Perhaps there are differences where the majority of men vs. the majority of women want to go, but that’s only a problem if it’s generalized to all men and/or all women.
FWIW, when I brought up gender, I wasn’t actually thinking “women are choosing to take a submissive position, and that’s bad”. I don’t think it’s bad if women choose that.
My thought was more along the lines of “Hmm, what is written here sounds eerily similar to how many women view romantic relationships, and coincidentally a lot of the people espousing the view are women, which provides further evidence that there is a romance subtext to this hero/sidekick dynamic.” I wasn’t making a value judgement concerning which gender played hero and which sidekick, just noticing that the subtext existed.
And then my second thought was “there may be something psychologically unhealthy about evaluating the quality of romantic attachments in light of how much a person can save the world”. I just don’t think “is this person smart, powerful, and knowledgeable enough to save the world” is an appropriate criteria for a relationship here.
Perhaps I should have not even mentioned gender and just said “this sounds like a romantic relationship”—that would have been sufficient to get the point across. Gender was only important insofar as it gave (correct or incorrect) clues about the motivations about people espousing the views.
I could fairly be accused of stereotyping, since if a bunch of men said “I wanna be a sidekick” I might not have picked up a romantic subtext. (But I think stereotypes are epistemically valid as clues, and although it is sometimes instrumentally better not to act on that information for the purpose of not perpetuating stereotypes I thought it was okay in this case).
FWIW, when I brought up gender, I wasn’t actually thinking “women are choosing to take a submissive position, and that’s bad”. I don’t think it’s bad if women choose that.
My thought was more along the lines of “Hmm, what is written here sounds eerily similar to how many women view romantic relationships, and coincidentally a lot of the people espousing the view are women, which provides further evidence that there is a romance subtext to this hero/sidekick dynamic.” I wasn’t making a value judgement concerning which gender played hero and which sidekick, just noticing that the subtext existed.
And then my second thought was “there may be something psychologically unhealthy about evaluating the quality of romantic attachments in light of how much a person can save the world”. I just don’t think “is this person smart, powerful, and knowledgeable enough to save the world” is an appropriate criteria for a relationship here.
Perhaps I should have not even mentioned gender and just said “this sounds like a romantic relationship”—that would have been sufficient to get the point across. Gender was only important insofar as it gave (correct or incorrect) clues about the motivations about people espousing the views.
I could fairly be accused of stereotyping, since if a bunch of men said “I wanna be a sidekick” I might not have picked up a romantic subtext. (But I think stereotypes are epistemically valid as clues, and although it is sometimes instrumentally better not to act on that information for the purpose of not perpetuating stereotypes I thought it was okay in this case).