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

[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.