User blog comment:Gundam Legilis/Political correctness in RWBY/@comment-9090085-20150305100531

It's funny you should mention the "You can have her" line from Dance Dance Infiltration, I had a fascinating experience in regards to that a few months ago.

Let me set the stage... I am male, and have a male friend who I hang out with some times; he has a girlfriend who can be a little clingy. One day, when I was thinking of calling my friend to come over, I decided to call his girlfriend first to see if they had anything planed(she often calls me if she can't find him). It turned out they didn't, and do you know what she told me?

"You can have him." The exact same wording. Even though we were both straight males who were just going to hang out.

Naturally I told her(and her boyfriend when we watched the episode) about the scene in question, lampshading that, despite how incredibly sexist it sounded on paper, it reflected how people really do talk about their significant other.

I kind of expected that, though; people on the internet tend to divorce content and context, particularly cultural context. I only found out about the kerfuffle from the the review of the episode I watched, and I reached the same conclusion that the reviewer made: that it wasn't intended to be sexist.

See, people tend to "write what they know"; it's the reason why there are many High School AU fanfics - because the fic writers are in high school. Similarly, when one writes relationships and conversations, they tend to be based off of the writers experiences or what they've absorbed from media(I'm especially guilty of the latter). Thus, I assumed that the phrasing was used because that was the wording the writers had most often heard in that context, and didn't consider how it could be taken as sexist.

Granted, even I didn't expect it to be borderline gender neutral.

That cultural bias, which even I displayed, is part of why this apparently "normal" phrase was jumped on: a reoccurring problem in human society is the tendency to treat people(particularly members of the opposite gender) as "objects" rather then "people": see arranged marriages; compare how ofter you hear "I'd do her"(female pronoun) or "I'd tap that"(neutral pronoun); and notice how often people are described in terms of physical traits instead of their personality.

Obviously this objectification happens most often to females, and that's because most of us come from male-dominated societies; which brings me to why people jumped on it: RWBY is rather openly "going against gender norms", and that means that viewers are looking at it with a certain degree of "awareness" that they simply don't apply to other works; unfortunately, the internet tends to combine that lack of context with an all-or-nothing mentality.

Thus, whenever any stereotypical trope shows up in RWBY, it's attacked. Not only is that unreasonable to begin with, it ignores that Remnant is not a female-dominated society, but a more gender-neutral one. As such, a male getting ahead is roughly as likely as a female getting ahead there.

In fact, if we take Weiss's comments on how "suitors" chase after her because of her name instead of who she is, it implies that even in this fairly gender-neutral society, objectification of the opposite gender is still an issue. That doesn't necessarily excuse what Neptune said, but it does make it much easier to swallow.

(I was going to rant about social media, but I think I'll save that for a blog post)