If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you should be able to guess I’m a feminist. I’m not ashamed of that word (nor the word liberal, for that matter) and see it as a good thing to be. Glancing at my blogroll, you’ll see Shakesville, which is one of the larger feminist blogs, and where I read a post on Friday that made me think a lot. (Ok, made me think more than what she usually does.) Both about women characters in writing, and how I am personally. Here’s the part that gave me pause:
…women’s stories don’t get told, at least not like men’s do, and/or that women are much more infrequently cast in roles that, by any accounting, could be filled by either sex.
(There’s also the “token strong woman who’s segregated from other equally strong women” phenomenon about which I’ve written before—see: Eowyn, Leia, Trinity, Hermione, Sarah Connor, Ripley, et. al.—which reinforces the ideas that girliness is bad and that women must compete for coveted roles as tokens among men…)
Wow. This is one thing I struggle with in my writing. As a woman, I want to put females in the stories I write, but I don’t want them seen as token. It’s amazing how much societal influence makes all my characters male by default, and that I have to create female characters to fit into the story. Why do I feel the need to do this? Why can’t I just make a character one or the other, regardless whether he or she will be seen as token, special, or just plain ordinary?
What makes me agonize over character creation so much is how I remember feeling when I was younger, and what Melissa talks about in her previous post:
But even though Leia and Eowyn were both great heroines, it seemed to me as though girls who were smart and tough were always segregated away from other women. Images of women who are smart and tough and the only female in a group of men are, in fact, so common, that it serves to teach smart and tough little girls that girliness is bad. Only silly girls hang out together in their giggling little gaggles; smart girls hang out with boys—a sentiment reinforced over and over as I played girl-less video games and watched films and read books with a token girl. A second girl only meant a rivalry, never a friendship.
It’s become ingrained in me that a strong and cool chick isn’t girly. That it’s much better to hang out with the guys, because otherwise you’re just silly &/or the romantic interest. Plus, growing up during the 70s & 80s, there was a surge of “See? There’s a female character! We’re not being sexist!” going on, that definitely ties into the second post. In reality, there often were other females around, but they were always secondary characters in the background.
(Unless of course you are telling a woman’s story, then it’s “chick lit” and *groan*. Admittedly, I don’t like the traditional Lifetime type movies & stories, which I feel help to perpetuate the typical female roles and stereotypes. There’s also the idea that feminine & liking traditional “girl” stuff is somehow bad or at the very least not what a feminist does, but that’s another topic all together which was covered well at the first post above.)
So what did this all do, rattling around my brain over the weekend? From what I’ve figured out so far, it’s made me want to make sure the female characters in my stories are just like women in real life. Strong, cool, tough, but at the same time, sometimes girly. Guess that’s why I could relate and accept so well the Riot Grrrl movement of the early 90s. Which is where, incidentally, I take calling my daughter Baby Grrl.
I’ll be looking at my story’s characters, and will probably be making some changes, but I hope it ends up for the better.
Technorati tags: feminism, writing, female characters
