inmyriadbits (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
inmyriadbits) wrote2010-01-24 06:30 pm
inmyriadbits) wrote2010-01-24 06:30 pm
whoops that got long and thinky about women and stories. Plus meme
I've been seeing a lot of posts and discussions recently about writing female characters in fanfic. There are too many for me to address specifically, but it seems to boil down to what it always tends to in fandom: there are a lot of people out there, each with their own backgrounds and reasons and hang-ups and issues. Oh, fandom. And as usual, my reaction tends to be: whatever you do, it's usually a bad idea to let fear or anticipation of other people's opinions control your actions, especially when those opinions prevent you from creating things. Others' opinions expanding your worldview and inspiring you to take action is one thing; being guilted or pressured into action is something else.
To be less abstract, I vividly remember a conversation I once had with a professional writer I know, who will remain anonymous. She was also a fanfic writer, and I had many a discussion with her about awesome female characters (in fact, I think the first time I saw her in person was at a Tamora Pierce book signing). But...she only ever wrote male main characters, and rarely wrote female secondary characters, both in her fic and her original work. I asked her about it once, and she explained that she got incredibly anxious; she loved female characters so much, plus she felt like female characters are judged much more harshly by audiences, so the prospect of writing women into her stories stressed her right the fuck out.
Granted, this particular friend was a bit of an anxiety bomb, but I've seen the same feeling in other people. And I get the impression that a lot of the people who get the most defensive about not writing women are covering for a similar guilt, and are reacting against a sense of being pressured about something that doesn't make them comfortable.
Of course, this is all conjecture, because I don't feel any anxiety about writing women. I haven't written all that much fic, but I was looking over what I have and going "okay: female-POV, established het; male POV, gen interaction with woman; male POV, slash, no women unless you count the car or the phone call; male POV, het, female main character; male POV, gen, OFC; female POV, het/gen; female POV, gen; female POV, gen/het/slash." Even split between fe/male POV, mixed bag of gen, het, and slash, and female characters in all of them. And I didn't even think about it, because why wouldn't I write women?
You know, I used to really not like McShep fic. I mean, I got over that, but seriously – it used to really bother me, because IMO, Stargate fandom is all about the team. The team is the emotional as well as logistical center of the main characters' lives, and it just drove me nuts that writers would have all these scenes with McKay and Sheppard and none with them interacting with Teyla or Ronon. It didn't feel right, or true (although I suppose it was overlapped somewhat by my annoyance with the kind of people who get a significant other and promptly start ignoring all their friends, but more justified because these people were coworkers as well as friends). It's an awkward analogy, but this is sort of how I feel about writing women. It's not a political statement or a PC gesture or a moral obligation, it's an issue of quality; when you have situation with women, ignoring those characters' presence, POV, opinions, and actions makes no sense. I mean, maybe if you're writing the POV of a character, say from Mad Men, who is actually sexist and ignores or dismisses women. But John Sheppard not noticing Teyla or seriously caring about her opinion? It makes me wonder what on earth the writers are thinking. The only answer I can come up with are (IMO) stupid ones; either they feel like they have to choose, or, much like the aforementioned couples-who-drop-their-friends, they get tunnel vision and forget. Which, IMO, is a mistake.
This entirely aside from the fact that it's fun to write or read about someone like Teyla or Joan Holloway, and you're totally missing out if you're not.
It's not just in fanfic, either. I thought about writing about the representation of women in film for my thesis (before deciding that was a Very Bad Idea for a 20-page paper and a stressed out college student) through a statistical lens. There's this post, on the xkcd blog of all places, that really kind of smacks you in the face with math to demonstrate how few Hollywood films feature female heroes. I can understand this in the case of something like, say, Generation Kill, where the entire cast of Recon Marines are very realistically only men, but when your only female leads are mothers/daughters and horror film victims, there's a problem. My screenwriting professor, who knew stories and was a great professor despite being kinda problematic in certain ways, used to talk about how the "women's films" and the powerful female stars of classical Hollywood dried up after women's lib in the 1960s. His personal theory was that people became afraid of writing women, because no matter what you did, someone would criticize you. I think there's some validity to that, although I also think his conclusion was simplistic. My thesis adviser, when I discussed this paper idea with him, had a more balanced view: freeing women from simple, acceptable cultural roles meant that there weren't easy answers anymore. Hollywood is all about the easy answer; the many adaptations and sequels released recently are a good example of this tendency. Take away their familiar formulas and types, and they can't deal. Anyway, neither of these answers were necessarily satisfactory for me; I'd still like to properly research the topic someday, and also look into the state of women in the film industry (see this and this about female directors in Hollywood); I think the cultural perceptions rather than actual statistics are affecting things, and that's just dumb, but no one that I've seen has ever looked at the numbers in order to craft a good counter-argument. Regardless, the point remains: perception and assumption are keeping people from writing realistic or balanced narratives, and that bothers me.
I wandered a bit there, but my point is this: IMO, there's no good reason not to write female characters, and lots of valid reasons in favor of the practice. If you do look at yourself and see that you don't, I think it's worth your while to try to figure out why. If you look around and see others not writing, try to understand that, too, rather than attacking them for it. I think stopping at "because it's fun to write men" isn't good enough. If it's "because it's fun to write these men," that works better for me – but there are very likely women out there with similar characteristics, so what's stopping you from writing them, too? These are questions well worth asking of yourself. What you do with the answers is your business (although please don't let fear or self-consciousness decide your actions), but at least try to understand it rather than being blithely righteous about doing it the way you always have.
Anyway, enough with the srs bzns meta portion, and on to the fun part! It's one thing to talk the blah blah blah, but allow me to demonstrate via fun with memes:
Give me a female character and a prompt (feel free to use any number of meme formats; give me someone you'd like her to have a conversation with, give me a pairing, a theme, a mood word, a situation – whatever you like!) and I will write you commentfic. Feel free to tell me a little something about why you like said character in your comment, if you wish, and I will try to tailor my ficlet accordingly. ♥
To be less abstract, I vividly remember a conversation I once had with a professional writer I know, who will remain anonymous. She was also a fanfic writer, and I had many a discussion with her about awesome female characters (in fact, I think the first time I saw her in person was at a Tamora Pierce book signing). But...she only ever wrote male main characters, and rarely wrote female secondary characters, both in her fic and her original work. I asked her about it once, and she explained that she got incredibly anxious; she loved female characters so much, plus she felt like female characters are judged much more harshly by audiences, so the prospect of writing women into her stories stressed her right the fuck out.
Granted, this particular friend was a bit of an anxiety bomb, but I've seen the same feeling in other people. And I get the impression that a lot of the people who get the most defensive about not writing women are covering for a similar guilt, and are reacting against a sense of being pressured about something that doesn't make them comfortable.
Of course, this is all conjecture, because I don't feel any anxiety about writing women. I haven't written all that much fic, but I was looking over what I have and going "okay: female-POV, established het; male POV, gen interaction with woman; male POV, slash, no women unless you count the car or the phone call; male POV, het, female main character; male POV, gen, OFC; female POV, het/gen; female POV, gen; female POV, gen/het/slash." Even split between fe/male POV, mixed bag of gen, het, and slash, and female characters in all of them. And I didn't even think about it, because why wouldn't I write women?
You know, I used to really not like McShep fic. I mean, I got over that, but seriously – it used to really bother me, because IMO, Stargate fandom is all about the team. The team is the emotional as well as logistical center of the main characters' lives, and it just drove me nuts that writers would have all these scenes with McKay and Sheppard and none with them interacting with Teyla or Ronon. It didn't feel right, or true (although I suppose it was overlapped somewhat by my annoyance with the kind of people who get a significant other and promptly start ignoring all their friends, but more justified because these people were coworkers as well as friends). It's an awkward analogy, but this is sort of how I feel about writing women. It's not a political statement or a PC gesture or a moral obligation, it's an issue of quality; when you have situation with women, ignoring those characters' presence, POV, opinions, and actions makes no sense. I mean, maybe if you're writing the POV of a character, say from Mad Men, who is actually sexist and ignores or dismisses women. But John Sheppard not noticing Teyla or seriously caring about her opinion? It makes me wonder what on earth the writers are thinking. The only answer I can come up with are (IMO) stupid ones; either they feel like they have to choose, or, much like the aforementioned couples-who-drop-their-friends, they get tunnel vision and forget. Which, IMO, is a mistake.
This entirely aside from the fact that it's fun to write or read about someone like Teyla or Joan Holloway, and you're totally missing out if you're not.
It's not just in fanfic, either. I thought about writing about the representation of women in film for my thesis (before deciding that was a Very Bad Idea for a 20-page paper and a stressed out college student) through a statistical lens. There's this post, on the xkcd blog of all places, that really kind of smacks you in the face with math to demonstrate how few Hollywood films feature female heroes. I can understand this in the case of something like, say, Generation Kill, where the entire cast of Recon Marines are very realistically only men, but when your only female leads are mothers/daughters and horror film victims, there's a problem. My screenwriting professor, who knew stories and was a great professor despite being kinda problematic in certain ways, used to talk about how the "women's films" and the powerful female stars of classical Hollywood dried up after women's lib in the 1960s. His personal theory was that people became afraid of writing women, because no matter what you did, someone would criticize you. I think there's some validity to that, although I also think his conclusion was simplistic. My thesis adviser, when I discussed this paper idea with him, had a more balanced view: freeing women from simple, acceptable cultural roles meant that there weren't easy answers anymore. Hollywood is all about the easy answer; the many adaptations and sequels released recently are a good example of this tendency. Take away their familiar formulas and types, and they can't deal. Anyway, neither of these answers were necessarily satisfactory for me; I'd still like to properly research the topic someday, and also look into the state of women in the film industry (see this and this about female directors in Hollywood); I think the cultural perceptions rather than actual statistics are affecting things, and that's just dumb, but no one that I've seen has ever looked at the numbers in order to craft a good counter-argument. Regardless, the point remains: perception and assumption are keeping people from writing realistic or balanced narratives, and that bothers me.
I wandered a bit there, but my point is this: IMO, there's no good reason not to write female characters, and lots of valid reasons in favor of the practice. If you do look at yourself and see that you don't, I think it's worth your while to try to figure out why. If you look around and see others not writing, try to understand that, too, rather than attacking them for it. I think stopping at "because it's fun to write men" isn't good enough. If it's "because it's fun to write these men," that works better for me – but there are very likely women out there with similar characteristics, so what's stopping you from writing them, too? These are questions well worth asking of yourself. What you do with the answers is your business (although please don't let fear or self-consciousness decide your actions), but at least try to understand it rather than being blithely righteous about doing it the way you always have.
Anyway, enough with the srs bzns meta portion, and on to the fun part! It's one thing to talk the blah blah blah, but allow me to demonstrate via fun with memes:
Give me a female character and a prompt (feel free to use any number of meme formats; give me someone you'd like her to have a conversation with, give me a pairing, a theme, a mood word, a situation – whatever you like!) and I will write you commentfic. Feel free to tell me a little something about why you like said character in your comment, if you wish, and I will try to tailor my ficlet accordingly. ♥
no subject
Was that McKenna? Because it sounds an awful lot like him.
I think a large part of Hollywood not having female leads is that Hollywood knows that women will see movies about male characters, but they don't expect men to see movies about female characters. I mean, yes, men will see, say, Kill Bill, but movies that aren't a hot chick killing a lot of people? And I don't even mean chick flicks, I mean, like...oh, say, the new Harrison Ford/Brendan Fraser movie. If those characters were female, it would be marketed to women only, instead of to everyone. Which is of course sexist of Hollywood, but also, hasn't it been proven that women go to the movies more and spend more on that sort of thing? Oh, Hollywood. You're so good at shooting yourself in the foot. *eyeroll*
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I think there's an element of that, definitely; it's also that male viewers of the prized teenage/YA demographic are more valued, because someone concluded that they were more likely to spend money in a study, and then everything dominoed after. But yes, essentially; my point is that Hollywood operates on this bizarre framework of assumptions and presumptions based on very thin evidence. Which is why everyone made such a fuss about the Twilight films, because they were drawing out female viewership in droves, and suddenly the suits were all "Oh, hey! The little womenfolk spend money too!" instead of realizing that maybe they would've spent money earlier too, had they been given something to spend it on. *headdesk*
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Yeah, Hollywood loves to operate on conventional wisdom that isn't actually true. Because, you know. THINKING is HAAAAARD.
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OH MCKENNA, NEVER CHANGE. I guess.
Well, I pretty sure there's no danger of him EVER changing, so I suppose you needn't to worry too much about forming an opinion of that possibility. ;)
Yeah, Hollywood loves to operate on conventional wisdom that isn't actually true.
Well put. And sadly true. Of course, then you also get the people who react to this by thinking too much and ruining their stories in completely the opposite way. *cough* I have a few of my fellow film majors in mind...
no subject
But I think fandom is entrenched, and caught in biases and ideas about female characters and double standards and I guess it does make sense (in any situation) to ask yourself why. If that's not where people feel inspired, I don't think they're full of fail or automatically girl-hating.
(And yes, do it because they're fascinating and you want to and you realize you have a story to tell, not because you feel *obligated*)
I don't suppose you're familiar with Friday Night Lights? I want Ellen Harvelle and Tami Taylor to run into each other, drink a few beers, and be awesome together.
no subject
But I think fandom is entrenched, and caught in biases and ideas about female characters and double standards and I guess it does make sense (in any situation) to ask yourself why.
As I see it, the only way to get un-entrenched is to question the status quo, and then act on what you find faulty in the situation. I think a lot of the "multivitamin"-type people (from your post) are going about it the wrong way because it's external impetus rather than internal; someone has told them that not writing women is wrong, and they need to fix it, so they've gone about addressing the symptoms (i.e., generate more fannish product) rather than the root cause (i.e., really sitting down and asking themselves "why is there such an imbalance in gender portrayal in my writing?"). Ideally, the conclusions they reach and the actions they then take will fix the problem; in the case of my anxious friend, she was only halfway there, having at least figured out her own issues with writing women. But she has never actually confronted to her own anxieties, which makes me rather enormously sad, because damn, what she could do without those hang-ups.
Sometimes, the way fandom argues about issues drives me mad. If someone has a legitimate opinion I disagree with, I will cheerfully discuss it with them, because I've found that talking to people with unique opinions refines my own ideas. I generally don't think the worse of such people for their opinions (except in certain rare cases), despite not agreeing with them. And I've never found that attacking someone's character is a particularly effective way to either prove my point or change their mind. Fandom discussions, however, often devolve from ideological debates into personal attacks. It's so ineffectual.
I sometimes also get annoyed even with the ones who don't fall into that trap (most of my friends are of this reasonable sort), however, because they generally just stand apart and express their disgust at the discussion in general or mock it rather than suggest a solution, or improvements to the process.
So basically I end up saying -- as in this post -- "for fuck's sake, people, stop just reacting against others' opinions (real or perceived), think about what you're doing, please undertake that analysis seriously, and then do something about it." And then hoping the lack of comments means that people agree rather than that it was tl;dr. :)
I don't suppose you're familiar with Friday Night Lights? I want Ellen Harvelle and Tami Taylor to run into each other, drink a few beers, and be awesome together.
Sadly, I have not. :( I hear great things about the show, and I really should see it, considering they produce the show here... It's on my (very long) list!
What can I write you instead?
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But then again, I write a lot of gen, and gen doesn't exist. :D
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Wait, what's gen? ;)
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Exactly
(That's a joke that goes back to when I was in Prison Break fandom.)
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Then again, porn is awfully fun. And gen, by its very nature, is lacking that. :D
(also, icon! I adore Criminal Minds.)
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(I adore Criminal Minds as well, though I haven't kept up with this latest season. Too many other good shows.)
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Noooo, don't stop fall behind on CM! It is the BEST. They had an awesomely creepy episode recently. It was AMAZING.
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But it's so hard to keep up with Fringe and White Collar and The Vampire Diaries and Warehouse 13 and NCIS:LA.
(I'll probably end up buying the dvds and binging on them at some point.
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Found the gen porn (actually,
He Leaned Against the Wall and Breathed (http://mooyoo.livejournal.com/48659.html) by
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