I love being a woman. And I love being a woman-loving, man-criticizing, ranting, raging feminist. However, I find sometimes that living this life can be exhausting. How I would love to exist in an oblivious world where I could watch a film without it being ruined by the underlying sexism. As someone who writes stories, and loves them, I am constantly unwravelling them, and sometimes the results of that can be, well, disappointing.
Recently, I was talking to my brother, who was recommending a superhero story he was reading. We were talking about the main character, who is female. I said something along the lines of, “Hmm, is she a well-written female character?” To which my brother responded, “Oh yeah, don’t worry, she’s not just some dumb bimbo, she’s super capable and cool.” When he said this, the first thought that crossed my mind was obviously: Uh, that doesn’t mean she’s well-written necessarily. But the second one was what really stuck with me: Is this how boys think when reading superhero stories? Is it that simple for them? Bimbo = poorly written woman, and everything else is fine?
As well as being a woman-lover, I am also a writer. So, I love to include women in my stories. I am a woman, as are most of the people I have close relationships with, and yet, I still find the task of writing women to often be very daunting. I came to a realization long ago that throughout much of my childhood, I fostered a lot of internalized misogyny, most of which came from the media I was consuming. With that in mind, when I write my own stories, I think I put a lot of pressure on myself to write about women in a way that counteracts that. They have to be unique, they can’t fit any stereotypes, and they have to positively represent all women because I am fighting against a long history of misrepresentation.
It’s no secret that storytelling was originally very male-centric. The first epics we have records of have male protagonists, and of course, that did not change for a very, very long time. And even as women began to take on genuine roles in stories, it felt like they could only fit a handful of roles: the loving partner, the over-competent badass, the mom, and yes, the bimbo. With centuries of examples of these, it’s hard to create something new, or something that feels like it does women justice, defying the faults of past writing. It feels like it’s my job as a female writer to make sure my characters aren’t subjected to falling into these tropes.
But how do you do that? My other brother likes to play Dungeons and Dragons, and is a Dungeon Master. When I was talking to him about coming up with his plethora of characters, I asked how he decided their gender. His answer was interesting; He said that he writes a whole character without considering gender, and then flips a coin to decide whether that character is a guy or a girl. For a while, I thought that might be the solution. And yes, that approach works great for a game of Dungeons and Dragons, where NPCs are not always incredibly important and disbelief is meant to be suspended. However, that is not always the case with storytelling, and writing a woman who feels real might have to be more deliberate. I don’t want to write a person who happens to be a woman. I just want to write a woman.
In the real world, there is so much pressure on women. It sucks that even when we enter a fictional world, that pressure follows. To write a woman well, I think one often has to work to subvert stereotypes and think a lot about how accurately this one character is representing all of womankind.
However, whether you are writing within, or subverting, a stereotype, you are still writing based on pre-existing works. Sometimes, to really write about women, rather than drawing from examples in fiction, we should instead try looking for examples in our lives. It shouldn’t be this hard. Let’s remember: Women make up 50% of our population. We all know women, and good writing does not come from defying, or following, other writing. It comes from creating your own stories based on what inspires you. And just by looking around you, there are so many women to be inspired by.