). I think the main issue now is the terrible writing. With the possible exception of Rumple, who was shown to have complex motivation in the first three seasons, I think the men (and even the women now) all suffer from just being boring with irrelevant backstories — which seem like filler episodes. That wouldn’t be so bad if their episodes actually developed their characters in interesting, complex ways that didn’t contradict previously established events, rather than served no real purpose except take up time and create discontinuity. The same goes for most of the female characters’ backstories now, which just recycle things we already knew about them. Snow, Regina, and even Emma’s stories have all been told, and the writers keep changing and retconning what has already been told (hello baby-snatching Snow White)!