Monday Musing..."Real" Women in Fiction

So this issue came up again. Yeah, the women thing. The women in fiction thing in particular. And yeah, I've written about this before.

I'm not going to link to the post that prompted my musings in this particular case, because it feels sort of irrelevant, honestly. Suffice it to say, I read a comment on a message board that referenced "real women" as being women who get upset when they break a nail, and some people got upset about it, (I know, I know...someone got MAD on the internets...holy gods, what are the ODDS?).


This certainly isn't to bash or criticize any of those people either, they all made very valid points including some of the ones I'm going to make below about how impossible it is to talk about any type of woman being a "real" one, and how limiting that to old stereotypes probably is not such a great idea, overall, at least for most of us.

Anyway, this REALLY isn't about that particular person's comment, or what she might have meant by it, or the comments' relative merits vis a vis feminist discourse...or really anything remotely that deep or enlightening.

It more got me thinking about characters.

Specifically, it got me thinking about how friggin' HARD we make it, when it comes to writing female characters, and how much we try to pigeon-hole those characters into our conflicting impressions of what it means to be a woman/girl. It seems to me that this argument about fictional characters almost exactly reflects the arguments we have about women in real life, and it's just as reductive, and just as impossible to make mean anything real.

Personally, I find both ends of this spectrum exhausting.

Like, where would you put me, if I was a fictional character?

On the "strong" scale, I've been a martial artist and a ring fighter, I worked intense corporate jobs for over fifteen years, I have a master's degree, I traveled the world, lived abroad (alone in most cases), started my own business, stayed single when it would have been easier to get married. I'm generally a tough negotiator, I speak my mind more often than most, and I'm willing to go to the mat even when I'm in the unpopular position. I've also been in a number of life and death situations where I handled myself (reasonably) well. Well enough to still be alive, anyway.


On the "weak" side, I cry when my feelings get hurt, I've made an utter fool of myself over men, I've had temper tantrums and acted childish, I've been manipulative, petty, gossipy, and I've lied to make myself look good. I've been horribly afraid, including in the life and death situations mentioned above...I've also done incredibly dumb and dangerous things that nearly got me killed. I've thrown whiny fits about bad haircuts and clothes, I obsess on my weight (childishly) and now, increasingly, my age. I've been suckered in by charlatans and cults and con men (and women), and while in India I had a panic attack so severe that I drove my family nuts, positive my face was rotting off when there was absolutely nothing wrong with me

So what kind of character would I be in a book? Would I be a horrible example to femininity? Or some kind of superhero? More likely, I would be neither of those things, because often it feels that we aren't allowed to write characters like me, meaning how women actually are, because if we include too many of the tough things, then anything weak is considered "out of character" or "too stupid to live." And if we include too many of the weak things, then the tough things are either "too masculine" for some people, or "unrealistic."

Sound familiar? It's the lose-lose thing women I know have been facing all of their lives. Meaning what's "assertive" on a man is "bitchy" on a woman, what's "sexy" on a guy is "slutty" on a woman. Women need to be twice as smart and half as emotional to be viewed as equals on the same job as men...and on and on.

Now I'm increasingly seeing the flip side of that too, meaning what used to be considered "feminine" in the condescending, old school model, is increasingly seen as "Too Stupid to Live" or "weak" in characters depicted in current books.

In all cases––however we depict women in books––it seems that a lot of people need to make this into some kind of overarching message about women in general, rather than just a character with a bunch of flaws due to their place and time in history or whatever else, some of those flaws being gendered or related to how they think of themselves as female.

I mean, the truth is, we ARE women raised in a culture that encourages us to be conflicted about our roles, identities, appearances...our friggin' shoes and nails and whether we can cry at work when the male employees can throw temper tantrums when they're upset and no one will roll their eyes and say, "ah, men are just so EMOTIONAL, aren't they?"

I've never heard large groups of people freak out because a particular male character in a book "demeans men" or is horrible for even existing because aspects of that character depict stereotypes about masculinity that don't pertain to a lot of men. No one screams that a male character should never be petty, or childish, or overly concerned with their ego/manhood, since these are considered stereotypes of immature males and will make it seem like ALL MEN are that way.

Well, okay, some people do complain about depictions of men, but it's not very common, comparatively. Generally, the complaints I hear about male characters is that they're "unrealistic" because they are too much a female fantasy or whatever (a charge often levied against romance books)...or the Thelma and Louise thing, where a lot of the men depicted are jerks.

For the most part, however, it seems like men in books, just like men in real life, get to be individuals.

Women in books and other forms of fiction, however, (like most racial minorities and gays and a lot of other "not white mens," I would imagine) not only have to be interesting and compelling and relate-able characters, they are saddled with the additional burden of REPRESENTING ALL WOMEN OF ALL TIME EVER. If they don't do that correctly (i.e., according to certain people's standards), then naturally, they either are derided as "male characters in leather pants and eyeliner" or else they must be killed on the spot, since they are clearly "too stupid to live."

[Note: Related to the above, it also hit me that I've rarely heard male characters described as "TSTL" ("too stupid to live"), at least in the proportions that I hear female characters described this way.]

I mean, as writers, we use stereotypes, right? Some people read because they want to delve into the fantasy that stereotypes or tropes of various kinds provide: the alpha male, the sexy siren, the kick-ass woman in leather...or that hero's journey standby, the ordinary person who grows into someone formidable due to adversity or a magic ring or whatever else.

It also hit me that, despite all of the fury by some folks about Bella as a character in Twilight, she's not actually that different than some real-life teenagers I've come across. As it happens, she's not much like my niece, Maya, who's a champion gymnast and weight-lifter at the ripe old age of thirteen, and who's wanted to be a surgeon since she was about five years old. But she is like some teenaged girls I've known, including when I was a teenager myself.

I guess my concern is that we're making so many rules that we're getting in the way of letting our female characters fully develop as people...which means that we're over-thinking "types" instead of allowing them to be contradictory masses of vulnerabilities and small-mindedness and whatever else. It seems like a lot of writers either embrace those stereotypes wholesale, or else rebel against them wholesale. I find both ends problematic, because if we only give our female characters flaws that are strictly "gender neutral," A) we're kind of feeding the b.s. that these traits are "bad" which hearkens back to them being labeled "feminine" in the first place and B) we're creating unrealistic portrayals of women, since ignoring one's own gender status is more or less impossible in real life, at least if you live in the same world as the rest of us.

Even if our characters have transcended the society in which they live in a lot of ways (as extraordinary people/heroes are wont to do), I think to constantly label any perceived stereotypically feminine trait as "weak" is problematic in a whole other way, and one that won't necessarily send the right message to readers, either.

I guess I wish we could just forget all of that crap and just write PEOPLE.

I mean, one of the things I loved about the character Angel in Joss Whedon's show of the same name was how vain and petty he could be...and how cheap. It was hilarious to see this 200+ year old vampire chuck a cell phone in the trash because he couldn't figure out how to work his voice mail, and whine because people made fun of his hair.

I've ranted about the character of Ripley in the Aliens franchise before, and specifically in James Cameron's Aliens itself, but I still think she's a great example of a female character that isn't trying too hard to "act male" in order to be taken seriously. She's definitely not a gender-neutral character. In the longer version of the movie, she's depicted as a mother grieving her child, and that being a huge part of her emotional life at the time. Throughout all versions, she's also depicted as a person who's clearly afraid of the aliens, having anxiety attacks and nightmares around her experiences, and flat-out refusing to go out there at all, at first. That fear never really abates throughout the movie. She's very clearly afraid as she is going down to find Newt in the sub-basement of the complex at the end...and even her anger in the last fight scene is tempered more in "Damn it, I'm finally going to end this!" versus "snark-snark, I'm not afraid of you! Nyah! Nyah!"

So yeah, she's afraid, out of her mind with fear a lot of the time, but it doesn't paralyze her, and she manages to face those fears right up to the end...which to me made her a much more "real" character, and a much stronger one.

Bottom line for me is, I just want to be able to explore human struggles within ALL kinds of characters, without making some kind of statement about womanhood or whatever else. I guess I'm still yearning for the days when we all just get to be seen as individuals, and the fact that it's still not that way with fictional characters just reflects that we're still not quite there in real life.

I'm also a little tired of anything stereotypically "feminine" still being demeaned. Like crying (yes, men do cry), or admitting vulnerabilities or letting yourself trust or love people, even if it gets you hurt more often than the "badasses" who never risk letting anyone in. At this point, I think I'm a lot more tired of these qualities being seen as "weak" than I am of them being seen as "feminine." Our views of strong vs. weak just strike me as so incredibly superficial and juvenile at times.

That being said, I know some (most) of this is in reaction to years and years of screaming women running through the woods in high heels and complaining about their hair in the middle of a "the world is ending" crisis, so I totally get it.

I guess I'm just waiting for the day when most of our depictions of strength don't come in this somewhat two-dimensional packaging, when we can look deeper and show more nuanced versions of character where vulnerability ("feminine" or not) isn't immediately denounced as "weak."

Sometimes, too, I wonder if this shows a lot more about the fears and weaknesses of our own culture than most of us probably really want to think about...where compassion is increasingly seen as a sucker's game, and any outward show of vulnerability an invitation to attack.


Anyway, I clearly need more coffee...so I will leave you with that.

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