Boys do it, but girls don't: Or, double standards in a certain popular scenario (Multifandom)

Something of an irritation which occured to me during my recent Alias watching, but relates to a lot of other fandoms as well, is this: the coy playing around with prostitution scenarios in the case of female characters, while always keeping a failsafe deus (or dea) ex machina et hand. And the double standard for male characters. When Jack accused Elsa Kaplan (and through her Irina) of "prostituting" herself, he meant that her activities as a spy included having sex. Now, in the "real" world, we had actually a lot of male East German spies (the so-called "Romeos") who did just that to a lot of female government employees. Even in the fictional template for the Alias world, the James Bond books and movies, you have good old James having sex quite often not just because the hormones say so, but as a method of getting something out of the girls in question. "Kiss the girl, get the key" is how this gets described in the DS9 Bond parody, Our Man Bashir. But of course if it's a male spy sleeping with a female, the word "prostitution" gets never used, and depending on just how sexist the scenario is, he even manages to convince the woman in question to switch sides by his manly charms.

Meanwhile, "good" female spies of course don't have sex as a part of their profession. The scene with Sydney in S/M get-up is funny, and I laughed at the "what was wrong with the black one?!?" as much as anyone, but it epitomizes what I'm talking about. Because Jennifer Garner is agreeable to look at, the producers will put Syd in a couple of situations per season where she's posing as picking someone up, and/or as a call girl. But she never has to deliver more than a kiss. Which is a long tradition of how these things are handled, all type of shows. Take a completely different tv series like Twin Peaks. Audrey Horne, trying to help Agent Cooper whom she has a crush on with his investigation, ends up posing as a prostitute in a brothel. Lynch goes as far as having a masked (and hence presumably unrecognisable) Audrey being presented to her own father. But of course Audrey manages to escape/ be rescued before anything happens. She never actually has to have sex with anyone to maintain her cover. Audrey might be sultry and flirty etc., but she's still essentially coded as a good girl, and good girls don't have to do this in tv land. Or take the episode from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which Kira Nerys takes a little trip through time to find out the truth about her mother and Dukat. Kira, for a while, is also forced to pose as a prostitute. But does she have to do so much as to kiss a single man? Nah. The Cardassian she got assigned to conveniently passes out from drink.

All of this doesn't mean I would necessarily have wanted to see Sydney Bristow have sex with Stooge of the Week X, Audrey with her father, or Kira with Random Cardassian Y. But I think the producers wanted to have their cake and eat it - present the "good girls" in voyeuristically tiltalating scenarios - without ever compromising the standard for sexual virtue tv sets for said good girls. But not for good guys. In another DS9 episode, Ben Sisko takes a trip to the Mirrorverse and has to pose as his morally ambiguous alter ego. In the course of his mission, he has sex with Mirror!Dax and Mirror!Kira, and we're not supposed to feel this compromised him in any way. (Actually, the expected reaction was probably pretty much the one these scenario got - lucky Sisko, to have sex with the two gorgeous women under his command but not really because they're the evil alter egos, and the real ones will never find out.) For some reason, I can't quite imagine a Mirrorverse episode in which Kira, posing as the Intendant, has sex with, say, Mirror!Dukat, Mirror!Sisko, and Mirror!Dax to maintain her cover. Something would have intervened to spare her the necessity.

There is a fundamental dishonesty here, as well as the disturbing echo of the old "good girls don't get raped" maxim, that I find distasteful.

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And while I'm being cranky - last night I wrote a lengthy reply for Londo's recent theatrical_muse challenge (the best 24 hours in his life) but couldn't post it as lj told me his journal was on read-only mode. This morning, it still was, until about an hour or so ago. Imagine me ranting a lot at a silent computer screen in between!

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In a more joyful mode: Thanks to whomever nominated my Rygel story and the Obi-Wan meets Scorpius one for the Sparkies. I feel deeply honored!