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Strong Women!

By Kate Griffin
Related Categories: Claire North Posts, Writing

Many writers of fantasy/SF identify as feminist.  This is a Good Thing – by adopting the label and wearing it with pride, there is an inherent acknowledgment that genders are equal with each other.  That’s all it is – a simple thing.  Men are equal to women who are equal to men.  This is empowering for everyone, and I am delighted by how many people seem to get this, and grateful to all the writers who go out of their way to celebrate the equality of peoples by writing… well… people.  People who are male.  People who are female.  And occasionally people who don’t fall into either camp.  The heart of it is this: that they are people.  All of us people together, thank you very much gender equality, battle done.

Except….

… there is also a slightly awkward sub-section to this noble quest for equality in fantasy/SF, and that would be the Strong Woman.  And as a public service announcement, I thought it might be helpful to discuss a few things that people, including women – absolutely including me, since I am as guilty of cowardice in the depiction of gender as many can be when thinking about this – commit, thinking it is the same as writing Gender Identities who are also People.

  • ‘She was strong, beautiful and tough.’  Guys.  If you have to introduce your ninja-warrior female character with the words ‘she was strong’ then you are failing in the fundamental quest to give women actual personalities.  Certain words are applied to women differently from men.  ‘He was a strong man’ for example doesn’t actually mean ‘he knew who he was and was confident in his identity’ as it does with women, it means ‘he had big arms’.  Equally, we’re not meeting many from the camp of ‘feisty, assertive King Bruce, his handsome features framed by an iron crown, holding a sword as easily as if he’d trained with it his whole life, his red cloak highlighting the suppleness of his bare throat’, and I for one feel this is a void in our more balanced lives.  If you feel the need to say that a woman is ‘strong’ then something may have gone a wee bit wobbly at the characterisation stage.  I mean, I applaud the good intentions, but um.
  • Women who use sex.  Now, I’m not just talking about women as sexy sexy objects.  That’s still pretty much a given.  I’m talking about women who use sex to get their way.  And this is important, and many do, and it’s a perfectly valid character path to go down.  So long as it’s the best option going that a character has decided to use.  To put it another way: if your sorceress queen is capable of summoning an army of demons from the nether reaches at the flick of her fingertip, and yet still feels the need to coyly flirt with the hero while writhing her sensuous body before him, we are achieving inconsistent characterisation.  Male and female sexuality is vastly under-discussed and under-explored in most literature.  Having someone naked with thrusting hips is not necessarily an exploration of identity or sexual choice.  Stop.  Sit down.  Have a think.  Maybe have a cuppa tea too, just ‘cos you’re sitting here.
  • Motherhood.  We’re still pretty stuck in the SF/Fantasy trope of the maid (young, ‘feisty’, unmarried, no kids) the mother (fiercely protective of her flock, kind, emotionally mature) and the hag (older woman, no kids or kids narratively absent but usually no kids, brisk, often widowed).  And again, don’t get me wrong – I do this.  Kids can be narrative burden on a story where you don’t necessarily have time to deal with it.  But sometimes, just occasionally, it would perhaps be nice to see an old lady happy with kids, who can use a sword and talk back and who isn’t wise, and a young woman, who maybe has chosen not to have kids and is fine with that and not deeply, deeply regretful of the beauty of the world that she’s missed out on.  Again, throwing it out there: people being people.  Rather than people being uteruses that have either been tragically thwarted/defiantly scarred/fulfilled with the radiance of life.
  • Gratuitous rape.  We as a society need to talk about sexual violence, against women and men.  We need to talk about it, and actually discuss what it is that leads to sexual crime being perpetrated, and what the consequences are for those who survive it.  To put it another way: having three pages of a gang rape followed, thirty pages later, by the woman basically being ok because she’s ‘strong’ (again) is demeaning for society as a whole.  We can do better.  (We can absolutely do better than having women suffer sexual abuse and then worry that they’re no longer worthy of men!  That is not what shame means; world… better more, please….)
  • ‘It’s ok because it’s historical’.  Ah yes.  The endless catalogue of women who are sold into slavery, sexually demeaned, reduced to holding knitting in the background, or forced to get their way by marrying princes.  Sometimes they might get a sword, but that’s against great adversity.  (And yes!  Let’s talk about adversity!  Let’s make it more than three pages of adversity followed by the rest of the book it all being fine.)  These women cannot say what they want, or do what they want, because it’s not culturally/historically accurate.  IN A MADE UP WORLD.  IT’S MADE UP.  YOU MADE IT UP.  And maybe you made it up to discuss the oppression of gender – male and female – thank you Margaret Atwood et al.  OR MAYBE YOU MADE IT UP BECAUSE THERE’S SWORDS AND THE WOMEN HAPPEN TO BE OPPRESSED ANYWAY.  Just saying; let’s do better.
  • Dead wife = motivation.  And conveniently, by being killed within the first sixty pages, leaves the hero open to be healed through future encounters with a new sexy mate who will restore his confidence through her warm, healing strength and remarkably lithe body.  Once again, I feel we can do better here.
  • Tempted virgins.  Those religiously avowed virgin ladies who swore an oath to keep their bodies pure… there’s nothing like being brutally kidnapped, mocked by an evil sorcerer, saved at great peril by a dashing night, chased by dragons and fed elvish soup to make them doubt their oaths.  Because even if they were impressed by the size of that sword, they’re grateful.  Grateful grateful grateful.  And that’s why they forsake an entire lifetime of chastity and their ancient, potent vows to have the gratitude sex.  Yay.  (See also: noblewomen in charged political environments for whom pregnancy equals death, casually getting off with the hunky dude who holds the spear.  Every now and then this is an excellent trope that leads to fantastic stories full of adventure, romance and awesome daring-do.  Too often it’s a trope of women who after barely 25 years of knowing their minds, are swayed by nice arms and a lute joke.)
  • The awesome protagonist/sidekick munchkin.  Again, this is definitely something I’ve done – the amazing ninja-warrior-sorceress-space-pilot lady of awesomeness, who is very clearly smarter than the hero, stronger than the hero, better at making sushi than the hero, who is in every possible way the Dude of the Dudes, and yet… who’s every act, will and thought is subsumed towards the hero’s deeds.  Not in a big way.  Not in an overt ‘I must serve you my master’.  Just in that they believe entirely in what the hero is doing and like and respect the hero and will go to the ends of the world, awesomely, with their awesomeness, to help the hero out.  And yes, they’re awesome.  And no, they’re still not people.  Because as a person, I’m here to tell you that I have friends who I’d go to the ends of the earth for, but even for the ones I love, there would be a thing that could be done which would make me stop and more to the point, I have a life of my own, and one day they might need to come to the ends of the earth for me.  To put it another way: sometimes it’s ok to be the sidekick/bff of the Promised Saviour of Mankind.  But you don’t have to marry the guy, ok?  (See also: female pupils who over time form a deep emotional attachment to their teaching father-figure, largely fed by admiration, resulting much agonising and probably sex.  In a manner that Ofsted would probably not approve of.)
  • Chivalry.  If your male protagonist is meeting an endless cascade of beautiful, scantily clad women, and choosing not to rape them, that is not the same as being chivalrous.  That is a man thinking about raping someone, and then choosing not to despite his hot hot hormones.  Yay for the latter, what the merry hell for the first?  Again: we got issues we need to talk about here.

In all of this, let me hastily add, men are also getting a massively raw deal.  If you are genuinely writing a male protagonist who is so possessed by demons/drugs/nanorobots/testosterone that he has to fight every page to stop himself committing violent acts against women or men, then there’s probably, rightly, a few men out there who are gonna have issues unless you’re doing it for a sound character purpose that explores actual questions, rather than because, you know, having to resist the urge to rape is great storytelling, isn’t it?  Equally, if the height romance is being written as men with impossibly toned bodies, great riches and a tendency to stalk women – if this is being portrayed as the physical and economic ideal beneath with all other men are inferior, then again, we got some problems.

In this vein, there are plenty of tropes which dishonour men, including…

  • Talking about feelings.  It can be hard being a man who’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.  You don’t want to let feelings get in the way.  It’s culturally a bit weird to let your feelings get in the way.  You know how sometimes you can stop feelings getting in the way?  By talking them through before the evil vampire lord plays them against you at a critical moment.
  • Laying down your sword to save the girl even though 100,000 people are gonna die.  Because if you don’t, you’re a Bad Man.  I mean, if you do, you’re an absolute idiot who’s just condemned millions to death, but again, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.
  • Being a man stuck in a feminist story.  I know this sounds contradictory, but as someone who has read books and worked on plays tackling actual yarns about the oppression of women, it’s incredibly easy to reduce the men who oppress down to two-dimensional cut-outs in silly hats, rather than people who actually believed in what they did.  Because even wrong usually thinks it’s doing good, and to villainise a gender… ugh.  Problematic.

I know that there will be people reading this who shake their heads and exclaim ‘I would never do this – I am a feminist!’  But I’d like to hastily say – I’ve done variations on a theme of some of this in my career.  Not consciously, but I have.  It’s easy.  Sometimes it’s fun.  And if every time you wrote about a woman dismissing a man or a man dismissing a woman because of their gender and then had to turn that moment into a vast exploration of the nature of identity… well… you’d be writing a very long, rather repetitive book.  I’m not saying you can’t deal with any of these things and still make for a joyfully entertaining story.  I’m just saying that if you do… if you want to… then it is a scribbler’s duty to make it about people.  Not about cliche, laziness, or an attempt to create character out of violence or oppression, rather than just out of people being people.  As always, forever, and amen.