After Slate released an article talking about "House of Cards" character Claire Underwood as an exploration into feminism, Conor Friedersdorf replied in an article about the "moral barometer of feminists writers" even though Slate never held Claire to a high moral standard for feminism.
Friedersdorf lists Claire's various sins and crimes against other women: complicity with murder, getting a woman fired for no reason, and he concludes that, "Women need Claire as a feminist ally like a fish needs a wood-chopper."
According to Slate, there is a big difference between arguing that the show explored feminist themes and indulging "the impulse to celebrate Claire Underwood as a feminist, or to romanticize her Season Two persona."
"There is a tendency to talk about women's relationship to female characters in stories in the same way we talk about children who look to Big Bird for lessons in sharing," Slate reported.
There's a widespread assumption that women are looking to fiction for role models, the article also read. That's why there's all this back-and-forth about whether or not female characters should be "likeable," Slate reported.
Sometimes it is worse and the discourse becomes about "strong female characters," a phrase that usually denotes nothing more than a character who is supposed to model perseverance and courage for ladies assumed to be in endless need of "bucking up," according to Slate.
It would be nice if we could just get past these infantilizing assumptions about what women get out of fiction, the Slate author wrote in the argument.
"These characters entertain and their stories allow the audience to explore various themes and ideas beyond whether or not they're teaching us to be good people," according to Slate.
Fictional characters do come in different genders, but that shouldn't affect how we watch and relate to them, Slate reported.