What I really wanted to write about was women, though. Blimey, but science fiction and fantasy writers have a hard time depicting female characters. I don't think I'm being too controversial in saying that writers in these genres are very sensitive and alert to the fact that there has traditionally been a certain image problem with their field: twenty years ago SF and fantasy was very much seen as almost exclusively being the preserve of the unwashed male nerd. There has therefore been a strong push-back against this; it seems to me that many SF and fantasy writers are quite deliberately and self-consciously making an effort to appeal beyond the core unwashed male nerd audience (presumably also at the behest of publishers with an eye on expanding their market), and what this has come to mean is: more female characters depicted positively, doing positive things, and even (heaven forfend!) being the heroine of the whole thing.
All well and good - I have no problem with this. I am not a Men's Rights Activist or Gamer Gater or anything like that. I like women and find them interesting and valuable as human beings (especially when they're naked). My problem is not with the impulse, but with the way it is executed, and it is simply this: to many male SF and fantasy writers, having strong and positive female characters means having female characters who are indistinguishable from the male ones except for the fact that they are nominally of a different sex.
I am picking on Leviathan Wakes here not as a particularly egregious offender, but simply an example of this trend. None of the characters in it are convincing, but the female characters even less so, because to all intents and purposes they are all the same as the male ones. The obvious truth that men and women are equal is conflated with the obvious untruth that men and woman are the same: competent in the same way, intelligent in the same way, flawed in the same ways. They speak the same, think the same, and act the same. Swap the names around and you would notice no difference; sex is cosmetic if even that.
This is odd, when you think about it. I mean, as far as I can tell - and I have met one or two women in my life - one of the most obvious things about them is that really they are quite different to men in the main (and to a straight man this is part of what gives them their charm). They speak differently, think differently, and act differently. They are not all that much like men, really, and I find it difficult to imagine how anybody who has ever actually talked to a man and then talked to a woman would fail to see this. If I was a cultural feminist, I might even suggest that there is something rather strongly anti-woman in the notion that, to be valued as men's equals, they ought to come to resemble them.
To the male nerd eye, being valuable as a human being means doing things that are held in high esteem because they are the traditional purview of high-status males (and which male nerds secretly or openly want to be good at). Those things are largely fighting, exploring, engineering and hunting. To the male nerd SF writer, then, writing female roles that portray women positively means writing female roles that involve women being just as good at and as interested in fighting, exploring, engineering and hunting as men - and leaving it at that.
Lest it be said that I am advocating essentialism of the sexes, or something, I want to make it clear that what I mean is not that I want all women who appear in SF novels to be mothers, nurses and midwives. That isn't what I'm driving at, at all: what I want is strong female characters who plausibly appear to be women. Who are written in such a way that they appear to be like the women I know in real life - not just
The problem isnt portraying women positively. Its portraying them accuratly. Most of my female cousins have been defined by their relationships with men. Moving from one unreliable guy and failed relationship to the next until they reach a maturity where they conclude 'screw men...time to fend for yourself'. Only then did they find they could 'go it alone'. The problem is they are wasting decades on the journey of discovery and not passing that to the next generation as anything but a 'learn it yourself' life lesson. Applying the hero's journey to women characters must ultimately deal with the shedding of their reliance on men as the 'giant penis' central to their universe.
ReplyDeleteMost men are defined by their relationships with women. Most people are defined by relationships, and women and men have the same amount of agency. I don't buy into male self-loathing in that regard.
DeleteExcellent post.
ReplyDeleteI think this touches on an important point about genre SF and fantasy: despite all the special pleading to the contrary, much of it *isn't* the equal of even fairly bog-standard "literary fiction". The rendering of female characters is a major part of this.
I suspect RPGs, with their (generally) gender-neutral character-generation rules, have had a malign influence on the adoption of the "competent, square-jawed, breasted" androgynes that population so much speculative fiction in recent decades. I've been running Dragon Warriors for my kids and their friends, and the party's two fighters are barbarian twin sisters (each wielding a two-handed sword). And that's just fine for a game.
But it doesn't work so well in a fantasy novel. If women are commonly the equivalent of fighting-men in the setting, then there would be a host of sociological implications that are never thought through. Anyone who's done a sport or martial art involving a significant strength component has a pretty good idea of (a) the importance of strength (and size) in combat and (b) the gulf between the sexes there. Yes, there are many outstanding female MMA competitors who would take an untrained male opponent to pieces. But the issue - as it arises in fantasy novels and games - is about conflict and competition with *trained* male warriors.
As to contemporary (male) genre novelists who get female lead characters right (or at least doesn't require them to be "badasses"), I think you could make a case for China Mieville in The Scar and (though I haven't read it) Embassytown.
Who else? Well, among mainstream genre writers, George RR Martin actually does quite a lot of good things in A Song of Ice and Fire by having female characters who influence events through the (few) means open to them in his pseudo-medieval society. But he rather spoils the effect by having a tomboy character training up to be a "badass" RPG-ish assasin and by having Brienne of Tarth as the most formidable warrior around (though I have a [very] faint hope that her size and strength will be explained by dint of giant blood ...).
Now here's a comparison for you. Tolkien actually handles female warriors much better than contemporary authors. Eowyn is a heroic character and a (secret) shieldmaiden, but she's not a "badass". When disguised as a male warrior, she's notably small and slight. And while she kills the Witch King, she does so through dint of courage, her foe's overconfidence ("no living man may hinder me") and Merry helping out with a magic sword in the back of the Witch King's leg. The apparent hopelessness of her defiance makes her all the more heroic. She doesn't have to be an implausible Brienne of Tarth (who can beat all-comers in tournament melees and on the battlefield) to be an affecting and heroic character. And her finest hour is all the more dramatic as a result.
If I were trying to identify the best fantasy writer of female characters down the pub, I'd twist things to pedantic extremes by identifying Brian Moore, who is a sublime writer of female characters (Judith Hearn, etc) and did occasionally write fantastical fiction (including an excellent ghost story collected in the brilliant Black Water anthology) ...
Brian Moore *was* a sublime writer ...
DeleteIt's funny, I was thinking about Tolkien when I was writing the post. Tolkien gets a lot of stick for his treatment of sex, but I've always thought that's a bit harsh - his books don't have a lot of female characters, but when there they are usually pretty interestingly and sympathetically portrayed.
DeleteMy main problem with "badass" female characters in fiction is not so much to do with the physical side of things - it is speed and technique that kills. It is more that it just seems implausible based on the women I have known in my life that female fighters should be common and widespread; the difference between men and women is not so much that men are necessarily "better" at fighting but that they are much more aggressive. I have done quite a bit of martial arts down the years and I have often noticed that while male students really enjoy physical confrontation and testing their physical abilities against each other (and often come to crave physical pain), women students largely don't. Male students cheer when a session is going to be all full contact sparring. Women roll their eyes. And this is women who have actually made the decision to do a martial art in the first place. This distinction is quite stark, although there are of course the rare exceptions like the female MMA fighter/boxer or Brienne of Tarth.
I haven't read the books, but I thought literary Brienne was a pretty mediocre combatant? The badass Brienne who can beat The Hound (albeit wounded/diseased Hound) in a duel is an HBO creation, right?
DeleteNo, in the books she is a fucking wrecking machine.
DeleteI have not seen the TV series. In the books she's presented as being a very good fighter - I think she wins a tournament at one point? (Been a while since I've read them.) George RR Martin has his flaws, but he is simply superb at creating believable characters, and I think Brienne is one of his best: as a depiction of a female warrior type, with all of the internal and external issues that would accompany that role in that setting, I think she is utterly credible.
Delete"Fucking wrecking machine" might be slight hyperbole. She has a lot of success in one-on-one combat, but her fights against multiple opponents do not go super well, I think? So she is an above-average fighter in a setting with a pretty low skill ceiling.
DeleteOn "it is speed and technique that kills": well, yes - but strength is a key component of "speed" in fighting. That's why - for example - fencing tournaments have both male and female categories. And strength was far more important in *real* medieval sword-fighting, as grappling was a huge factor - especially when plate armour became a factor.
DeleteSize is important too; I always thought that RuneQuest was a step ahead of other games in making SIZ a stat.
I agree with you on Martin's characterisation of Brienne: he works through the consequences of her situation very well. My (minor) issue, I suppose, is with her status as winner of a 100+warrior melee tournament and "wrecking machine": it rather breaks the plausibility of non-magical Westeros (unless she does turn out to be a giant throwback or something). But so, of course, does Robert Baratheon's warhammer, which Ned Stark could hardly lift. A strong man wouldn't have an unwieldy warhammer: he'd simply hit harder with a relatively normal-sized one!
There are different types of strength, though. Speed comes from fast-twitch muscle fibre strength, which is different from having big musculature. I suspect the reason why fencing tournaments are split into male and female categories has more to do with reach, which is a function, of course, of size. I don't want to dismiss the importance of strength entirely - I just think the reason why men have ended up being fighters in most societies is more to do with the fact that they are just intrinsically more aggressive (they actually want to do it!) and, perhaps more crucially still, are expendable. I'm pretty sure in our ancient past we lived in societies in which a 'big man' got to have sex with a lot of women, and there were a lot of surplus unmarried men hanging round as a consequence. They mostly ended up fighting each other and hopefully eventually becoming a 'big man' themselves. In slightly more advanced societies this ended up in a situation in which you had a rich elite where the men each had a large number of wives, and there was a consequence of young unmarried men around as a result. They could be employed as soldiers. You also don't particularly need men around to bear and look after kids; women are biologically precious. Men aren't particularly.
DeleteThere are different types of strength, certainly. But men have more of both. I'd disagree on reach being a huge factor; good male fencers are often short (especially sabreurs), and longer arms mean bigger targets (in sabre and epee, at least). Also, strength allows an effective 'beat' in sport fencing and a stronger parry. I fenced a lot through school, and the post-pubertal divergence was almost as marked as in my other fighting sport, judo.
DeleteNow, *real* sword-fighting has much more kinship to judo than sport fencing (look at the role of grappling in historical manuals), so big musculature is much more of a factor. And we know that that was the case historically; bone analysis from sites like Repton, St John's Oxford and Towton shows that medieval warriors were typically very heavily muscled. I recall talking to the main archaeologist of the Repton site when I was at college. He told me that the bones of the viking corpses had spurs like those on the bones of modern powerlifters.
That underscores the point about *trained* fighters. Given muscle-building potential, the physical divergence between trained male and female fighters would be greater than that between untrained levies.
Now, I agree entirely on aggression. I'd argue that it's much more common to meet men who will be aggressive *without losing their temper* than women. I played rugby in the front row for years, and there's certainly an endless supply of men who will deal out physical punishment with a smile. That's not to denigrate women's rugby in the slightest - but there are far, far fewer female enthusiasts for that sort of thing.
Another point on strength. I think its importance in hand-to-hand fighting tends to be underplayed for various reasons. First, modern combat-derived sports like Olympic fencing have tended to demote its role by removing grappling entirely. Second, coaches of combat sports don't - for very good reasons - want new participants to rely on strength. They want them to learn technique. So the role of strength is deliberately played down in training ("stop being negative", etc.). Now, technique ultimately trumps strength, but it takes a lot of technique to trump a lot of strength. An experience grappler will run rings around a strong newbie, but a strong newbie can do quite well against weaker people with more limited training. And a *very* strong person can be a real handful for even the most skilled; I read an account of a heavyweight US masters state judo champion saying that he simply couldn't throw a newbie who had a 500-pound bench press. That's really extraordinary strength of course (probably well off the 3D6 scale!).
Anyway, I entirely agree with your main point`! It strikes me that there's often a poverty of imagination in contemporary fantasy books and games that confuses a *strong character* (one that's well drawn, vivid and compelling) with a *physically* strong character (and that sometimes gets compounded by a geekish/Mary Sue wish-fulfilment tendency).
There's also sometimes a certain juvenility in genre fantasy that elevates "strength", "hardness" or "badassery" to essential components of heroism or even being a protagonist. Again, for all the fashionable denigration, that's not a trap that Tolkien fell into much: just look at the hobbits!
Like I said, I'm not trying to argue strength is irrelevant! Just that there are plenty of women I know who could (if they wanted to) go around picking fights and winning them, but never do so because they don't have that testosterone-fuelled urge that many men have to inflict and receive pain. So it seems to me it's not so much that you can't train either sex to be good fighters. It's more that you wouldn't bother given that men seem to have such a mental aptitude for it (and are largely expendable for reasons discussed above), while women don't.
DeleteYeah, one of my big complaints about the new Star Wars film was that I felt that Rey was too much of a badass. They seemed to want to go with a "strong" female lead...but did exactly what you're referring to and interpreted that as meaning she is able to beat up a dozen storm troopers before breakfast. The two things seem unavoidably (but mindlessly) linked together in contemporary geekdom.
No, you're not alone in feeling this way. I rarely like female protagonists written by male authors in the last 20 years. Before then, it didn't seem so bad. The '80s seem to me, in retrospect, to be a bright period for well-written female characters due, in part, I think, to the stars of the field being almost entirely female. Most of the men who write women well today got their starts back then (Brust, Rosenberg, King, Weber, etc.)
ReplyDeleteOr maybe their skills improved by sheer dint of effort and time as my standards rose? ;)
It sounds like you aren't saying 'the female heroes are like men', but 'the female heroes are like male heroes'.
ReplyDeleteBrienne of Tarth probably isn't any less realistic than John Carter, but there's a tradition of accepting male characters of that type.
That's an interesting point, actually. I think it was sort of what I was getting at in the second to last paragraph. Nerdy male SF writers have a certain vision of what "heroism" is, so whether the hero is male or female, he or she will have exactly the same set of attributes.
DeleteWho cares?
ReplyDeleteMe. Duh.
DeleteIain Banks. Hugh Howey. Octavia Butler. Nnedi Okorafor. All good! :-)
ReplyDeleteI have an Iain Banks allergy. I've never been able to enjoy his books. The others I have heard of and will read at some point...
Delete@ Noisms:
ReplyDeleteFor an accurate portrayal of female characters, you may need to seek out women authors. I don't actually read that much science fiction, but The majority of "fantasy" novels I've read over the last couple decades have been female authors (not by design...just how it worked out), and even the books that feature male protagonists have much deeper (I hate to say "realistic") female characters.
Could it be (with SciFi) that male authors are spending so much time with their speculative world that they have less "speculative energy" for putting themselves in the female shoes of their opposite gender? No idea. But it would be interesting to take 10 books by ten authors, split between genders (though writing in the same genre) and give the whole a read, specifically making comparisons of characterization.
I think there is an element of that - in the case of the writers of Leviathan Wakes it can be explained partly by them simply not being very good.
DeleteI also think there is this weird thing going on in male nerd-dom at the moment that prizes the Lara Croft vision of womanhood: the 'perfect' woman who also does all the 'man' stuff better than you too. I've never understood the appeal of that, but it is a sort of leitmotif in 21st century video games, films and books.
@ Noisms:
DeleteThe pulp action hero has always been of that mold (see Doc Savage)...Croft just happens to be a female version of the classic "uber-hero."
Starting from this point from a previous poster: "It sounds like you aren't saying 'the female heroes are like men', but 'the female heroes are like male heroes,'" I think there are a few interesting things to look at.
ReplyDeleteFirst, SF/F is often a genre that traditionally demands willpower, bravery, and fighting ability to survive in. When a woman has those skills, it doesn't mean that she is like a man. It means that she has identified the route to accomplishment, and it's the same route male heroes have been taking for so long.
The cure for this is having a multitude of people of all genders. For an example, we can look at Mad Max: Fury Road. It had women who were strong and forceful and brave, and it had women who found strength in escaping men, and it had women who were part of the harmful system. Women could be fighters, seed-bearers, gunners, talkers, cowards, and everything in between.
Similarly, look at the men: fascists, soldiers, cowards, dumb muscle men, currying of favors, and so on.
"Man" is not a singular thing, and neither is "woman." Both exist on a bell curve defined by culture, and so a man on an extreme edge of his curve can be very different from the other end of the curve, and he can have more in common with a woman on the extreme edge of her curve.
A strong, aggressive woman is realistic. They exist in our world. An emotional, intuitive man is realistic. An uncaring woman is realistic, and a mothering man, and all combinations of these adjectives and genders along with everything in between. And if you don't think one of these exists, I'd bet it's because you don't include them in your circles.
It's the multitude that lends realism, and that's what "literary fiction" (as much as I dislike the term) can have over genre fiction: it takes time to explore those differences and those internal lives. Once SF/F starts doing that more often (like Dune, for instance, with it's fey Feyd-Rautha and it's armies of women), it'll get closer to gender equality.
It's not that strong, aggressive women or emotional intuitive men are unrealistic. It is that they are comparatively rare. There is some overlap between the sexes in all respects, of course, but that shouldn't be overemphasised.
DeleteI'd add that I think fiction is (in part) about exploring what it means to be human. That means exploring, and doing justice to, differences between the sexes.
"It's not that strong, aggressive women or emotional intuitive men are unrealistic. It is that they are comparatively rare". Not especially, no. The culturally accepted expressions of aggression or sensitivity are different for the two sexes to be sure, but I've met plenty of aggressive women and plenty of sensitive/intuitive men. Indeed, I've met a good number of men and women who were both forceful and emotionally intuitive.
DeleteNow of course there are differences between the sexes, and I'm not one to suggest that all of these differences are purely cultural, but it's not especially shocking to meet a woman who isn't classically feminine in every respect.
That said, I agree with you that the male nerd author's vision of femininity tends to be a very masculine one. I waffle between thinking this is the result of overcompensating on trying to deliver Strong Female Characters (where the author is working on a very narrow definition of what it means to be strong) and a curious kind of sexual idealization, in which the perfect woman is someone who likes everything the male author likes. In either case I think it could be largely resolved by the author A) meeting more women, and B) getting out of a mental space that treats women as some unknowable Other. Women will have different perspectives and life experiences than men, and that should usually be apparent in any well-realized character, regardless of personality. And if all of an author's female characters fit into a certain mold, whether it be Male With Breasts or Fragile Virgin, we're probably dealing with a poorly written book.
Have you really met 'plenty' of aggressive women? I'm not talking about being assertive. I'm talking about physically aggressive. I think there are certain male and female traits that are more 'male' or 'female' than others. For instance, it's true that in general women talk more than men. But it isn't hard to find men who are very talkative or women who are taciturn. I would put physical aggression in a different category - there is only a very slight overlap between the sexes there.
DeleteOn the second point, I think overcompensation is a huge factor, but I also think there is something to this argument about the feminine ideal. To the male nerd, the ideal woman is beautiful and sexy, but also likes everything the male nerd likes, and - strangely - is also better than them at doing "traditionally male" things like fighting, athleticism, etc. There is something interesting going on there psychologically, but I'm not sure what!
I agree with your point. Female writers also tend to write male characters like (slightly androngynous) women - I noticed this with Vanye the aspect-character in CJ Cherryh's 'Chronicles of Morgaine'.
ReplyDeleteBTW I'm pretty sure men are a minority even of sf book readers these days; men have been pushed out of books just like with TV sf a few years previously. SF videogames are about the only area where men are still a majority (hence GamerGate); sf films of the Marvel Superhero type seem to do a decent job attracting both sexes.
Perhaps so, although I think "pushed out" sounds overly suspicious. My feeling is that men have largely pushed themselves out - video games are now the leisure activity of choice for a heck of a lot of them.
DeleteI think it's a mix - TV sf retargetting itself to female viewers around 15 years ago seemed like a push to me. Personally I noticed there were suddenly all these supposedly sci-fi shows that were really women's TV in disguise (if that). That's what prompted my loss of interest in TV sf, not a preference for videogames.
DeleteI'm not sure if the more recent SJW takeover of literary sf is a cause or effect of the loss of interest in literary sf by men & boys, it might be both.
I'm not sure how a science fiction show being REALLY a woman's show is a contradiction. Science fiction is essentially a collection of setting elements, not a type of story. You can have space opera, sword & planet, classic logic puzzle hard sf, sf noir, sf romance, sf mystery, science fiction fantasy, soap opera, western, children's cartoon, and so on. They're all still science fiction stories.
DeleteAnd as someone who enjoys classically masculine science fiction and fantasy stories, I'm not exactly hurting for reading material. It's mostly older work to be sure, but I don't read much contemporary fantasy either so I'm not especially bothered.
@Tom Killian - "It's mostly older work to be sure" - it bothers me if an art form is effectively a dead form, like literary sf and even tv sf - certainly if I see it die in my lifetime.
DeleteThis makes me think of Lara Croft. I think in most Tomb Raider games, if you reskinned the character model as a man, and changed the voice, it wouldn't seem wrong. I always thought this was a sign of a well written character, the fact that she's a woman doesn't define her at all. Her character is defined by her methods, motivations, and relationships. She's a globe trotting, aristocratic, thrill seeking archaeologist with guns. The fact that she's female is far less interesting.
ReplyDeleteI respectfully have to say that I think of this as a sign of a badly-written character!
DeleteThat sounds reasonable. You can have women characters whose femininity is more of an implicit trait, and that can still be powerful or appreciated by the audience. E.g. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/19/gaming-made-me-tomb-raider/ tells how the writer (a woman) really appreciated the Tomb Raider games.
DeleteWell all humans have to be one or the other, don't they! Is it very hard to think of a male character in fiction who seems to have no particular 'maleness' to them? Maybe they're just male because, what else would a former soldier be?
Delete"I am not a Men's Rights Activist or Gamer Gater or anything like that."
ReplyDeleteI would suggest that the idea that MRAs and Gamergaters hate women is essentially fabricated. Many of them hold views identical to your own and a significant proportion are women themselves.
Regardless, I'd probably just blame poorly-written female characters on Sturgeon's Law combined with an increased desire for representation. Although there seems to be a persistent myth that any and all differences between men and women are cultural. I'm not sure how much that plays into the writing - I suppose you'd have to look at the views of the individual authors - but in that context, having male and female characters acting similarly might even be seen as progressive. Particularly in a fantastic or futuristic setting with a vastly different culture to our own.
That myth is an odd one, but these things go in cycles. About 10-15 years ago it was very much in the zeitgeist to take quite seriously the biological differences between the sexes (at one stage you couldn't turn on a BBC channel without finding a documentary about that subject, and books like "Why men don't listen and women can't read maps" were really popular). This seems to have flipped to the opposite extreme. I expect it'll flip back again at some point.
Delete"I would suggest that the idea that MRAs and Gamergaters hate women is essentially fabricated."
DeleteI like the tweet from aMBusch: "Go fuck yourself stupid cunt. Learn your shit before you make something out of nothing. Gamergate is not hating on women"
A thought experiment that might be relevant:
ReplyDeleteImagine a female version of The Stainless Steel Rat-a conwoman named 'Slippery' Jane DiGriz.
If you didn't know the original character, you'd probably assume that 'Slippery Jane' was a seductress/femme fatale type: she cons men by using her sex appeal.
But Jim DiGriz doesn't do that at all. Even though there are men in real life who use seduction to con people (men and/or women), 'conman' heavily implies 'seduces people' for fictional women but not for fictional men.
A couple of years back, a fantasy author with whom I am acquainted had her debut novel accepted for publication; but her publisher, no keenly doubt aware that the primary target audience for fantasy novels is now girls rather than boys, requested that she rewrite the male protagonist as female. You can read her thoughts on the rewriting process here:
ReplyDeletehttp://lucyhounsom.com/?p=1652
As for the 'strong female character' issue, I was actually impressed by the subtlety and care with which it's addressed in 'The Hunger Games' novels (although not so much in the film versions). There's a rather glib reading which basically applauds Katniss as awesome because she's all tough and violent and tomboyish rather than 'girly', but the books actually explore in some depth the different kinds of strengths and weaknesses attendant upon being a manly man (Gale), a feminine girl (Prim), a feminised man (Peeta), or a masculinised woman (Katniss), and does not at all straightforwardly valorise Katniss's version of femininity over the other possibilities around her. The novels have their weaknesses, but I don't think that their handling of gender is amongst them.
Cordwainer Smith and PK Dick are probably my favourite SF authors and Cordwainer Smith was absolutely sensitive in creating interesting female characters. His stories are poetic and romantic and yet exacting (it is hard to find fault with his scientific extravagance) and mythologically far flung across vast gulfs of time. Warmer than Clarke-Kubrick's 2001 it is easy to imagine an early 1970s David Bowie soundtrack to his stories.
ReplyDeleteThis is the best edition of his work.
Deletehttp://www.amazon.com/Rediscovery-Man-Complete-Science-Cordwainer/dp/0915368560/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461625203&sr=1-1&keywords=cordwainer+smith