A-ha! Thank you for that: something just clicked about what I’ve been doing with the characters in my novel, and why I’ve been doing it.

Specifically, two of the main protagonists are female, so most of the mirror/object/cipher/McGuffin-guardians are male. There’s one protagonist who’s male (and one side character who I don’t know has enough agency to be a protagonist) and one McGuffin-guardian who’s female. I was worried that by making all these men show up with random McGuffins I was diminishing the agency of the protagonists, but I don’t know that’s true. No one character has to do everything.

That said, i lethem is among my top 3 favorite writers of all time for fortress adn motherless brooklyn.

Ha. I was waiting for that twist through the whole pilot, actually. I was damn sure it was going to happen.

Good call!

It really is a pity, though. Think how the meaning of that “learning to keep calm by counting” sequence in the pilot was changed by keeping Jack around as the annoying alpha male hero. Instead of it being a sequence about a woman learning how to become the action hero that her community needs, it instead turned into just the first in a long line of scenes designed to display Kate’s inferiority, her role as a person who always needs to be “taught lessons” by virtuous men. Blech.

Woman as mirror, woman as object, woman as cipher, woman as the guardian and bestower of the Sacred McGuffin… Woman as Muse. They’re literary roles with such an ancient and established pedigree that I guess it’s unsurprising, if also saddening, that even women adopt them when we sit down to write. We’re part of the culture too, influenced by what we read, and women who want to write may be even more strongly influenced by the extant canon of literature than others. Writers are usually intense readers, after all. They read in part to learn the craft and by reading, absorb tons of useful information on how to structure a narrative, how to delineate character, how to establish voice, how to use dialogue. But with all that good info also comes a crash course in how women are “used” in fiction.

The claim that young women do this more often than young men does surprise me, though. That doesn’t match with my observations either.

If it’s hard to think of a woman outside roles A, B, and C, and you need to create one who is in role G, H or I, then create a male character who embodies G and H and let that character stand in for the female one via identification.

When I was young and used to write stories, I always made my protagonists male, and for just that reason. I didn’t like the sort of stories that I thought female characters had to have. In fact, I liked them so little that I rarely wrote in any female characters at all. My stories took place in strangely homosocial worlds: all men, no women to be found. I think that this was probably my weird subconscious attempt to degender the fictive universe entirely. After all, if there are no women at all, then the troubling and upsetting expectations of gender can be temporarily laid aside: it’s okay for anyone to identify solely with the male characters if that’s all there is on offer. (Or maybe I was just corrupted by Tolkien. Who can say?)

It wasn’t until I was fifteen or so that I think it occurred to me that since there was nothing intrinsic to girls and women that restricted them to certain narrative roles, therefore I as writer was empowered to write them differently than I always saw them written in other books. That it took me until high school to realize this is…well, a bit depressing, yes, and also vaguely embarrassing. But probably not all that unusual.

To bring this full circle, in Argument Three, Mander addresses specifically this point. To update the discussion, we’d have to add “porn star” to the list next to “blushing bride”, but otherwise it holds up.

“In Myth America, Carol Wald and Judith Papachristou detail a history of the images of women from 1865 to 1945, as presented in - print media. They argue that the images, created exclusively by men, formed the operative visual myths about women in America and that as the images spread and entered people’s minds, they became mirrors of reality. Men wanted their women to be that way; women, seeing only those images, attempted to and eventually did become like the images. It was a kind of alchemy in which the image finally produced the reality.

“‘To the degree that pictures seeam real, people were inclined to accept what the [male] artist saw in good faith…. Through such an arrangement, the myth becomes apparent…. Myths prevail. Here, all the expected roles of women are illustrated, from romantic elopement, blushing bride, and honeymoon to household drudge and nagging wife…. All are expressions of [male] feeling made visible through art. . .’

“The authors are careful to point out that the images of women had little to do with the reality of women’s lives, which were filled with hardship, and the need to solve problems against enormous odds, many times on their own. Nonetheless, because the images were everywhere, they began to dominate the reality, making women wish to be like men’s images of women, encouraging men to perceive women in those terms and helping institute a power arrangement between the sexes.”

I was thinking about this very matter last night, while remembering all the children’s ensemble shows where there’s the Smart One, the Irresponsible One, the Leader One, the Weird One and the Girl. Also while thinking of certain kinds of science fiction as described in that Joanna Russ essay about male writers of “there are no men on this planet! Augggh!” science fiction. Also while thinking about how I sometimes find it hard to tell the girlfriends of my more conventional male acquaintances apart.

There’s a cultural fantasy about women where it’s both desired that they are interchangeable and their interchangeability is a subject of horror. (I’m not saying that this is the only cultural narrative about women; it’s one of many) On the one hand, interchangeable women make it easy to dispose of them–they get old, they get dull, they make demands, and since they’re all the same anyway it’s easy to throw them away. More, since they don’t actually have any significant interior life, it’s not wrong to throw them away. A pretty girl is, after all, like a melody–and a melody doesn’t care if no one sings it.

But there’s also this horror of interchangeability–the women are all alike and yet they’re all different from men. Maybe they have superior numbers; maybe they are secretly plotting things. Maybe they’re….not human at all. And if they’re all the same and all interchangeable, then they have no loyalty to any particular man. This is the stuff of various science fiction stories and the revisionist “Houston, Houston Do You Read?”.

And this in turn relates to why I can’t tell the girlfriends apart–not because they really are interchangeable, but because in order to date the conventionally successful, conventionally good-looking, political nullities that they do date, they have to pretend to interchangeability, at least when performing gender in public. When I meet them on public occasions, they are all dressed in similar clothes with similarly flattened hair and similarly made-up faces. They say uninteresting polite things and listen politely when their boyfriends talk. They intentionally obscure their interior lives in order to perform femininity. (I emphasize that I meet these women only on public occasions; if I knew them better, it would be different. It’s not that they are interchangeable, and they’re probably not actually very similar; it’s that they need to seem similar.)

…now that I think about it, when I was a little girl I always identified with boys precisely because I felt that girlhood was about flattening and about becoming identical. I never found girls interesting. I seldom found my mother interesting, because she was always yielding and never expressing opinions. This, of course, had various depressing consequences later on.

I do see a lot of what Robinson suggests in the writing of new female writers and less in new male writers. This is largely because in my experience with fiction workshops, beginning male writers quite often write stories where all the characters are male. Actually, this is true with more experienced male writers as well. There are few examples I can think of where a story has only female characters and is not relegated to “chick lit” status.

There was one episode is the season you’re watching (I think) where some of the women go off and have an adventure all their own, but it’s only happened that once, and it was notable FOR that fact. Grr. This is one of the reason i had to stop watching.

(That and the crap writing)

Just to provide some counterexamples - Mieville’s Un Lun Dun does not have this particular young girl character problem. It’s one of the best books with young girls in the lead that I’ve read for a long time.

Whatever. (head shake)

This post is reminiscent of Ilyka’s post on Kirsten Dunst’s incredible acting range in the Spiderman series. She’s allowed to giggle or be depressed, and she’s just tossed back and forth between the two guys in her life. Can’t she help kick ass in some way?

Obscure spoiler follows:

(And Amp, wouldn’t it have been so much better if it turned out Ben was just a complete psychopath?)

Ha. I was waiting for that twist through the whole pilot, actually. I was damn sure it was going to happen.

I can usually guess the reversals on that show… now I know I was cuing off *something* anyway. ;)

I also have a specific complaint about the most recent Lost plotline, but I’ll refrain from mentioning it in this thread. :-)