Occasionally I get asked if I have any advice for writers on how to create believable female characters while avoiding cliches, especially in fantasy novels where the expectations and settings may be seen to be different from our modern world.
There is an “easy” answer to this.
Write all characters as human beings in all their glorious complexity and contradiction.
That’s a decent answer, although rarely easy to pull off in practice, but it’s not really answering the question I’m getting asked.
Standard Disclaimer One: In no way am I suggesting anyone has to write women in a particular way or that they have to write women at all. Write what you want to write. That’s what I do. This post is for the people who have asked the question to me directly or in a more general way to themselves.
Standard Disclaimer Two: I’m barely scratching the surface here. There is so much more that can be said. Think of this essay as part of the journey rather than the destination.
My Three Basic Pieces of Advice
1. Have enough women in the story that they can talk to each other.
The lack of women talking to each other is the most frequent criticism I have of writers writing women (especially male writers).
Pay attention to the fact that women DO talk to each other. Create opportunity for women characters to talk to each other. Check to see if you-as-writer are missing chances to have women talk to and interact with each other.
It’s all well and good to remind writers that they can in fact have more than one female character in their story. But I often notice stories with more than one woman character in which the female characters exist in isolation from each other. That is, each woman or girl exists in a different sphere—a different sub-plot or specific plot-setting—which results in each being the only woman or girl within her sub-plot, which results in the individual women only ever (or mostly) interacting with men. It’s not that those characters have to come into contact with each other, and it may not be possible or desirable for those individuals to do so within the narrative, only that it is possible to think about who else they could interact with.
Women and girls talk to other women and girls A LOT. If you are writing a hard-shelled patriarchal society, this is going to be even more true rather than less true, and in such a case your story will be less realistic if the female characters in the narrative only ever talk to or interact with men. It’s rare for women to live in isolation from other women—and in circumstances where they do, they are often eager for a chance to interact with other women even for a short time. In Molly Gloss’s novel The Jump-Off Creek, the chapter in which a homesteading woman, who lives in almost terrifying solitude, relishes the chance to spend a few days with another family offers a great example of this.
I’m not referencing the Bechdel Test here; that’s a useful but limited test that has a specific remit to make people think about representation in film.
I’m saying it is realistic and believable to show some, all, or many of your women characters interacting with and talking to and having close, important relationships with other women.
2. Filling in tertiary characters with women, even if they have little dialogue or no major impact on plot, changes the background dynamic in unexpected ways.
Pay attention to how you are assigning minor roles.
I define primary characters as the protagonists, often, although not always, the point of view character(s). A primary character’s personal story usually drives the plot. Harry Potter is a protagonist. Secondary characters (by my definition) generally have a relatively significant part to play in the plot and with the primary. While I could (and might) argue that Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley share protagonist status with HP, I believe I can safely say that the other Weasleys, Sirius Black, Severus Snape, Minerva McGonaghall, Draco Malfoy, Luna Lovegood, Cho Chang, and Hagrid (and so on) all function as secondary characters.
By tertiary I mean characters who have much smaller roles, maybe only one or two scenes interacting with the protagonist(s) or secondaries, as well as characters whose major function is to be part of and thus help establish the setting. They might be the scribe who has a document your protagonist needs, the servant who knows a secret entrance into the mage’s tower, the soldier or farmer chance-met on the road, and the healer your character approaches for an ointment to sooth a poison ivy inflammation. They are the people your protagonist asks for directions on the street of an unfamiliar city, and the artisan or street vendor your secondary buys a knife or food from.
In virtually all societies historically there have been both women and men present. Really, it’s true. In a few societies women’s movements have been (and in a few places are today) constrained, but this aspect of women’s lives is highly variable. Women exist, then as now. Furthermore women of the upper classes are often involved in their family’s business and political dealings. As always, everywhere, working class and poor women have to work, to haul water, to run businesses, to sell in the marketplace. No matter what other constraints these women live under, they partake in the tasks that make society function.
Re-think these smaller roles. If you default to assigning almost every secondary and tertiary role to a male character, stop. There may well be historically accurate reasons you can give many of those roles to female characters. Anyway it’s your world and your rules: All else aside, what do you want your world to look like?
Check your background. Actually take note of the background characters with whom your main characters interact. Think of this as the equivalent of scanning crowd scenes in films.
Who we see in the background of a world tells us as much about the world—and the writer’s imagination—as the physical landscape and the cultural trappings of the story.
3. Set women characters into the plot as energetic participants in the plot, whether as primary or secondary or tertiary characters and whether in public or private roles within the setting. Have your female characters exist for themselves, not merely as passive adjuncts whose sole function is to serve as a mirror or a motivator or a victim in relationship to the male.
This is where it gets complicated.
It’s not enough to say “let your female characters do everything your male characters do” because that can feed back into the idea that the lives of so many women across time and cultures are important only insofar as they are congruent with or participating in “men’s lives” or “men’s activities” (however those are defined, and those definitions differ cross-culturally).
Dig deeper to find meaning and importance and a place in the narrative for all lives.
For example, let’s say a female character’s place in the plot mostly revolves around a male character or is confined to a small domicile. She can still have her own dreams, her own desires, her own goals and quirks and thoughts and emotions. She can make choices, however small they may seem to be, for herself. This is how I define the nebulous term “agency.” (Others may have different definitions of the word. That’s cool.)
People with little access to external agency can still have internal agency. Furthermore, people with fewer direct avenues to power and influence have always had ways of digging around obstacles, cobbling together leverage, or acting privately through the public agency of others. There was, after all, one person almost all male emperors in a cut-throat world could trust: their mothers.
A blanket statement to the effect that “with few exceptions women living in pre-industrial cultures really were not all that interesting” can’t be taken seriously. Nor can the argument that, because of patriarchy, women in the past were erased slates without intelligence, personality, desires, or ambitions.
Ask yourself, as a writer, if you are automatically assuming a woman’s story, her agency, can’t be interesting because it literally cannot be or rather if the idea that “women’s stories” aren’t interesting is one many of us have absorbed without really interrogating its truth. I can’t say this enough: I struggle with such engrained assumptions all the time in my own work. I do not think most writers do this to be assholes or sexists. As a writer, you have the option to find a way to make a variety of stories intriguing and vivid. That’s your job.
It’s often a matter of perspective. If a male born into slavery or serfdom or the working class can be deemed to have enough agency to make his story worthy, say, of epic fantasy, then it is in fact no stretch at all to find women’s stories that can become resonant and fantastic tales in their own right. In some cases, it’s a matter of looking hard enough for stories that dovetail with the traditional and standard epic map. In other cases—and here’s the rub—it’s a matter of looking outside expectation, of expanding the map.
I’m not saying a woman character in an epic fantasy shouldn’t be (for example) a kick-ass warrior. I love the kick-ass woman trope. Bring it on.
I’m saying: Be careful of only investing excitement and significance in what I’ll call the public theater of (often male-identified) public action.
Don’t get me wrong: I love writing about the public theater of public action, but it’s not the only way a story can be told, and it’s not the only thread that can be woven through a story. Putting a female character into a stereotypically “male role” is not the only way to make her interesting or strong.
Of course not every activity has to be gendered in your story (nor does gender have to be binary, since it isn’t—a topic outside the purview of this essay). There are so many ways to write stories that move beyond the idea of gender being the most crucial thing we know about someone or the root of all behavior or the locus of how people are treated in the world.
By the same token, not every activity has to be non-gendered. Depending on the culture(s) and setting and how you want to write your story, there can be culturally understood male and female spheres of activity or there can be something more complicated and multivalent.
Make conscious choices rather than default choices.
Whatever their age, experience, background, fortune, and personality, your female characters will become vivid when you find their hearts and their minds. That’s it.
A Not-so-Brief Discussion of How Preconceptions Influence Reception
At the most basic level, one-dimensional, shallow, and cliched characterization comes about because of poor craft on the part of writers whatever the gender of the characters. If a writer can’t be bothered to dig deeper than a commonly deployed trope (defined as a literary or rhetorical device), their characters aren’t going to be well drawn.
If the clichés and tropes they use belong to a subset of character types that is currently valued and commonly agreed upon as “typical” or “realistic” in the popular culture of the moment, then some readers may not notice the shallowness or cliché because it is a portrayal they EXPECT to see and have seen a thousand times before.
Its very familiarity comforts and feels right.
If a woman is introduced as a potential love interest for the hero and then killed so he can be sent off on a quest or spurred to seek revenge, not every reader and viewer will recognize that as The Disposable Love Interest or The Fridged Woman; rather, people see this as an established and suitable narrative theme.
The Nameless Raped Girl is often described as “realism” even though every person who has ever been raped has a life and a personhood that such a plot obliterates in service to the story.
A female character who behaves like a guy and is portrayed as “one of the boys” or “as good as a man” in a way that elevates her above all those uninteresting women whose lives consist of boring-women-things doesn’t elevate women characters on the whole, nor does it show respect for the historical diversity of women’s lives in the particular.
The Exceptional Girl walks alone, almost never interacting with other women except maybe in competition with them, but often people don’t remark on how much of a stereotype it is to situate one girl away from other women as if women are somehow made more important the farther away they get from other women.
Be cautious with the popular Mother Figure, for as I once described the film Immortals: Men can aspire to be divine. Women can aspire to have sons who can grow up to be men who can aspire to be divine.
The Evil Seductress With Her Sexually Tempting and Irresistible Wiles; The Slutty Girl Who Pays For Her Sexual “Freedom” With Her Life; The Girl Too Ugly To Get Married; The Passive Bride who will either Be Crushed By Life or who will Find Her Strength; The Withering Old Woman Who Hates Her Youthful “Rival” Because There Is No Meaning For Women Beyond When They Cease Being Sexually Attractive to Men; The Peaceful Matriarch Whose Nurtures All Because It Is The Essential Nature of Womanhood To Nurture.
They write themselves.
This is why I feel it is important to carefully examine your women characters as you conceive and begin to write them. Consider if they are individuals or types. Sometimes the cliché or the “type” might work well in a plot; there can be reasons to use two-dimensional characters in certain roles. But be sure you’re doing it deliberately, not unthinkingly.
The flip side of comfort is discomfort.
People may react negatively to portrayals that are feasible simply because those portrayals don’t match the template they have in their head.
A recent example? Complaining that the recent BBC television show The Three Musketeers casting of a mixed race actor as Porthos is “inaccurate” or “political correctness” because of the mistaken belief there were no black people in France before modern times. Alexandre Dumas, the man who wrote The Three Musketeers, was himself mixed race, the son of a biracial man who rose to become a general in the army of Revolutionary France in the 18th century.
When erroneous or cliched ideas about the past fit a reader’s (often unexamined) preconceptions, it may be easier to accept plots and characters that fit these preconceptions than to adjust to stories that might actually be more realistic.
Consider discussions of age of marriage in the European Middle Ages and what some readers consider realistic in fiction set in a “medieval-like” fantasy. I occasionally see the vociferously argued position that back in those days all girls married at 14 to 16 and therefore if a fantasy world shows women getting married in their 20s it is nothing more than a sop to modern sensibilities.
I asked Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen [Professor of German Literary Studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada] to comment on age of marriage. She writes:
“In the high and late Middle Ages, Europe north of the Alps was the engine of economic and political change. Here, a distinct marriage pattern emerges: late age at first marriage, i.e. in one’s twenties, which is especially notable for women; and a very small age difference between marriage partners. There were many many single women and men, i.e. people who never married (in part for economic reasons). Re-marriage was common; for elites, both aristocratic and urban, it was the NORM, for both men and women. This is called the Western European Marriage Pattern.
“During the same time period, among elites in the countries around the Mediterranean such as the important Italian cities, the marriage pattern is utterly different. Here, elite men marry late, in their 30s, and they marry women who are teenagers, ca. 20 years younger than themselves.” [pers.com.]
As you are writing, beware any blanket generalization about “life back then.” It is rarely so simple, and the past—like physical topography—is a landscape not a stage set.
People carry an idea in their mind of what epic fantasy is. I would go so far as to say we have drawn a “map” of what kinds of story and conflict and characters are appropriate or fitting or “realistic.”
If I am, for example, writing about a patriarchal world where it is my fervent belief that only men had agency, then I may simply not believe women existed in any meaningful way beyond being sexual receptacles for men, the bearers of their sons, with maybe some soft-focus lesbian hijinks in the harem with or without the man around. As we all know, naked writhing harem scenes are totes realistic unlike (say) extensive land-holding by women in the ancient world, a woman running a business, or a king’s daughter fighting on the battlefield [all attested in the historical record].
To quote Alfred Korzybski, the map is not the territory. Neither is our imperfect and fractured vision of the past a fully accurate understanding of the past. As writers we carry a lot of baggage into the writing process about who people really are and how they ought to act that isn’t easily sloughed off.
Over time I’ve come to the conclusion that what’s most “conservative” in fantasy is people’s erroneous and limited views of what “the past” looked like.
Have women in the past (and the present!) often suffered legal impediments that give them a lower status than their equivalent menfolk? Have they in many cultures been subject to the rule of male guardians? Have they been vulnerable physically to violence as well as famine and disease, and medically in terms of risk of death in childbirth as well as disease?
Of course.
But so what? Women, being people, act and react in a multiplicity of ways to the circumstances in which they find themselves.
To suggest that “inequality” or “violence” is the only or the most important thing in portraying women’s lives in a reconstructed past is a profoundly incomplete representation of a much richer territory.
The actual contradictions and complexities of history are so much more interesting than any bland, rigid default.
These days in fantasy fiction I am seeing a number of complicated, interesting, and varied portrayals of women and girls in a complex web of settings, some traditional and others less so, and in so many modes: fun, tragic, sexy, action-packed, violent, philosophical, compassionate, nurturing, clever, cynical, hopeful, loving, scheming, and bantering.
If you so wish you can visualize a kaleidoscopic palette of women and populate your stories with a range of fascinating characters. The limits arise from within ourselves.
There Is No Trick To This
Assume every character you write is a full human being just as you take yourself to be, with no more or less mystery than you feel for your own self.
Get rid of the word “them,” the very idea of an Unknowable Other with a Mysterious Psychology.
In a narrative that you write and which you encompass the whole of, there can be no “them.” If there is you have already lost the battle because you are relegating characters you feel uncomfortable writing to a lesser, inferior, not-fully-human state, as if they are people who vaguely resemble you in having arms and legs and heads but are otherwise aliens.
People are not aliens. They are people.
Treat all your characters as people.
It’s that simple. It’s that hard.
Kate Elliott is the author of over twenty fantasy and science fiction novels. Find out more on her website or follow her on Twitter @KateElliottSFF.
This is so good. I enjoyed reading this, and it’s definitely what I look for and notice in the media I consume nowadays.
“Putting a female character into a stereotypically “male role” is not the only way to make her interesting or strong.” – yeah, this. I love seeing women in other roles than the stereotypical ‘female’ role (which as you rightly point out isn’t even based on real history) but not when it is at the expense of other women in those roles as the boring, lesser women. I love it when stories explore what it means to be a woman in a multitide of roles (or a man, for that matter).
“Make conscious choices rather than default choices.” – and this, a million times.
I also think it’s really interesting when stories do take the time to show, as you say, internal agency – even in scenarios where the women don’t have external agency. It doesn’t mean that all women in these scenarios were just boring, one dimensional characters for whom their victimization or oppression 100% defined them (this is not at all to say that such things aren’t going to have an effect, sometimes a dramatic effect, on a person).
I am remembering a debate I got in on some forum long ago where we were talking about Padme in Star Wars. Some of the posters didn’t like her representation and what she said about women; I was arguing that I didn’t see how it had anything to do with women; she was just a character. But as I’ve gotten older I can understand what they meant; since there are so few female characters in those movies (although overall I think they do some good things with those characters as well) you can’t get away from the ‘stand in for all women’ issue.
Regarding tropes…I think all of those tropes can be interesting and even well done if consciously used, and with depth. In fact, my own life, if fictionalized – I have to wonder if somebody would read it and say, ‘oh, how cliche! She’s just a {trope}’. LOL. So sometimes some of those tropes can resonate for me even if they can be rather lazily used. But, looking back at the stories I wrote as a teen, I can definitely see some lazy use of it myself…especially regarding Rape as Trauma, etc. At the time I was exploring a lot of things – such as my own fear regarding that subject, and how it would effect me. I tried to deal with it as sensitively as a 16-18 year old could at the time, with limited experience. But there are a few things I’ve cringed at, looking back at it now.
Lately I’ve been reading more Sharon Shinn and Juliet Marillier (two authors I loved in high school) and I think they both do a pretty good job of having interesting and varied women characters.
This is so good, Kate. Thanks for writing this.
I really like the teritary character comment. If an environment shows people of all kinds, women AND men, people of various kinds, it really does make a world different in the reading.
“Putting a female character into a stereotypically “male role” is not the only way to make her interesting or strong.”
THIS
I’ll admit, I used to fall into this trap myself, but it’s so limiting. But characters like Phedre in the Kusheline Series, or Siggy on Vikings are great examples of women who can be confined to traditionally feminine roles, but still be completely badass and awesome.
And women talking to each other. Hermione has a lot of pressure as the sole female main character in the HP series, but despite being limited by only seeing her through Harry’s viewpoint, it’s still apparent that she has other relationships and conversations. Her and Ginny are pretty much inseperable when they are at the Weasley’s and she’s always relating conversations with Lavender and Parvati.
It also helps to read books that are written by women and also read by lots of women.
I found it very eye opening in that I found a lot of the details, conversations, and motivations to not just be weird, but ALIEN.
Sorry I stopped reading at #1 and just skimmed the rest. I’m sure you make some great points, but I get so freaking sick of the “make sure your female characters have other females to talk to, because real women do” tripe.
I’m a woman and I literally have zero female friends. I do not usually enjoy female company. I grew up a tomboy, I have more “masculine” interests, so I tend to prefer the company of men. The only women I talk to on a regular basis are my mom and sister.
So if your female character has a female sibling, sure, have them talk it out. Unless they hate each other, which is also just as likely.
Personally to me it’s just as sexist to say that women MUST have female friends/companions/aquaintances. It’s sexist to say that a women couldn’t possibly enjoy the company of men more than women, or couldn’t possibly have a lot of male friends instead of females. You can have a fully fleshed female character that doesn’t adhere to this cliche, despite what most will say.
You never talked to your mam then Elvensnow?
elvensnow, I too am a woman who’s had long stretches in my life where all my friends were male. (I don’t even have a sister, and I used to go weeks without talking to my mother). I’m an engineer in a male-dominated industry (aerospace), and spend much of my spare time climbing and backpacking and canyoneering (again, lots of guys). So I hear you on the frustration over being told that your experience is “not realistic.”
But here’s what happened as a result. My debut novel The Whitefire Crossing has several women in it, but unconsciously I made them all like me: surrounded by guys, mostly interacting with guys, never shown to speak to another girl. That was a failure of imagination on my part as an author, because my personal experience isn’t shared by all women. (Or even most women, probably.) I was working from a blind spot that I have since tried to correct, because as an author I want to show the whole rich tapestry of human experience, not just reflect my own. This is I think what Kate is trying to get at in this piece. That we should all look at our own blind spots in case they are restricting our imaginations and our stories.
@5, you’re talking to a woman right now. ;)
This is a great and helpful article. The bit about emperors and mothers reminds me of Nero, who attempted to drown his mother Agrippina in a leaky boat. She swam to shore and survived (at least for that day), which goes to show that even a cliched female role like “mother of the emperor” can have unexpected depth and drama.
@5, I had the same eye twitch reaction as well, since for most of my life, I have gravitated towards male friendships and shyed away from socializing with women (although part of that was due to my own biases and prejducies shaped by some pretty nasty experiences early in life – in fact, over the past years, I have made it a point to seek out friendships with other like minded women instead of instinctually viewing them wtih fear). I am definitely more on the ‘masculine’ side of temperament in certain ways (depending on how you define that – that of course is a whole nother topic).
So, I agree that not every female character has to have a clique of best girl friends or girls to have a heart to heart with. But what I do think is ‘unrealistic’ is the idea that females in general are sparse; obviously there are some exceptions (I also work in software so spend time with a lot of guys, although we have a good number of women too)…but still, when I go about my day to day life, I interact with lots of women. So I think that is what she is getting at; when all the default ‘set dressing’ or minor characters are male.
Also, as Courtney points out, we may be a bit of outliers, so for the majority of women to be portrayed like that (either consciously or unconsciously because you simply didn’t create any other female characters) doesn’t really speak to the diverse ways womanhood can be lived out.
Great article!
But should you write non-human characters as if they were human? I like a really bold depiction of the ‘alien Other’ in fiction. Of course, that is different from an author writing women as aliens simply because they have never interacted with one in real life…
‘Women speaking to other women’ is a big issue: I suspects that texts depicting women without bonds to other women may be mindlessly reproducing a patriarchal view of women as objects who have no existence (and therefore no relationships) outside serving men. Contrast with Jane Austen!
I say ‘I suspect’ it. There may be good reasons for the isolation. But it’s something that makes me wonder.
One major cause for people to have a preconceived notion of the past is a tendency to see human history only as a one-way road, or an arrow, to ever-increasing freedoms and “rationality”, perhaps for political reasons.
I.e. in this somewhat simplistic view, women and minority had absolutely zero rights in the past, and they gradually gained more rights only recently. While this view isn’t actually “false”, it’s a simplification of a much more complex reality.
There have always been waves of liberation and change, followed by waves of conservatism, and also a lot of regional variance and a lot of people acting in creative ways to circumvent social restrictions.
As for women having relations with other women, my wife is an Engineering student that always says that she doesn’t go out of her way to have friendships with other women. She has them, but they are few. Of course, she has a mother, a sister, a sister-in-law, lots of nieces, and she interacts with all of them.
I suspect there’s cultural pressure affecting women not associating with women. If it’s perceived as “superior” to associate with men, and women in general are perceived as silly/shallow/not as good, that sort of feeds on itself. (And note the anger of those who argue this here, the insistence that the article wants to “force” them to do things in a different way than they have done.)
In many cases of oppression or suppression, the oppressed can be major champions and perpetuators of that oppression. q.v. foot-binding or genital mutilation. It’s one way the power structure sustains itself.
A while back I was in a collaboration that failed. Male author had idea of very strictly separated genders in sf setting (females half the size of males, but industrialization meant they could catch up via machines and accordingly altered perceptions of female intelligence and capability). I loved the idea and had a grand time with it–and scared the ever-living shit out of him, to the point that the project stalled and never got started again.
What scared him was the fact that the little women wittering around below belt level not only talk to each other, they have whole separate lives and even languages apart from the men–which I was basing firmly on heavily male-dominated human cultures. Gentleman and scholar and proud champion of women’s rights though he was, he could not wrap his mind around it. He wanted the world to be all about the men, and the women learning to be more like men, so they could have better lives.
The idea that they might already have lives, and in fact separate lives that didn’t have much to do with the men at all and might even actively exclude them, was totally not on his radar. It made him deeply uncomfortable, so much so he couldn’t continue.
That’s where I see one of the points of Kate’s article. The ability to see women all over the culture, and to recognize that they have lives and thoughts and even agency. Even under heavy suppression, they’re still thinking, feeling, acting, doing whatever they can to not only exist but make a go of things within whatever limits society places on them.
Just because the men can’t see them, or hear them, or realize there’s anything to notice, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Or shouldn’t be there.
If I am, for example, writing about a patriarchal world where it is my fervent belief that only men had agency, then I may simply not believe women existed in any meaningful way beyond being sexual receptacles for men, the bearers of their sons, with maybe some soft-focus lesbian hijinks in the harem with or without the man around. As we all know, naked writhing harem scenes are totes realistic unlike (say) extensive land-holding by women in the ancient world, a woman running a business, or a king’s daughter fighting on the battlefield [all attested in the historical record].
How about combining harem scenes with women running the country? It did happen in the Ottoman Empire, during the 17h century, the so called “sultanate of women”.
I love everything about this article, because I’m like Courtney. I usually hang out with men and find it much easier to interact with men than with women. I would like to relate a funny story about how consciously putting women into a story takes effort, even for women.
I wrote a novel and set it in a matriarchy. Guess what gender I made the soldiers and the nobles? Men. I had to consciously place women in roles of power and in the military. At first it was a real effort, then as I switched gender roles and added more men, the story became very gender balanced.
So a lot of what Kate is saying here about redefining how we think about our stories is incredibly valid. She just gives us a lot of good points to think about as we write. And while I would suggest using her post as a guideline, it’s like all writing advice: take what you need and leave the rest, but always leave yourself room to grow.
Elvensnow@5: thank you for demonstrating Kate’s point.
You have no female friends. Okay. That doesn’t mean you never speak to women. Unless you live an isolated life in the wilderness, you probably speak with half a dozen (or more!) women every day. That you don’t recognize their existence is exactly the problem Kate is noting: some writers completely overlook the existence of 50% of the population, despite them being, literally, all over the damn place.
Do you shop for groceries? I bet your checkout clerk is female at least half the time. Buy coffee? Look your barista in the eyes sometime, see if they’re female. How about clothes and shoes? You only buy those on the internet, or do you go to a store? I bet the sales clerk is female.
Go to any sort of office? The receptionist, clerical staff, assistants/aides, etc are almost certainly female, and you have to exchange at least a few sentences with them. (And that’s before we even consider that the professional person you’re going to see may be -gasp!- female.)
Looking for something in a store but can’t find it? Do you just give up and go home, or do you ask an employee to point you in the right direction? I see a lot of women working in Home Depot, wearing those orange aprons, happy to tell me where I’ll find the window caulking or de-icer or plumber’s tape.
You’re on the internet. How many people do you interact with here? Do you know their genders? I bet lots and lots of them are female.
“Interact with other women” doesn’t mean “be best chums with them.” It means that the odds of anyone getting through their day without saying a single word to a female person are virtually zero in any environment with even modest social freedom.
If a writer is trying to postulate a society where women are actively and aggressively oppressed (which is the only kind where they won’t be roughly half the people walking around), then the author is still missing the logical reality that if the only people women are allowed to talk to is other women, they’ll be doing that, and forming their own kinds of networks and social structures.
Are there women like you who don’t have any female friends? Sure. And heck, for fictive purposes, an author can postulate that the character is an orphan and has no siblings or cousins, and never interacts with another woman in any capacity, however minor. At which point “she is the only woman in existence” becomes a character trait, and that book should be very interesting indeed.
I realize I’m coming from a male perspective when I read stories —
I’ve just read a story in which a team is investigating an old building (won’t bore you with details). From that first page, I assumed the person in charge was male (the person was only referred to as “boss,” and nothing in the person’s actions or thoughts led me to believe otherwise). So I was somewhat surprised to learn on page 2 that *her* name was Barbara.
Is this just my male perspective making this gender assumption? Would a female reader make the same assumption (given typical societal programming), or assume the person was a woman?
If the team is simply investigating a building, and no personal name is used, would it be wrong to have a specific action and/or thought to imply sooner to the reader that the character was female? Or, would this detract from the equality of the character, that it doesn’t matter the gender of the “boss”?
And if the latter, will we *ever* get away from our own personal assumptions?
#5 elvensnow
I talk to women every day, most of whom are not my friends. That’s the core of what I’m trying to say.
Sometimes talking to women will include kinship (which can be negative or positive but is usually important in a person’s life), sometimes friendship, sometimes business, often a passing encounter with the clerk at the grocery store or the innkeeper at the D&D village along the road. What I do not say is that every female character must have a passle of BFFs because I am aware that not all female experience is the same, and furthermore I don’t want it to be the same. I specifically at the end of that section use the words “some, all, or many” to suggest there will be variety in experience and that this variety is what matters most.
I hear you about growing up as a tomboy–which I most definitely was. Not sure how much my interests were “masculine” — in retrospect I would say I’m a jock at heart, just wanted to be outdoors climbing trees and running around (it’s just that was coded as “masculine” back then). I don’t know how to use makeup properly, and I can’t walk in high heels. My experience with friendship has been different from yours in that regard, and those differences are what (imo) make for great narrative.
#1 Lisamarie
“the ‘stand in for all women’ issue.”
Yeah. This is one of the biggest reasons to include variety in characterization.
#8 jere7my
That Nero! Always going against the grain. And yeah — there’s a great story thread that could be easily put into a fantasy novel. Also the “you like my younger brother better so I have to kill both of you!” gambit, which happened at least once in the Diadochi period. FUN!
–E (#16), while I agree with your overall point, I have to say that it’s actually not that hard in modern society for some professional women to have zero contact with other women in their day. I have days at work when I quite literally speak to no other women, because all my co-workers on that one project are guys. I don’t have time to run errands on the days that I work, so I don’t speak to clerks or baristas or gas station attendants. At home, I have a son and a husband. Yes, because I’m an author, I maintain a twitter presence and answer emails and such, but there are some days I’m too busy for that (and if I weren’t an author, I wouldn’t have even that chance of contact because I wouldn’t be spending much time online). So while the odds of me getting through, say, an entire week without speaking to another woman may be low, the odds for any one day are actually disturbingly reasonable. (I do not at all say this is a good thing. Just that it can and does happen. Which makes it all the more important for me and women like me to realize we have a big ol’ blind spot created by our lives as Smurfette, that we should examine and address.)
#12 Rene That’s a great point about “history as a one-way arrow” when (imo) reading history often shows how much we retain over generations in terms of human behavior.
#14 Ryamano — the Ottoman Empire is a good example — and yet look how Western reports defined the empire as therefore decadent and “weak” because of female influence. We see the same thing in Greek views of Persia, even though Persia was a powerful empire — their rulers are sometimes described as being “too influenced by women”
# 20 Courtney — And that is exactly the kind of thing that is so important to take into account when a writer is thinking through how their particular societies (in their fiction) work. Not just “how does this society function” but “how does this individual’s life within their society function.”
I think #1 is still the hardest. Many writers default to only having one woman character in a cast of 50. Some of the worst examples I’ve read of this are by women! The women writers usually have their character as the protagonist, but no other women. Seriously, if that were that few women in the world, all the men would be going to war over her!
This is a great article and I like how you have broken down each aspect plus the usual cliches to give people a thorough view into this issue. It’s one I find particularly irritating as a female reader/viewer and an aspiring fantasy writer because of the common way women are depicted in these stereotypes in the mainstream. Not always but still enough to make my eyes roll and put me off otherwise good books or other media. And so much of it comes down to what you and George R R Martin say about portraying women as just human beings (Women – human? Shocking I know.)
Writing the opposite sex can be hard (I worry about whether I write men accurately), but honestly I have such fun with it because as a someone with an acting background Ive always enjoyed getting into other people’s heads and one thing we were always taught was ‘dont judge your character, even if they are the villain.’ We are human beings first and genders second. Of course cultural conditioning and hormones do play a big part but I think men and women are alot more similar than most people believe.
Also as a writer the thing Im learning most about is research. If you don’t know something – that’s fine, but go and find out. Here you cite examples from history and talking to an expert. Often by going to the facts you find much more interesting and rich sources of inspiration then relying on a tired old cliche and your worldbuilding becomes so much fuller and deeper. My mother researching her historical fiction novel on the conquest of the Americas found an amazing tale of the Nun Lieutenant – which shows sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction!
BTW Kate I wanted to say thank you for the Spiritwalker Trilogy as I just finished them recently and thoroughly enjoyed them especially for their feisty female lead, Darcy-esque anti hero and some truly amazing world building. After a load of awful fantasy books it was a breath of fresh air.
Martyh@17: Yep, women have the same reaction. That is the problem calls for diversity are trying to address: that with no specific indication of a character’s gender, color, sexuality, etc etc, readers–virtually ALL readers, at least in English–will have a default assumption that a character is male, white, hetero, able-bodied (and probably 25ish, +/- 5 years).
(The stereotypes work the other way, too: e.g., assumption that a nurse character is female. That a hotel maid is Hispanic, or a streetcorner drug dealer is Black. Yet in the real world, some nurses are men, plenty of hotel maids are white, and drug dealers come in all colors.)
The cure for this is to do more of this breaking of reader assumptions. If someone reads several stories where “boss” turns out to be female, they might quit defaulting to male in their assumptions.
One could do a lot worse than examine how Terry Pratchett deals with women characters.
He seems to manage to depict believable (if sometimes exagerated) female characters in both lead (the Witches, Susan Sto-Helit) and supporting (Adora-Belle Dearheart, Sgts Angua and Littlebottom, Lady Sybil) roles that are interesting and feel like they exist as distinct entities even when they are interacting with male characters.
Interestingly I find his weakest female characters are the “dragged up” women soldiers in Monstrous Regiment.
@13
He wanted the world to be all about the men, and the women learning to be more like men, so they could have better lives.
The idea that they might already have lives, and in fact separate lives
that didn’t have much to do with the men at all and might even actively exclude them, was totally not on his radar
Ahh, the great white knight effect. Behold o women, the largesse which we shall bring you by making you more like men.
Actually I’d quite like to read that book. Although what I’d like a whole lot more is a pair of books, one written from each gender’s POV, with the same start and endpoints, but with totally different ways of getting there. I think there could be some really interesting subversions from both sides of the fence, especially when you get the whole view the same scene from completely different perspectives thing, kind of the way Peter Brett has been trying in the Demon Cycle.
@26: I love Lady Sybil. And yet, in the book where she’s introduced, she never speaks to another woman (or even, if I recall correctly, another female, talk about reader assumptions!). We’re told that she works with mostly women in her dragon-rescue and dragon-breeding activities; we even meet a few of those women. But we meet them when they talk to Sam Vimes; Sybil herself is in the house waiting to talk to him alone. The women never speak to each other.
I just thought that’s interesting, in the light of this discussion.
I love (most of) Pratchett’s women. But he did have to grow into treating women as oridnary people.
Good article that gave me a lot to think about, and a good spirited discussion that gave me even more to think about. This kind of dialogue is why I love Tor.com.
@27 Mayhem One of these days I want to try at least my half of the book–would have to make sure it’s OK with the collaborator. It was so much fun, and I was startled when he bounced off so hard he never came back.
Taught me a lot about power dynamics and the finer points of (completely sincere and well-meaning) sexism. And why so many male writers disappear or objectify the women, even when they’ve trying not to. (Women writers, too. We’re all culturally conditioned to do this.)
When asked how he writes women so well, George RR Martin says, “You know, I’ve always considered women to be people.” Internet creates a MEME to support him.
Kate Elliot writes an excellent and well-reasoned post on Tor.com about “Writing Women as Human Beings.” Internet loses its mind and nickpicks the hell out of it.
I call the whole being-the-only-woman-at-the-table thing “Dorothy Parker Syndrome.” If you don’t like the traditional stereotypes of “girly” stuff, you can always hang out with the boys. If you are in a male-dominated profession, it can feel warm and comfortable getting to do the “cool” stuff most women don’t get to do and being The Girl surrounded by all those guys, especially if you used to be a tomboy.
But that has not-so-great parts. For example, consider what happens when one or more other women enter that scenario. The men become a lot less “understanding” (now feeling threatened by the possibility that more of that 51% world plurality might show up and ruin their majority rule) and the women, if they don’t stop to consider what’s going on, find themselves in vicious competition for that same pedestal spot. If they band together, the men often turn on them both. Men talk about how a woman (or two) coming into a situation can “ruin” it, without stopping to consider their own contribution to the dynamic.
There’s also the issue that you’re basically internalizing male attitudes toward and about women (which are often nasty and corrosive), and what women like, without examining them. Writing without thinking hard about what you’re writing at some point in the process does not lead to great or original storytelling.
From a practical point of view, the stories you can write about such a situation are very limited. Women are slightly over half the population on Earth. Scenarios where a woman is the *only* female in a group of men therefore can only ever apply to a minority of women in the world. The rest of us end up having to hang out with each other for lack of an adoring guy pack. Fortunately, women are starting to do more “guy stuff” with each other, so it’s not all *that* tragic.
As a writer of historically accurate steampunk (if you see what I mean) I’ve never done anything alse. I blame my upbringing in a matriarchal London family :-)
In fact I noticed, in my latest novel, there are considerably fewer male characters than female (there’s the protagonist’s love interest, of course, readers do love him partly because she’s so horrible to him most of the time). I think I probably need to work on that.
However the girls don’t need to do guy stuff – unless it’s appropriate to the character. Of all the stories I’ve written only one female lead was kick-ass. The others are “merely” clever.
From a thematic viewpoint I find writing Victorian steampunk allows me to highlight gender and race issues effectively without being obvious or letting them overpower the plot.
There’s some interesting comments in this post, reading this from a male perspective – my one observation I would make that on this topic (and any other topic), even given the write what you know instructions we were all likely given on our earliest composition assignments, unless you are writing a very introspective, limited participant/situation piece, simply relying on your own experiences or personally known anectodes is going to provide a very limited story/world-building, etc., etc.
All that aside, I do understand someone stating that they may have little interaction with one sex or another. I take public transit nearly every day and everywhere I go, I certainly go shopping, today I had to take to the pharmacist and several offices via telephone. So I certainly ‘spoke’ with a fair number of females today, as I do every day. But I wouldn’t say I really had a conversation with any of them. Some of the pharmacy techs I have dealt with for nearly a year; I could describe them physically and the one I have in mind, I could say is attentive, kind, perhaps even compassionate would be a good descriptor. But it would be a very shallow charactization because I ultimately really know very little about her other than the most surface of things. Anything about her interior life, say, I would need to imagine.
On the other hand, because she has access to my medical records and some of my recent medical history, in addition to our brief interactions the past year, given a good imagination, she could probably paint a more interesting character sketch about me!
Well, there are still places/situations where women are a minority. Electronics engineering and some of the more technical professions, for instance. It would be unusual for a story set in the present day or earlier to have as many women engineers as men working on a large project. When it comes to science fiction literature, I think that tends to skew things towards male characters.
But, at least in my country (Brazil), there are plenty of professional environments that are more balanced. Lawyer offices, for instance. Women make up more than 50% of judges and lawyers. It would be unrealistic for a large law firm to have only one female lawyer.
Also, there are no excuses for more fantasy-oriented stories, like those featuring superheroes, magic, or psi powers. People in the Internet love to bash Chris Claremont, but for all his faults, his X-Men stories were real eye-openers on this. Other superteams always had just one token family, but Claremont eventually gave us teams with a majority of female characters.
I like this article a lot, and I especially appreciate this articulation:
People interested in reflecting more specifically on the women of Pratchett’s Discworld may like to read Tansy Rayner Roberts’s series of essays on that topic.
One insight that I also think follows from Ms. Elliott’s piece is the point that, since doing evil things is part of the human condition, some women characters will do evil things. We gotta make room for unlikeable women protagonists, and for women who do evil things as they climb political ladders, like Claire Underwood and Kai Winn.
I’m also curious whether anyone in this discussion has done the Writing The Other workshop, and whether they found it also helped them write characters of genders that they’re not.
Three very useful pieces of advice. Thank you.
@Elvensnow: Even if you don’t have female friends, that still puts you in the minority of girls. The vast majority of women I know, see, and interact with everyday, have friendships with other women and girls. Sure, some of them have frienships with guys too (myself, included), but the fact remains that most women have female friends. Many stories don’t adequately represent this dynamic, and go towards that cliche of a woman who only interacts or makes friends with men.
P.S. I don’t understand why some people confess that they only skimmed through the majority of an article, as if it’s a talent to not read something fully before throwing a criticism on it.
Great article! I really enjoyed a fresh take on the old question. I always enjoy having female characters in different roles than the cliches, and I enjoy having them interact with other females too. Many stories do one, but not the other, or vice versa. For example, Dory from Finding Nemo is a female comedic character, but she lacks a lot of interaction with other female fish ;)
When I read a book in which all of the characters are cardboard-cutout (male and female), then fine, I accept this is just bad writing. If the plot and setting are compelling enough I’ll keep reading, but I have to wade through all the poor characterization and dialogue to get there.
But when I read a book in which there is a cast of well-written men with complex motivations and emotional arcs, scattered with a few token female characters that each fit a trope, THEN I get aggravated. For one thing, because it is lazy writing! Instead of continuing the character-building work done for the main guys, the author just copied some easy traits and plots from other books and plunked it in to make an easy character. I cannot abide laziness!
If you are looking for a fantasy author or two that writes women well I might suggest Steven Erikson and also Cam Esslemont, both of the Malazan world. *
Theirs is a broad tapestry of characters, hundreds and thousands perhaps, male and female, and placed into all levels and situations and circumstances. A truly diverse array of them in a world where although there are some patriarchal societies there are also plenty that dispense with that notion.
Lorn, Tavore, Laseen, Tattersail, Korlat, Hellian, Shimmer, Felisin, Blend, Picker, Vorcan, Taya, Tissera, Janath, Rucket, Seren, Kilava, Challice, Olar Ethil, Silverfox, Kiska, Yan Tovis… I could go on listing. I find them both believable and relateable, empresses, queens, generals, mages, mothers, daughters, it matters not.
* I’m a Malazan apologist. I think it’s one of the best fantasy series written. :)
Great article, and thanks for bringing up so many issues that have been coming up all over webland lately. It always puzzles me how people who can write a story about a peasant boy running away to join the army, proving himself, and then discovering he’s heir to a throne, can complain that stories where women and girls have any kind of agency (and don’t get raped) are unrealistic.
And thanks for raising the age of marriage thing too. The Northern European versus Mediterranean marriage pattern is a great insight. I’ve noticed that Lady Capulet’s offhand comment to Juliette (about her own early marriage and motherhood) in Romeo and Juliette is often cited as evidence that all girls were married and mothers by their early teens everywhere in the old days. I’ve often wondered about that, as age at first menarche isn’t usually until 14-17 in pre-industrial societies, and there’s generally a 2-3 year sub fertile period too. From a purely reproductive standpoint, it makes little sense for older men to be marrying 13-14 year old girls, though of course marriage served a political role too. But you can see how it could start a downward spiral. Girls starting to have babies before they’re fully developed probably means a higher maternal mortality, which creates more older widowers and might increase the economic pressure to marry daughters off even younger.
There’s also that odd idea that fantasy societies have to be A. based (even loosely) on medieval Europe or any other culture that has ever existed, and B. That the way things played out in the history of our world is the only way things ever could have worked out in a parallel world.
This is a great article for sure. I only take exception to the first statement. Not becuase I don’t believe women interacting with women, but that all women want or need to interact that way. There are many women who really dislike interacting with other women or find themselves really not looking forward to that interaction. I have known many women who would much rather be alone than deal with a group of women. There really are women who don’t want to deal with the emotions and conversations about families that is the norm.
Writing that woman is more interesting to me. The woman who is looking for someone, male or female, who is willing to talk about things beyond family, business, etc. That is the interesting character.
The rest of this article is spot on and I agree with it.
This article is very apropos because I realised just yesterday how much webcomics embody this kind of balanced and multifaceted storytelling.
It seems very much a case of writers being able to explore the stories they want to tell, free of any considerations of whether “the market” wants it. Even some of the webcomics with more stereotypical beginnings have evolved into wonderfully rich and diverse casts of characters.
Excluding gag strips, this is my current “pull” list: Something Positive, Questionable Content, Sinfest, Dumbing of Age, Girls with Slingshots, Goblins, Gunnerkrigg Court, Girl Genius, Broodhollow, Code Name: Hunter, Monster Pulse, Dresden Codak, Drive, Brainchild, The Last Halloween, The Last Saturday, and Namesake (a brilliant recent addition). Plus there have been some great self-contained or now-finished works: Nimona, Starslip, Penny and Aggie, the Good Crook, Digger.
Characters here include: the octogenarian starship captain, the mad scientist hereditary ruler of a living castle; the cyborg teenager abandoned by dad; the bar owner managing a cast of misfits who has a best friend running a phone sex business; the child fighting through a premature apocalypse, the spirit guide and medium to a forest-dwelling folk; the spunky secret agent; the hero on a quest to retrieve a tribal hierloom kept in slavery for many years and only recently freed; the alcoholic 30-something living at home with mum due to ongoing fiscal and personal irresponsibility; the devout Christian forced to re-evaluate their worldview by staying in a college dorm; the royal tirelessly working to save their world from otherworldly creatures without making the situation public; someone traumatised by apparent mental delusions which may be real; and the reincarnation of a fairy tale persona adopted by Cheshire Cats.
I hope you would all agree that this is an amazingly diverse set of characters. They live in some of the most creative and fun fictional universes I have ever encountered! Oh, and they are all girls.
That’s not why I keeping reading these stories though. I just like how they tell stories with depth and integrity that feel more grounded than 99% of mainstream entertainment out there.
Lisa –
I hear you. I am a guy that doesn’t like three of the favorite subjects men talk about when in all-male non-nerd groups: professional sports, cars, and complaining about their wives/girlfriends.
Thanks for this Kate. Maybe one day we won’t need to be writing essay’s like this one.
Great article. The best stories have strong characters driving the plot. Female characters should be as well written as male, the realism of characters allows for empathy, empathy draws the reader in to fully immerse into the world of the book. My female characters certainly converse with each other, as is natural in our world, so it is in theirs.
@RosaWatkinson
@@@@@ Lisa, and others, who have commented that women not wanting to interact with other women or have female friends is realistic…
Yes, such a character is realistic, although I would argue realistic as an example of an unusual woman, not a typical woman, in many societies. I would further argue that such a character would not be a reasonable or healthy character, that a person who holds the opinion that an entire half of the population holds some sort of combined set of traits that make them monolithically undesirable to befriend, is a character who shows a stunning lack of imagination in what other people must be like. Such a woman would be a stunted, prejudiced character indeed.
She might be prejudiced and stunted in this manner because her society, in historically having valuing things that men do and de-valuing what women do, has raised her to be that way. That would be very realistic.
And it might not be a bad thing for a story that she is a stunted and prejudiced character….characters are interesting sometimes just as much for their flaws as for their virtues, especially the self-desctructive ones.
But, I’ve read a lot of stories that featured female characters who felt at odds with other women, or described a female character in such a way that made it clear that her Difference, Smartness, Athleticism, Tomboyness, Somehow-More-Maleness, etc, made her Better Than The Average Woman. Either the woman herself was prejudiced in this way, or the narrative was. The point of those stories wasn’t about the believed superiority due to these traits, and prejudice against women who don’t have them, (either on the part of the character herself, or just her author) being something unhealthy and unreasonable to learn from and grow out of. Rather, those are the aspects about her we are supposed to find praiseworthy. The prejudiced belief, that all other women are 1) remotely the same as each other and 2) as a class of people have little to offer, is being at worst unconsciously perpetuated, and at best, celebrated.
Well, maybe that’s fine too. Not every story has to have a moral, or a moral that I agree with.
But I do think it noteworthy, and alarming, that not only is a representation of this type of woman overly common in SF and Fantasy, relative to the likely small numbers of women like her who would exist in many believable SF&F worlds; so too, seem to be her defenders…among, most especially, women who read SF&F and see something in that type of woman that resembles ourselves.
If that woman must be writen about more than she already has been, let’s write about her learning from and growing out of such a secluded perspective.
“Such a woman would be a stunted, prejudiced character indeed.”
Isn’t that a bit judgmental? The term “stunted” sounds a bit offensive.
If people prefer the company of the opposite gender, so be it. It’s their life. Yes, it’s wrong to assume that 50% of people share traits, yet if you really want to avoid certain traits, it is good strategy to look at the other half.
Like I said, I’m a guy that doesn’t like professional sports. I don’t make the mistake of thinking all guys like sports, or that no women are into football. Yet, if I strike a conversation with a group of women, the chances that they want to discuss last night’s ball game are lesser than if I join an all-male group.
Great post! Thanks for writing it.
I love this article’s intention, but I got about 2 paragraphs down this article and immediately decided that the tertiary (and secondary) character premise was essentially short changing the fact that recent-ish primary characters (Leesha Paper, Karris White Oak, Princess Leia, Fantine) are sufficiently complex and self deriving characters that an interaction with a tertiary (or secondary) male character need neither end in a derogatory or patronising fashion nor immediately set the female up as a damsel in distress. Yes, women talk to women more than men but that premise permeating the article as strongly as it does is equally as disingenuous to male readers as it might be considered to Temple Grandin. Look her up…
Some interesting prejudices surfacing here….
#51
“are sufficiently complex and self deriving characters that an
interaction with a tertiary (or secondary) male character need neither
end in a derogatory or patronising fashion nor immediately set the
female up as a damsel in distress.”
Well, no, Michael, that has absolutely nothing to do with the premise behind my tertiary (and secondary) character premise. Sorry.
Thank you all for your comments. This is a fascinating conversation.
It was lovely to get a rundown of some current webcomics as well.
#24 Starsaphire: Thank you so much for the kind words on the Spiritwalker Trilogy. I’m so glad you enjoyed it.
I want to make another comment about this element of women talking to women because I’m intrigued by the way some have read the comment to mean I’m stating that every women in a story must have female friends and that all women must want to talk about makeup and clothes (or whatever).
Embedded in the idea of having “enough women in a narrative that they can talk to each other” is the fundamental idea of having enough women characters that they can have very different personalities and ways of functioning within the plot. That means one woman character might, indeed, mostly or solely talk to men, while another would talk to men and women equally, while yet another might mostly talk to women. The point isn’t that all women MUST want to interact with other women but rather that in too many books they aren’t allowed to because there aren’t enough women characters to do so or because the way the plot is structured always keeps them apart or doesn’t even recognize that women talking to women can be important.
*is not a writer* I vote with my money to support the writers who have my gender be part of the world in a way that reads believable to me ^^.
These days I will read a new author who was recommended by trusted reader friends or blogs if she is female – if I don’t find her to have women with various versions of agency in her book, preferably as protagonist or at least part of a group of protagonists, too, then I am unlikely to read another book by her.
I hardly ever read male writers’ books now. There are so many books I still want to read and the chance that a woman won’t be included in any meaningful way is just so much higher with a male writer.
I’m sure I miss out on some good books that way. I always will – see: there are so many good books. I’m fine with that.
Thank you for this article – I’ve been reading you since your first book ^^ (although not all of your series have been my cup of tea, heh).
A subtle way of doing this is giving a female character with agency a gender neutral or male name/nickname.
“A female character who behaves like a guy and is portrayed as “one of the boys” or “as good as a man” in a way that elevates her above all those uninteresting women whose lives consist of boring-women-things doesn’t elevate women characters on the whole, nor does it show respect for the historical diversity of women’s lives in the particular.”
@51 — As an autistic woman who not only understands but agrees with this article, I’m not sure what point you were trying to make by citing Temple Grandin. I very much doubt she’d back your assertion that token representation of women is realistic or adequate.
(Though if we’re going there, I would love to see a post like this on portraying disabled characters as human beings, too. Mental and physical disability representation in literature is godawful.)
Great article, Kate! Really loved it. Also enjoyed reading the comments.
This is an interesting discussion. I’ve been one of those women who’s tended to gravitate towards men too, probably because so many of my interests were towards things that were male dominated. But I’ve had some very important female relationships too. I think it’s very tempting to take pride in being a “man’s woman” or whatever one wants to call it, since the trappings of traditional femininity are generally regarded as being boring, frivilous and so on.
It’s amazing how many women I’ve run across who insist that they prefer male characters in novels, either because they like to fall in love with them a little (I can certainly understand that), or more problematically, because they think female characters are irritating, shallow, uninteresting. I don’t know how much of this is because some of us have been conditioned to dislike our own gender, and how much of it’s simply because so many fiction writers (outside of female-focused genres) have written female characters in shallow, annoying ways.
I did something recently with the novel I’m shopping right now–counted up all the named characters by gender. I figured I had more female than male characters, but in fact the opposite was actually true. It wasn’t a huge discrepancy, but it’s got maybe 55% male to 45% female. And I purposely created a fantasy world where men and women both held power and can do many of the same jobs.
I think the fact that many of us grew up reading tradtional stories where the overwhelming majority of characters were male has warped our sense of proportion. I remember reading years ago that said research showed that people percieve any gender ratio on a TV show or movie where there are more than about 1/3 female characters as being female dominated (and therefore of no interest to men in particular). I hope this is something we can train ourselves out of. This certainly explains why the preponderance of speaking roles go to men in movies.
This post of mine got too long, but thanks for writing such an interesting article.
@GuruJ: I absolutely agree about the webcomics thing. I only found the medium about 2 years ago, and only really started getting into it in the last year, but webcomics are a great way to find stories that subvert the norm, in terms of gender, race, orientation, etc. The creators are more free to pursue what they want to write, instead of sticking to the status quo.
I second your suggestions of Girl Genius, Gunnerkrigg Court, Namesake and Nimona, and add to the list: Agents of the Realm, Balderdash, Cucumber Quest, Demon Street, Paranatural, and Witchy, some of which are just starting out but all of which do their best to incorporate diverse characters.
IMO most writers don’t think carefully enough about what they are writing, full stop. The need to accept good criticism to discover short-comings is essential. Even better, challenge as many assumptions as possible.
Some people are incapable of writing realistic characters, full stop, regardless of gender.
I’m not entirely sure what a “male role” is, though. Is a woman who joins a mercenary company and engages in siege warfare indulging in “masculine” behavior, or is she simply doing what the reader — if not the other characters, depending on the setting — expects of a human being in a setting where goblins, dragons, brigands and other assorted dangers pose a constant threat? (I never thought of Elizabeth Moon’s Paksenarrion, for instance, as “more male” than a woman who doesn’t fight on the front lines.)
@55, I practically only read female authors now, aside from GRRM, Stephen King and some Star Wars EU authors.
At the end of the day, even if the female authors write problematic characters(Oh, Patricia Briggs and Your Exceptional Women), other aspects of the story that are realistic in regards to a woman’s lived experience, so it is somewhat redeemed. Male authors, if they fail their characters, the rest of the story is pretty irredeemable.
There’s only a few times when I read a book and notice that an author doesn’t “get” a gender right. Maybe it’s because I’m selective with what I read. One example that comes to mind was one of the Anita Blake books I read just because people told me it was so bad it was good, where the villain says he’ll force the heroine to endure a striptease made by another woman. Anita asks why he’d want that, and he says maybe he’s like other men and has lesbian fantasies. And then he gives up on that and forces Anita to watch a stripper give a lapdance to her boyfriend. Maybe I’m too jaded after having watched “Silence of the lambs” and other serial killer stuff, but I think if a man was as fucked up as that villain he wouldn’t demand or say tame things like that in that situation. It was obvious that time it was a middle-aged woman writing about how she thought a sexually deviant man would say, and she couldn’t fathom how his head worked. There are other examples of that, and I think they might be more numerous in the cases of men writing about women, but that was the example that most jarred me. Most of the time, though, I don’t even notice the gender of the writer, and I think the writers do a good job of making believable characters of both genders.
I think one of the ways the default portrayal of women as victims of inequality and/or violence and as uninteresting, and the lack of agency connected to those portrayals, is dangerous, is that men look around at the women in their lives, see that the women they know have agency, and therefore literally cannot see how patriarchy and racism and sexism and ableism limit, confine and damage women’s lives in very real ways today.
The vast majority of entertainment shows that violence and inequality are the defining charactertics of women; if real women don’t centralize
violence and inequality they way women in fiction do, that violence and inequality cannot therefore exist. The extreme example of this is rape, and how a woman has to be half dead and emotionally shattered in order for most people to believe she has been sexually assaulted.
@62 – I think the idea is that ‘stereotypically’ is the key word. I struggeld with this growing up, as I tended to have mostly “male” interests and personality traits, and so I did develop a disdain for ‘feminine’ things. Eventually after a lot of study and thought I realized that I was expressing my feminity in all of those things that were supposedly ‘male’ – and also that some of my disdain for things traditionally associated with being ‘feminine’ was rooted in sexism because we view them as somehow lesser (things like raising children, or even stuff like wearing makeup). And of course there are men who are interested in and excel in those feminine things but are no less men.
My aunt appeared in family pictures in trousers when the women around her wore dresses, often smoked cigars, and loved to drink and go fishing. She definitely didn’t fit the society around her, nor want to do things customarily associated with her gender. She converted to Catholicism, became a nun, and dedicated her entire life to serving mankind. She specialized in public works support at Catholic hospitals around the country. One of the finest, interesting, colorful, and most selfless persons I ever met. Some people fit molds, other people break them.
@66. I agree. I’ve always had more “feminine” interests than “masculine,” and have been called the usual assortment of names for it. I guess what I’m going for is that personality traits and interests are only considered masculine or feminine in the first place because we’re told they are, and the stereotype perpetuates itself. They’re not mutually exclusive, either; a woman can be a fighter and also be compassionate, and neither of these things should make her “more male” or “more female.” So many character issues could be resolved if people stopped getting stuck on thinking “oh, she’s such a dude” or “he’s in touch with his feminine side.”
Yup, funny thing is, my husband is the one that stays at home with the kids, does most of the cooking (although I do enjoy cooking, I just don’t have the time) and enjoys baking, costuming, etc. Although he also does stuff like do the yard work and is more mechanical than I am. He had some of the same issues growing up.
I don’t so much mind the idea of a person being in touch with their feminine side because I think masculinity and feminity are things/concepts – they just are not as shallow and concise as we make them out to be or as linked with biological sex as we make them out to be. And I think both men and women have those sides in varying degrees and that all men and women should be in touch with both sides. But that’s all very philosophical, haha.
As far as defying stereotypes go, my wife is much more skilled at mechanics, mathematics, driving, finding directions, than I am. She likes automobiles and motorcycles. I’m more the dreamy, distracted kind that has trouble going anywhere I’m not used to.
My wife is more skeptical and science-inclined than I am. I am more the mystical kind, I am the one with the deep interest in new age stuff and spirituality (though I also like science). If we ever get trapped in a haunted house, I will be the one the ghosts show themselves to, and my wife will be the skeptic that thinks it’s the wind or creaking boards.
Also, we really like to do things together. We’re both loners, sort of, so I don’t have a bunch of guy friends, and she doesn’t have a bunch of girl friends.
“Also, we really like to do things together. We’re both loners, sort of, so I don’t have a bunch of guy friends, and she doesn’t have a bunch of girl friends.” – hah, this describes our marriage a lot too. Although we’ve both lately been feeling maybe we should make some other friends, haha.
I always gulp when I read articles like this; I psych myself out by thinking, “my Gods, she’s right, I have to be careful… guys like me have been screwing up Lit with ladies in it for a really long time.” Im probably working myself up into a panic attack just worrying “I’m literally going to write some short story that I can sell and the Patriarchy is going to love it and then a female reader is going to comment that she feels undone because this one female character I wrote was 2d uninteresting and completely side long.
But then I stop and think about it… Im in the middle of the Read a Different Kind of Author challenge (Non White, Male, Cis), and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of that (I have Catherine Valente’s Book 1 of the Orphan’s tales coming: mouth= water)
And I generally only like stories with a massive diversity of characterization (Avatar TLAB, Growing Up in Karhide, the Sandman (finished reading all of that 2 monthes ago: JOY))
And hell I like talking to chicks or non binary persons more than guys anyway (I live with 2 people on the non binary scale)
And I never just “write” a story anyway, I generally rewrite the bits of pieces I write 3 to 7 times just to make it right.
Nah dude, I got this… I GOT THIS… XD
The Alana books really play with the idea of the token female character. In the first two books, she’s the only woman because she’s training to be a knight and she sees herself as better than other women. In the third book she actually spends time with other women and is surprised to find she likes them.
Having a group of female friends is not the same as being stereotypically feminine. We mostly liked science and books and geeky stuff (and baking because everyone likes to eat delicious things). Having female friends does not equal putting makeup on each other and gossiping. People who think that way are the reason so many movies (and books although movies are worse) fail the bechdel test.
I think this was really good, but I want to add something. Since women don’t go around thinking about what their body looks like all the time, when an author writes something from a female PoV, the writing shouldn’t be focused on her looks either.
Suppose I’m in my office working. There’s a certain kind of author who would describe it roughly like this: “She sighed. This problem had turned out to be very difficult to fix. She clasped her white hands together and stretched her arms towards the ceiling, making her small firm bosom rise. No, right now she would not be able to make progress. She swung her swivel chair around with her long, slim legs, and rose to reach the book shelf.” This is super annoying.