Female Characters, Female Writers

[julieandrews]

swanjun pointed me to this lj post on female characters. Do you prefer reading about male characters to female ones? If so, why? For me, I'm not sure if I prefer reading about male characters or not, but when it comes to writing characters, I do much better with male ones. They hold my interest better. Does it come from years and years of reading about interesting male characters and less-than-interesting female characters? Or is it from something else?

Broad Universe's mailing list directed me to this article on the ambition of women writers. It doesn't touch on the cultural upbringing women receive that tells them to keep quiet, be submissive, try not to get noticed. Which I think is a great deal of the problem here.

That's why when people say there aren't enough women writers writing science fiction, getting their science fiction published, or getting their science fiction acknowledged, I have to wonder how much is on the women. Why aren't you writing? Why aren't you submitting? If you are submitting, why are you submitting to low-pay, no-pay, or low-circulation markets? Fanfic writers, are you really content with being read only by fanfic readers and not getting paid for it? Or is the 'hobby' aspect of it what keeps it safe and comfortable? Are you not winning awards because you're too humble and nice-quiet-girl to get yourself on the list, or to tell your publisher to put you on the list?

What gets less attention is the dearth of female main characters in science fiction, particularly at certain age levels and certain subgenres. Even if an anthology is half women authors, it might still be all male protagonists. Were we all raised on such a heavy dose of interesting male characters that that's all any writer can write, male or female? When a writer does use a female protagonist, are they usually less interesting and thus that story doesn't get published?

Does The Other play a part? Male writers may be drawn to female characters because they're not like themselves? While female writers are drawn to male ones for the same reason? Many of the more memorable, likeable, enjoyable, interesting female main characters and even supporting characters I can think of are written by male writers. Is this because male writers write more interesting female characters? Or is it because they write them more like male characters and we're right back to liking male characters better?

Read. Ponder.

Comments

[dien.livejournal.com]

I've been on your flist or you mine or something for months now but I don't think I've actually commented. But your topic today is a most excellent one.

I used to be (and I suppose still am, to some degree) a writer/reader of male characters. They were just more interesting!! Furthermore, I often didn't feel like any of the women given me in fiction were real to me-- they never reflected how I felt as a person, as a woman. My sympathies always laid pretty squarely with the boys. When I'm given what's billed as a "strong female character" in fiction, it usually turns out to be a raging Mary Sue who's stunningly beautiful and pisses me off like hell. (See: Elizabeth Swann, POTC, as an example.)

It wasn't until I started a fictional universe with a friend in which we consciously set out to have both a gender balance and a race balance with the characters that I really started writing a lot of female characters. And, despite some initial mental hurdling, we ended up with several women who were strong female characters-- on our terms. That's not to say they're all necessarily positive or healthy characters, but they are people, and not a bunch of traits with a set of boobs attached.

Recently I've also started writing a character who's a middle-aged, divorced-with-two-kids Jewish librarian and kabbalist-- and she's the most fun I have had in ages. She doesn't get to swan around in badass leather or use swords or have rooftop chases or get the men to fall for her-- instead she gets to be real, to be smart (and geeky!) and tough (in a true, life's-put-me-through-hell-but-I'm-still-here-and-still-sane way) and funny and earthy and, man, I could go on about her for ages.

It feels wonderful to be writing her, to realize that for the first time ever I have a female character I can conceive of as a protagonist for her own story, and not just back-up for some guy's.

The key for me was throwing out all the stuff a female protagonist is "supposed" to have-- and I would make the case that high on that list is sex appeal. Not that my female characters don't have it, in various degrees according to their personalities, but it's just not the point of their characters. There just seems to be such a strong unwritten rule that Female Characters Must Be Attractive, and it wasn't until I mentally said "okay, I'm not going to pay that any attention" that I started writing women characters I actually clicked with.

Just my two cents.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

Your librarian sounds awesome. I'm a sucker for librarian characters.

Gender and race balance is something more stories should have, when it wouldn't be inappropriate and forced. Maybe I should take up a similar challenge.. but try to come up with a story with half a dozen or more female characters as the main action. It'd at least force me to make them all different from each other. Hopefully without copying Sailor Moon too much. ;)

You're right on there with the characters not reflecting me as a reader. I have a real disconnect with the 'typical' woman, portrayed not just in fiction, but in the media and everywhere. My favorite female characters tended to be the ones who were readers. Because at least I was a reader too.

[dien.livejournal.com]

Librarians FTW. :D

Yes and yes. The story where we're pursuing that balance is set 3000 years in the future, in a culture where we were specifically saying that the old race and gender rules didn't apply-- and then we realized that most of our characters were still turning out to be white males, which is when we said "alright" and consciously started working to change that. Bit of a shock, that-- that even though we're both female and considered ourselves POC-friendly (we're both white as well) we were still writing WM chars. Boo on that!

And yes, you do get variation once you put multiple women in. The head of state in this is a woman, her assistant/lover is a woman (and former courtesan), the head of the courtesan's guild is a woman (although there are many male courtesans too), the top professional athlete is a woman, et cetera, et cetera, and each one of those four women is very different from each other. It's such a delight to have women who aren't "womany"-- by which I mean that sense of disconnect you mention.

Not even in the media but sometimes in real life I hit this-- I was once dating a man, a perfectly nice and intelligent man, who, early on in our relationship, was very confused by me and constantly analyzing what I said. The reason? Because I generally meant what I said and wasn't playing "mind games." I didn't do coy, I didn't do 'I mean this but I'm saying this and waiting for you to figure it out so I can give you hell for getting it wrong', etc etc. This was something that had been routine with his last three girlfriends, and he just considered it something that went with women!

It's possibly mildly misogynistic of me to even have as a viewpoint, but that kind of woman? Pisses me off so much I'd much, much rather be a man, k thx.

[tomomi.livejournal.com]

I've been turning this over in my mind since I read the post on female characters, but my thoughts are still a bit scattered.

I think my main problem is that my answer to the initial question is, simply, no. No, I do not like the male characters better and never have. Either I didn't have a favorite character, or I would elevate the only available female, however minimal her part, and select her as my favorite character. Or, lacking a female character in a setting I really liked, I would make one up.

This has been my pattern pretty much forever, and not just with books.

Transformers - Carly (though later female Transformers appeared and I was quite pleased with them, even though I had already made up a bunch of female Transformers myself)
TNG - Beverly Crusher
He-Man - Sorceress
Batman - Batgirl & Catwoman
Ender's Game - Petra
HHGG - Trillian
Narnia - Jill & Polly
Prydain - Elionwy
etc.

I'm a little less sexist in my favorite character choosing now (some of the above have changed as a result), but I do still have this tendency. And I know that from a pretty young age I've been very very aware of whether or not I was reading stuff by female authors or by male authors -- it was something I paid attention to. I would fume about this in junior and senior high school, especially when the curriculum was too male author and male character heavy. (I guess looking back it's hardly surprising I went to a women's college, ha ha.)

I wholeheartedly agree that there is a dearth of female main characters in science fiction. And when there is a dearth of something, the ones that do appear tend to be all of a kind, because simply by existing they are different and no effort has to be made to have them be unique in other ways. It's probably part of why I really haven't read as much science fiction as you have. I could never get past the missing females problem, and so have stuck with mysteries (no lack of female characters or female authors there) or girls' series.

This is one of the reasons that the Japanese manga/anime culture was such an exciting discovery. Here were vast quantities of female characters -- main characters, supporting characters, token characters, they run the gamut. And because there were so many, there was -variation-. A lot were the same, but there needed to be effort made at having them stand out from the crowd. There are other problems with manga and anime, but a -lack- of female characters is not one of them.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

I never felt the need to pick the girl character just because she was a girl and I kind of liked her. I actively rebelled against having to 'be' the girl character, but at least that was made easy by the fact that our group was usually 2-3 boys and 2 girls, and any given show rarely had more than 1 girl. Even given the choice between Wily Kit and Wily Kat, though, I'd prefer being the boy.

More than anime (since Voltron had already failed on this score), I think it was Sailormoon specifically that was the revelation. The show is almost all girls! Even though I didn't like Usagi much, there was Ami-chan and Makoto to identify with and like, and then Haruka and Michiru later on. Awesomeness. Of course it also eventually led to me _playing_ Usagi and finding out she wasn't so bad after all. There's actual depth to her character beyond the ditzy, clumsy, boy-crazy 'meatball head'.

Here's some of my favorite characters for comparison and contrast:

TOS: Spock
TNG: Data, Wesley, Yar
DS9: Bashir, Dax (well, most of them were good, actually)
Voyager: Kes
Voltron: Sven
Batman: Batgirl, but also Robin
Smurfs: Brainy Smurf

Just from that list, I tended to go for smarts and/or outsiders. And my favorite characters had a nasty habit of dying.

[tomomi.livejournal.com]

There were limits for me. Unless there was some redeeming quality to the girl I would generally look for a substitute or lose interest in the show.

For example, I never could bring myself to like Uhura, even though she was a woman on the ship doing a responsible job. She did not seem to have any authority whatsoever and then she also had that stupid uniform.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

I don't _dislike_ Uhura, but I could never work out why she got all this airtime singing and what was supposed to be so good about her singing. I should've liked her more, if only because she was communications officer, and I thought that was a cool job. It was a cooler job on seaQuest. :)

I liked Nurse Chapel okay, until she went all inappropriately ga-ga over Spock.

Not that TNG improved matters. Yar was good, but brief. Crusher was okay, but also disappeared, leaving season 2 in worse shape than season 1. Troi was a definite TOS throwback. And Pulaski was just horrid.

[birdhousefrog.livejournal.com]

Whoa. That's heady stuff you're posting. Keep it and read it again in six months or a year. You just said that you prefer to write male characters and that men have written, for you, many of the more memorable women characters. Interesting.

I can say, at 50, that there were very few female characters to read about when I grew up. Not kick-ass ones, at any rate.

One of my stories in draft is exclusively about women, there are no men. And my older sister (by ten years) told me reading about women was boring to her, lacked interest.

There's so very much here, in what you threw out there. Papers and dissertations worth. Gender studies and genre studies both. Why is male/male erotic genre fiction written and read mostly by women, for example?

Shivers. This stuff sends shivers down my spine and sparks more ideas. Back to my first drafts I go. I go, I go, see how I go.

Oz

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

Just what I need, more ideas for grad school subjects! Gender studies wasn't really on my list of half a dozen or more.

Having read m/m fiction aimed at women and aimed at men, variously written by women and written by men, of varying degrees of both eroticism and quality, I can tell you there are definite differences between m/m written for women and that written for men. For a quick example, the m/m aimed at men will give you physical descriptions, usually as soon as possible, in some detail, particularly in regards to muscles, body/facial hair, and equipment. So you almost have to separate it, with labels such as gay erotica versus yaoi, before you can even talk about the whys and wherefors.

I wonder if your sister could say why reading about women was boring to her. Is it related to the Bechdel test? Where most fiction has few or no scenes involving two or more women discussing something other than men? Some people have extended that to include a few other things female characters typically discuss, such as family or housework. Me, I'd probably include talking about clothes or makeup or popularity, or excessive discussion of shopping. Those things don't interest me, so if most female characters end up talking about things like that, how are _they_ going to interest me?

Much to ponder.

[birdhousefrog.livejournal.com]

Since there aren't any men, there aren't any men to discuss, so it can't be that. And there's no shopping, no housework, though some family discussion. There's talk of getting a good "wife" which might trigger something. But overall, I don't know and I don't think she does either.

Oz

[jehanni.livejournal.com]

I've heard it argued that since "men" (in which we include the median-age-12 boy that is the typical consumer of SF) prefer to read about male characters, and "women" (and since girls statistically read more and more fluently earlier than boys, shall we guesstimate the median age of 10?) are willing to read about both male and female characters, the proper, game-theory-optimized response is for everyone to write about male characters if they want to be published.

I'm not buying it.

When I asked my 76-year-old Dad if he'd read Sue Grafton's alphabet mysteries (he being a mystery fan), he said he just didn't want to read about sex from a female point of view. Too icky.


And on the m/m fiction brought up by birdhousefrog: a (older, hetero male) colleague at work said that while he has no intellectual problem with people he knows choosing to have relationships with others of the same gender, the depiction in film (and presumably on stage or in life) of physical m/m closeness makes him feel slightly sick. It doesn't have to be overly erotic imagery, and he has a physiological response. He finds this curious, but is not interested in repeating it: it's uncomfortable. He'll just avoid the subject.