Is WomenAreWiser sexist?

A few months ago I corrected a large number of examples of Women Are Wiser that didn't quite match the mold of where they got used, and I checked the works for clarification. I highly doubt the creators of these intended it but everyone got offended when I did this.

I either took them out or changed them to Only Sane Woman or Straight Man cause it already got said in a not-so-sexist way, or because the gender wasn't relevant.

I understand my actions need to be discussed before I can act upon them and this is professional, but I don't have time change these back. This is only if I am required to put them back.

Women Are Wiser takes effect when a work portrays the female character(s) as being more levelheaded and sensible than the male character(s).

Only Sane Woman or Straight Man would imply that the female character in question is the only sensible character, and that both the male and female characters around her aren't as wise.

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Though when the story uses The Smurfette Principle, that distinction becomes muddy.

So, I'll need you to explain exactly why you think it's sexist before I can discuss with you. What about it's usage made you think it was incorrect or unintended?

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Just going to repeat some points I made on the ATT thread, since some people will read this who haven't read the thread.

• I looked at some of the examples of Women Are Wiser that surname moved to other tropes, and a lot of them were indeed misuse;

• Moving them to other tropes while leaving the text unchanged was not the right call, since a lot of them were also misuse for the tropes they were moved to. The right action was either to fix the text or delete it entirely, or if you didn't know the work well enough to make the call, bring it up for discussion.

• No-one "got offended". We just want the wiki to be accurate as to which tropes are present in which works.

Besides that, the real reason people got frustrated wasn't that we were completely opposed to your cleanup or whatever; we were opposed to you going and doing it with zero discussion or consensus, which is against the rules. Even if you were totally correct each time, it'd be an issue.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

To answer the OP's question moving past the drama, I assume that the reason the trope gained prominence to move past other sexist tropes. The joke being that women are smart is certainly better than the joke being that women are dumb, which can be unfortunately common (The Dumb Blonde, Brainless Beauty, Women Drivers, etc.)

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The trope comes from a positive place but is an issue when it's a default assumption that men can be a wide range of impulsive, energetic and flawed while women are just talking down to them. It's a constantly evolving trope, though, as before about the 80's a lot of female characters were easily grouped into The Ingenue, The Load, Hysterical Woman or Manic Pixie Dream Girl and the man has to juggle their eccentricities and/or mold them into something else. Women Are Wiser came as an attempt to carve a new character dynamic that gave them a strength rather than a collection of weaknesses. That's not to say realistic, complex female characters didn't exist (Lady Macbeth remains an iconic female archetype) but there are exceedingly few tropes that should be viewed as innately negative instead of one possible tool to use.

Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils!

I think the prevalence of the trope in comedy has a lot to do with the real life prejudice that women are less funny than men. Said prejudice leads to people not knowing how to write funny/silly women and thus end up defaulting to "the serious one" without noticing.

This isn't necessarily true for every comedy writer who uses this trope; I think in many cases writers just do it because they imitate common trends within the genre. That's how it goes with tropes.

Of course, this is specifically the case of comedy. I think there are multiple explications for the different uses of the trope across different genres and eras.

EDIT: Okay, after reading the ATT that sparked this I'm rather curious about why you decided to massively dewick the trope. While I do enjoy analyzing tropes, I feel like centering the discussion in "is it sexist or not" kinda distracts from the main question: Why did you do that?

Edited by UchuuFlamenco on May 8th 2024 at 10:19:45 AM

The impression I get is that the OP thought they were fixing misuse of the trope, which I wouldn't think would require discussion or consensus... the problem being that a) they were changing large numbers of examples, and if misuse rates are that high that should warrant a dedicated cleanup thread or TRS, or at minimum definition clarification to make sure it isn't you who has the definition wrong, and b) the tropes they were changing them to were also misuse, before even getting to whether and how many of the original examples were misuse at all.

Not sure how any of this relates to the trope being sexist, though, either as a whole or in how it's used on the wiki, but I haven't seen any of the examples in question.

I will explain what I did.

• I didn't change every example and some were fair, others were assumptions or tropers who assumed gender was a role as usually it's applied to the main page. I changed a chunk of these solely because they were blind assumptions or part of a crusade.
• I'm sorry you got scared or thought I was attacking the site, but I followed this topic for two years and took the opportunity to skim through each work it got applied to before the cleanup, noticed there were females who were flawed or dynamic like it's men, and I assumed you could correct it yourself. Nothing major, just a minimal edit.

Now, where does one go from here?

I you have reasons to believe that something about the trope has to be changed (redefined, renamed, disambiguated, merged with another trope, or cut completely ( though the latter is rarely applied to a trope with so many inbounds)), it's better to start with a Wick Check. Once it's done and there is an issue worth bringing to TRS, add your findings to the TRS Queue. Yes, it's a slow process, but you've said yourself you've been at it for two years. The queue moves faster than that

Edited by kundoo on May 9th 2024 at 2:30:15 AM

But I'd still like a more concrete explanation from you on what you think the problem is. It's sort of a necessity for discussion.

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Yeah, after reading the thread and ATT, I still don't get the problem is personally. Maybe you can explain how it is sexist? I don't get how it is?

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Surname, we've asked you about it several times now, and we still don't have any idea what you believe is the problem that you feel the need to correct. What do you believe is sexist about the trope to the degree that you need to "fix" it? The fact that we document it on this site at all? We've explained it to you several times that we are a wiki that documents tropes and trends; documenting how a work handles a trope is not an endorsement of it, nor does it warrant unilateral editing in a way that screws up how we handle tropes, namely by documenting things incorrectly. If you're so passionate about a cause against this trope, answering why should not be this vague.

Edited by number9robotic on May 9th 2024 at 3:29:37 AM

Thanks for playing King's Quest V!

I mean, I suppose you could argue that "women are smarter than men" is as much of an unfair stereotype as "women are lesser/weaker than men" (see the third paragraph in the trope's description).

The broader point here, of course, is that we're a website for documenting tropes; we don't throw them away just because we dislike them.

Edited by jandn2014 on May 9th 2024 at 7:34:22 AM

back lol

If it was sexist (I doubt it), it doesn't mean it isn't tropable, so the question is utterly irrelevant.

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EDIT: I'd also add the following:

Yeah, people might be sexist, and so some tropes are sexist (or racist, or homophobic, or ableist, or whatever). But that doesn't change they are tropes.

Edited by SamCurt on May 9th 2024 at 5:34:54 AM

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"(I) noticed there were females who were flawed or dynamic like it's (sic) men, and I assumed you could correct it yourself"

Alright, I think I'm beginning to understand what motivated you:

Do you believe that "Women Are Wiser = Female characters are Flat Characters with no flaws"?"

Based on your comment, I get the impression that this how you interpret the trope and it's what motivated you to get rid of "misuse". If that's the case, then when can discuss wherever that's a correct assumption about the trope or not.

Or was it a different reason?

Edited by UchuuFlamenco on May 9th 2024 at 5:40:48 AM

If we’re going by that example where being smart is the women in the show's defining and only trait, that’s not at all accurate.

I mean even take the page image from The Simpsons. Certainly most of the female characters in the show are smarter than the men, but generally The Simpsons' world is a World of Ham for either gender, and there’s a lot of jokes about how the women are Not So Above It All either.

Everybody loves the me! I’m a great athlete!

I know I personally don't enjoy the trope especially in comedies because it feels like a lot of the time, it makes the women boring and the "Stop Having Fun!" Guy while the men get to be fun and interesting, but that doesn't mean there aren't works that use the trope anyway. It is definitely tropeable and needs to be documented. I do agree that there's misuse though with some female characters being troped as this when they're functioning as the Only Sane Man or the Straight Man, when there are other female characters in the work who are comedic and weird and so it's not actually a pattern in the work itself.

Edited by DeathsApprentice on May 9th 2024 at 8:28:41 AM

Trust you? The only person I can trust is myself.

Personally, I think this trope is sexist (the description literally says that "it holds women to an impossible ideal and depicts men as naturally stupider"), but I fail to see the issue with that. TV Tropes catalogues and describes common trends in media, you're not obligated to like and agree with every single one of them. Just because a certain trend is problematic, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Whether or not this trope is being misused is completely separate issue

Edited by Andariel on May 10th 2024 at 12:23:31 PM

Since surname seems reluctant to explain his reasons and that has stalled the conversation as a result, I think it would be good to discuss what to do about the edits he did regarding the trope. Should we do something about it? Do we just let it pass?

I haven't looked at the edits, but if other people think they were unnecessary/incorrect have a mod revert them