We just can't figure out where they went, Captain. Uhura is the only one left, and she isn't talking.
Speculative fiction has always had difficulty including women. The number of spec fic stories that don’t have enough women in them is nearly equal to the number of spec fic stories in existence, but some stories are particularly egregious. The absence of women in these works is so extreme that it can be no accident of authorial sexism. Something must have happened to these women, a missing persons case that has never been solved. Fortunately, I’m here to crack the case. Detective Oren, at your service! I never rest until the perp’s been brought to justice or at least until I’ve done enough snarking as to be close enough.
Spoilers: Rogue One
1. The Hobbit
Ah yes, The Hobbit, a book which seems like Lord of the Rings‘s little sibling but is actually older. In this story of daring do, a troop of 13 male dwarves led by a male wizard approach a male hobbit about an adventure. On their quest, they meet male elves, male humans, male goblins, a male dragon, and more male dwarves.*
If there are any women present in The Hobbit, they are incredibly well hidden. None appear when Bilbo and friends visit the Elves of Mirkwood or the human settlement of Lake Town. It’s even stranger that none of the dwarves are female, as they are a group of exiles fighting to reclaim their homes, which is certainly something women would have an interest in.
Nor do we see any evidence that Middle-earth has the kind of extreme sexism that would keep women in their homes and out of sight at all times. Quite the opposite. While Lord of the Rings is not exactly overflowing with women, we see several ladies of great power among the elves, and Rohan is specifically established as having a tradition of training noble women to fight.
This case is a tough one to be sure, and to solve it, I turn to the work of fellow investigator Terry Pratchett. Through Pratchett’s Discworld Report, we learn that dwarves are a monogendered society,* though they have two sexes for the purposes of reproduction.
Since The Hobbit is explicitly written by Bilbo, we have our answer: he is attempting to respect dwarven tradition by not differentiating anyone according to gender. Of course, if he were writing in dwarfish, there would be a gender neutral pronoun, but it seems singular “they” hasn’t caught on in Hobbitese, so Bilbo went with default “he.” Not the most enlightened choice for certain, but I believe his heart was in the right place.
Now that the case is blown wide open, we can safely assume that approximately half of the Hobbit’s characters are female. Mystery solved!
2. The Aeronaut’s Windlass
This story takes place in a world where humankind resides in tall spires of rock, and the only way to get around is via crystal-powered airships. At first glance, it seems to have plenty of women. Three of the ensemble cast are female, as are many members of the nobility and the prestigious Spire police force.
Things only get dicey when we take a closer look at the airships that are so prominent in this setting. Remember, airships are not simply the most important mode of transport – they are the only mode of transport. And yet, of the several ships featured prominently, not a single crew member is female. It’s wall-to-wall dudes as far as the eye can see.
One of the ships does have a female captain, but that only makes the absence of other women even more confusing. No one seems to think Captain Ransom’s gender is an issue or makes her unusual, thieving pirate though she may be. And as mentioned before, women have plenty of status in this setting, so it seems unbelievable that none would be drawn to the important industry of airship commerce or the air navy, which is so vital for defending a spire from attack.
If I were not such a dedicated investigator, I might conclude that the author automatically equated “sailor” with “male” and didn’t question his assumption. Fortunately, I am far too thorough to follow such reasoning, especially when the real answer is sitting there for anyone to see: the spires are tragically short on women.
I can’t tell you why, exactly, but it’s clearly the case. Perhaps there was a plague that only affected females, or perhaps the women have all left the spires in search of education and enrichment. Whatever happened, the women who remain clearly form some kind of high-status matriarchy, with the male king as their figurehead. This would explain all the women we see running noble families. With so few women, low-paying sailor jobs would be beneath them, but the prestigious and relatively safe police force is perfect. Captain Ransom is no doubt an exile from this elite clique, probably banished for her criminal ways, but she still has the status to command instant obedience.
There you have it, another case of disappearing women handily solved. One only needs to apply the proper investigative technique.
3. Rogue One
This newest edition to the Star Wars franchise has been roundly praised* for bringing new diversity to a galaxy far far away, and rightly so. It features a racially diverse cast among both the main and secondary characters. Even the extras are a diverse group. It’s also the second Star Wars film to feature a female protagonist, along with several female leaders of the rebellion.
But something strange happens when we look at the background of the Rebel base. Nearly the entirety of the Rebellion’s rank and file are male. This is true of both the main Alliance and Saw Gerrera’s splinter group. For most of the movie, I didn’t see a single female face outside of the conference room.
This is highly suspicious. The Empire oppresses everyone, after all, so certainly there’d be women signing up to fight it. Of course, the original trilogy was also notorious for a lack of female faces, but this hardly qualifies as a defense of Rogue One. An extra wrinkle in the matter is that near the end of the film, at the Battle of Scarif, four or five female pilots are introduced in quick succession. Are all the Rebel females pilots? Seems even more unlikely.
In order to answer this mystery, we must turn to the Force. As is clearly documented, the Force is all about getting people where they need to be when they need to be there. The only conclusion we can reach is that the Force called away the Rebel women just before the movie started. That would explain why the Alliance leaders were in such a state of disarray. I’d be confused too if a good chunk of my army just got up and left.
But where did the Force guide these women? Why, to the only job more important than destroying the Death Star: destroying the old Expanded Universe. You might remember how Disney declared the old EU non-canon after it bought Star Wars back in 2012. But as we all know, just because something isn’t canon doesn’t mean it will go away, and so the Force stepped in.
You see, Rogue One needed the old EU gone in order to work. The Rebels getting the Death Star plans had already been covered, and if those stories weren’t completely destroyed, the movie wouldn’t work. And so the Force called on the women of the Rebel Alliance to perform this most important of missions. A few of the women made it back in time for Scarif, which explains the sudden plethora of female pilots.
Clearly the Force is with me: I’ve already solved three of these cases. Soon we’ll be able to rest easy, knowing what really happened to stories that seem to be missing all their women.
4. Star Trek Into Darkness
From one giant scifi franchise directly into another, now we’re looking at Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic vision of a bright future, or at least JJ Abrams’s version of it. Star Trek’s progress toward adding more women had been a rocky one, until Abrams took over and apparently decided not to bother anymore.
Star Trek 2009 was notably lacking in female presence, but it is the sequel Into Darkness that raises things to a suspicious level. This is ostensibly a world where such ills as bigotry and discrimination have been done away with, where no one is held back because they do not conform to the dominant group. And yet, when the commanding officers of the Starfleet vessels around Earth all gather in a room together, only 2–5 people out of a 16-person group are women. I say two to five because the camera only shows us two of their faces. I’m guessing three more of the gathered officers are women from the backs of their heads, but that’s hardly a certainty.
If we take Star Trek’s assertion of a prejudice-free world at face value, this number seems unlikely. It’s barely better than the modern-day American military,* which is certainly not prejudice-free. Perhaps it’s just random chance that most of the officers assigned to Earth’s defense ships are male, but if that were the case, we should be seeing the occasional gathering dominated by female officers, which is obviously not happening.
Combined with how few female officers and crew we see outside of the big meeting scene, it’s clear something is afoot. While the filmmakers saw fit to skip over this obvious mystery, I have discovered the answer after hours of painstaking research.*
The answer lies deep in the Animated Series. Most of Starfleet’s female personnel have fled to Tauren system. Seen in the episode The Lorelei Signal, this is a paradise ruled by women, where the technology is literally powered by draining the life from men until they turn into wrinkly old prunes. This might sound like a strange destination for Starfleet officers, but it makes more sense when you consider that these women have spent years with no uniform options outside the miniskirt, being consigned to traditionally feminine caretaker roles, or just ignored. They’re fed up with the whole thing. Now they can live in luxury, and any man who talks down to them or assigns them menial tasks for no reason* can be fed to the machines.
Those women we do see in Starfleet are clearly volunteers who have stayed behind just to make sure no one gets wise. So far, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
At this point I’d normally make a “damn it Jim, I’m a blogger not an investigator” joke, but I seem to be an investigator of the highest order. Is there no case of missing women I can’t solve?
5. Assassin’s Apprentice
This story takes place in a well-developed medieval setting with a deep culture and complex politics. It is a world of monarchs and nobles, of coastal villages and raiding longships. While many parallels can be drawn from European history, one notable change stands out: across the Six Duchies, inheritance is based only on age, giving no preference to sex. If a noble’s eldest child is a daughter, that daughter inherits title and property just as a son would. This is explicitly established in the story, and it does the author credit.
Our mystery begins with examining the rulers of the Six Duchies and of the neighboring Mountain Kingdom. All are male. Not only that, but the vast majority of past leaders anyone mentions are also male. This seems unlikely, almost as if the author established a world in which women could be rulers but then backed away from it at the last second. Of course, that can’t be the real reason. There must be something hidden in the text which explains it.
If this were only down to the randomness of birth, we would expect something like half of the rulers to be female. Since they aren’t, something must be happening to change the ratio. At first, I considered a covert campaign of assassinations targeted against eldest daughters, perhaps by this setting’s equivalent of MRAs. I had to discard that theory though, because one of the main characters is the King’s head assassin, and he would surely know of such a plot.
Perhaps this is one of those settings where women can technically be rulers, but sexism is so bad they would never be accepted.* If that were the case, it’s possible that female heirs would usually abdicate in favor of their younger brothers, if just to avoid constant questions about the contents of their carrier-pigeon messages. But no, that’s not it either. The story’s protagonist spends a lot of time in the homes of various noble lords, and never does he see any elder sisters wandering around with nothing to do.
With political factors ruled out, the answer must be scientific in nature. To deduce it, we must again borrow from history. Specifically, the history of how European rulers tended to be thoroughly inbred. We can assume the nobility of the Six Duchies is similarly afflicted, and so any genetic disorder would quickly spread among them. The answer is now obvious: all men of noble birth have a condition which makes it extremely unlikely for them to pass on an X chromosome to their offspring. This accounts for the extreme prevalence of sons over daughters, but it still allows for the occasional queen spoken of in stories. It’s also quite likely that any female rulers mentioned were married into the position, rather than being born to it.
It’s tragic, but there you have it, another mystery solved by science. Because that’s what this is – science, certainly not a paper-thin justification for the absence of women. I’d never do that.
6. Foundation
Romans. In. Spaaaaaace! That’s the premise of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, back when such a concept still required a lot of explanation. The Galactic Empire is collapsing, and when it falls, there will be 30,000 years of darkness unless strong actions are taken. Those actions come in the form of Hari Seldon and his Foundation, an organization created to preserve scientific and technical knowledge for future generations.
The Foundation is a big project, starting with nearly 100,000 people and growing into the millions as the years go by. It is a project that stretches for hundreds of years in the first book alone. And yet, we never see a single woman in the Foundation, named or otherwise. Even though the book has a third-person omniscient narrator, not one woman is ever described. Nor are any of the Foundation characters ever described as having close female relationships, not even sisters or lovers. Seldon makes a brief mention of “wives” when he first starts the Foundation, but if any of the characters are actually married, they keep it hidden.
And it’s not just the Foundation. In numerous visits to nearby worlds, not a single woman is ever mentioned. Not even a noble lady at one of the many fancy parties. It’s not until near the very end of the book that a woman is finally described, and she hails from a distant planet.
This is my toughest case yet. I’m not investigating the disappearance of a few commanding officers, or even a large number of soldiers, but of an entire population demographic. For it seems impossible that women could exist in the Foundation and yet always evade the narrator’s eye. At the same time, new children are born from somewhere. Most puzzling.
In order to solve this case, I had to completely change how I was looking at the mystery. It wasn’t a question of where all the women had gone; it was a question of whether there were any women in the first place. Since they are never described, I can only assume the answer is no. The most likely explanation is that the wives Seldon mentioned were slang for the artificial wombs needed to grow new children.
For more evidence, I looked at how Seldon kept mentioning that he’d set up a second Foundation on the other side of the galaxy. That must be where the women of Seldon’s plan have gone. This second Foundation handily answers another question: why does all the “advanced” technology of the Foundation seem so low tech? They still use paper and fission power. Call me a dreamer, but I’d imagine that by the time humanity has settled all of the Milky Way, we’d at least have figured out fusion.
No doubt the women of the Foundation are busy preserving the Empire’s more advanced secrets. They are charged with guarding anti-matter reactors, transporters, and smartphones. This is very important, because the Foundation’s men don’t really seem to know what they’re doing. They have trouble with enemies who use gasoline-powered spaceships;* they couldn’t be trusted to safeguard the galaxy’s scientific future.
Well, I certainly feel better after clearing up all those mysteries. People might complain that spec fic doesn’t have enough women in it, but I say to them that they aren’t looking hard enough. There’s always a logical explanation for missing women, and no doubt the answers I’ve detailed here are exactly what the original authors intended. Either that, or our fiction is badly in need of better representation, but who would believe that?
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I always thought that the makers of the Hobbit missed a golden opportunity to have some badass dwarf women characters, especially since they had already established that dwarf women have beards in Lord of the Rings. Imagine the dwarves having to explain to a bewildered Bilbo that half of his traveling companions are indeed women, he just hadn’t noticed. Instead we got a single throwaway joke when Legolas looks at the picture of Gloin’s wife, and for female representation we were left with Tauriel, who still could have been an interesting character but ended up being a very cliché one.
Thanks for the great & funny article! There are too many stories that need this sort of investigation.
I amend: you were talking about just the book while I was specifically talking about the movie adaptations, which had an opportunity to improve the gender balance but just didn’t.
Are you trying to tell me that women aren’t just tied to the kitchen in these universes? I find that hard to believe.
And sausage-fest universes are terrific. It shows such great world building.
Great investigations, I really enjoyed your explanations. Keep up the good work
Gotta agree with ya.
Not enough women.
(Though I honestly thought the only reason Rogue One didn’t have many women was continuity.)
What I want is an explanation of why Robin Hobb did not do ALL the worldbuilding and backstory in the first novel in her series! Because I’m pretty sure the reigning king in Assassin’s Apprentice inherited the throne from his mother, and about half of the second-tier rulers in the Kingdom of the Six Duchies are female. The titular assassin uses a female disguise to move about in public, and this female persona is actually deduced by the villain to be the king’s assassin, without any consideration to her gender or the fact that such an important job is given to a woman. The leader of the king’s soldiers is a woman, who is also a weaponsmith, and a generation later her weapons are still prized. The royal magic expert is male, but he’s a villain is later determined to be inadequate at his job, and far inferior to the woman he replaced when she died. The leader of his magic students i also female. Of the functionaries in charge of the castle in which most of the story is set, we see the Weaponmaster, Stablemaster, Cook, Chief Scribe and Head of People Who Sew. Three of them are women. The Stablemaster and Scribe are male.Yes, the ruler at the moment is a king, with three sons and by the end of the story, only two grandsons. But the mechanics of reproduction are important to how the narrator is in his current situation. If his royal parent had been the crown princess, she could not have had a bastard child without her knowledge! The second child of the king’s role in the story is to be held up as a poor copy of the elder sibling. Do we really want a novel in which the new Crown Princess is constantly being viewed as a pale shadow of her elder brother? That’s fine if you want to have a story about sexism & the patriarchy, but Hobb was trying to show a more gender-nuetral culture. And again, the second book has the new Crown Prince going off on a quest leaving his pregnant wife behind and vulnerable to the villains’ machinations. Not personally vulnerable, because she’s a frail pregnant woman, but politically, because of the dynastic politics issues. This story cannot happen if the royal heir heading off on the quest is a woman, leaving her husband behind. Other aspects of the succession necessitate the third child of the king be of the same gender as the second, due to a plot to replace the second child with the third, including a dynastic marriage to a foreign princess to bring their kingdoms together. And if Hobb wrote a female character into one of these roles, and included a magic fix so that a same sex union could reproduce royal heirs, the same critics who fault the lack of females in one royal generation would be complaining that Hobb spends so much time on palace intrigue and not exploring the dynamics of this new reproductive issue. Or they would complain about the princely rivalries being cat fights.
I really liked your well-thought-our response here! I’m currently on book 3 of the Farseer trilogy and one of the things I’ve really appreciated about this series is the non-misogynistic culture Hobb has built. We see female soldiers and guards working alongside the male ones and no other characters seem bothered by it or make comments like “whoa, a GIRL soldier?!” It seems like a totally natural thing in this setting. I find it refreshing in comparison to, for example, A song of ice and fire/GOT where tough women manage to succeed despite drowning in misogyny left and right.
There surely were female characters in the prequel novels to the foundation. I admit I can’t remember if there were any in the original trilogy. It’s been a long time since I’ve read that.
See this article is a joke but this is totally how fans earnestly behave if a story with multiple characters doesn’t mention men.
I feel so called out by this article. I should find a way to include more women in my story. I feel like I’m limited in various ways, however, by my MC and the circumstances of the story.
People often feel this way about historical fiction, although there is a lot more room for women in those stories than conventional thought dictates, but there is no reason to be limited by circumstances in speculative fiction, because the circumstances are entirely of your own making. Saying that women can’t inherit or command or enlist or whatever the reason is for excluding them because their culture won’t let them doesn’t carry a lot of weight when the culture doesn’t exist outside of your story. (I’m assuming speculative fiction because that’s what Mythcreants specializes in, but even if you are writing in the real world, there is still always room to diversify your cast.)
Unless it’s a planet where there’s no women or the locked-up barracks of an army which doesn’t take female soldiers in, there are always spaces for women. A lot of side characters, for instance, can often be women without changing the story much. Does it play a role whether the doctor patching your MC up is a man or a woman? No, not as long as they’re competent. Does it matter whether your MC buys their rations from a man or a woman? Not at all. It would be better if there’s a woman among the characters with more time in the story, but even just having women among the one-off characters makes them more visible.
I get you. My story isn’t devoid of women in that sense, but the gender ratio of the major characters is highly skewed. Most of the MC’s time later is spent on the battlefield, so the story gets more biased towards people directly relevant to that (the MC, his second-in-command, his adversaries, and whoever’s paying or supplying him and his mercenaries).
Technically, women can be on the battlefield, too. Even in ancient times, women were sometimes fighting, depending on their culture. In nomadic cultures, you’ll find that women, too, are trained fighters and would be part of the battle. In other cultures there can be outliers who are still on the battlefield. Suppliers or a mercenary or two could still be female.
The main supplier of the MC’s mercenaries until the later story is female. Most importantly, she procures gunpowder from her underground connections in the opposing nation, which is by far the biggest source on that continent. This allows the MC to give sailors enough training to match his elite ground forces and fliers.
The MC is, in most cases, the only named protagonist on the battlefield, barring allied commanders, or his admiral in amphibious battles. I could possibly explore that angle more; I just feel it’d be hard to make any other combatant look good and be interesting when the MC is a magically augmented super soldier. Given that the MC usually has to wait for an opening in the fight, however, so the enemy is left struggling to react to his appearance, there might be room to explore what happens leading up to that.
I don’t see why the admiral or allied commanders couldn’t be women, nor the second-in-command, nor the enemy combatants. It feels weird to say, but… honestly it was refreshing when in Everything Everywhere All At Once, one of the four(?) antagonistic security guards who got their rears kicked by Waymond was female – by which I mean, you can have female background characters, who don’t even have to “look good” per se. I think there’s this idea that for a character to be female, she has to have a reason to be female, and that’s just some male default garbage. It’s just a matter of changing pronouns in the vast, vast majority of cases, because being male is not actually part of the story. A great example of this is Alien, with the character Ripley, who was initially written as a man.
Also, insertname, you’ve mentioned elsewhere that you work in tech, and in other places that you have a sort of discomfort with women… just wanted to say that, seeing as women already face huge discrimination and prejudice in male-dominated STEM fields, I just hope you can reconcile that discomfort. I don’t say that to be accusatory, I just hope you’ve thought of that. Glad you’re working on it.
The admiral is male because he’s one of two major criminals the MC essentially compels into his service, and the other is female, the supplier mentioned earlier. (She was male at first, but I wanted at least one female major character with an integral role in the logistics of his mercenaries. I was initially hesitant because of the implications of the MC forcing a woman to serve him.)
The allied commanders usually aren’t mentioned unless they’re already named characters.
The second-in-command is male because he grew up with the MC in a monastery and is his closest friend. The MC being very protective of him and wanting him to stay off the battlefield is meant to show that he’s protective of *all* characters he doesn’t see as fighters.
I don’t want to put the MC in a position where he’s shown killing a woman. The closest he comes, as of my outline, is when a vampire, whom he later makes his supplier, mesmerizes him, almost kills him, and steals his legendary weapon. He later almost kills her in a battle after ambushing her, but opts to instead carry her out of the building he set on fire at the start.
Outside of clear-cut cases like that, I feel it’d be hard to have the MC fight a woman without it coming off very badly. Neither he nor I have enough privilege to dodge accusations of misogyny for it.
I appreciate the kind wishes. I wish reconciliation was easy, but just talking about the background of such feelings elicits the very responses from others I go out of my way to avoid.
If you frame a female enemy as capable of taking your MC out, if the fight between them is fought on even terms, I as a woman see no problem with your MC killing a woman who is out for his death as well.
To be honest, it might be more insulting for that vampire to be rescued by the person she wanted to kill than to die through their hands – or their inactions for leaving her in that burning building.
Yeah, I agree with Cay. If your MC tends to kill people who are out to kill him, then it’s odd to make an exception for one who’s female. Female characters can be violent and tricky; they can be heroic and daring. The trick is to not write them homogeneously.
If you really struggle with writing female characters, I once again urge you to write them as you would a male character and then flip the pronouns. Barring some limited cases where that would accidentally evoke weird bad tropes, it really is that easy.
There’s a trap where authors seem worried about female characters needing to seem generically good and physically strong and not much else in order to not upset people, but that just leads to the worse crime of those characters being uncomplicated and uninteresting in a sea of well-developed male characters. The key here is variety; just have a diverse array of character archetypes represented in your female characters and allow them to be as messy, imperfect, and interesting as you’d allow your male characters to be.
Basically, just have your character fight his enemies indiscriminately. I think you’re perceiving more eggshells to walk on around this than there really are, and concerns about amorphous theoretical future bad-faith critics who might call you misogynist seem a bit premature. Don’t let that stop you from having a diverse story!
Re: reconciliation, it might help to think of it as an internal project; after all, it’s yourself you’re trying to work on. If you’re worried about responses from people you talk to face-to-face, there are plenty of feminist resources online for you to read up on these issues. Since you’ve mentioned you’re a Black man who faces racism on that account, it could help to read the works of Black feminists who face both racism and sexism at the intersection of those identities.
I guess that seems bad without further context, so let me offer some. Earlier in the story, a client of the MC, whom he grows somewhat close to, berates him for killing assailants at his mercy, even though they were the aggressors. This, among several other things, leads to the MC starting to question the training and indoctrination of the organization that raised him as a child. (What pushed him to finally escape was his best friend telling him that the organization would pay his family if he let the MC kill him to absorb a rare ability he had.)
The incident with the vampire happens a little while after the MC escapes, when he’s looking for a home. After managing to defeat the vampire with a quick reversal, the MC is once again put in a position where he could kill someone at his mercy. In the moment, he chooses not to. This sets up a sharp contrast to later in the story, where he embraces being the demon he’s known as, to stand against the antagonists.
On the note of building threatening characters; that’s a valid suggestion. The nature of the story however, means that it’s difficult to build up such a character. It’s complicated, but the existence of such a character (and the protagonists’ knowledge of such a character) would open up plot holes before much later in the story, when there’s limited time to build up such a character. There are still characters built up as major threats, and who defeat the MC, but their threat doesn’t come from dueling ability.
All that said, the story isn’t set, though I have a solid idea of the sort of path I want it to take. I much prefer to err on the side of caution.
Regarding switching pronouns: because so many of my characters are morally questionable at best, there are a lot of cases where it’s hard to do so without running into what might be considered a problematic stereotype.
For example, of all the major political leaders in my story, *none* of them are particularly upstanding. Some, however, are better than others – most notable with successors compared to their predecessors.
One leader, for example, seeks to end slavery in his nation. He turns out to be controlling, vindictive, and manipulative after getting the throne, which fits into several negative stereotypes of women. And he’s one of the better ones, establishing a friendship with the MC after abusing his leverage over him several times to force him to assassinate rivals.
In addition, some things are more problematic when done against women than against men. Two examples from my story:
* The MC punches his best friend in a moment of rage and despair. This moment would be much worse if he was hitting a woman.
* The MC is attacked by assassins while bathing – the only time he’d be both accessible and unarmed. This would come off as fanservice rather than brutal opportunism if a woman were in that position.
And none of this is to contradict you; just to note that my reservations come from analyzing the situations my characters are in.
I sincerely appreciate your suggestions. It’s a wound that’s frequently reopened, so doesn’t heal. It’s exacerbated by how hard it is for me to identify when people will react negatively to seemingly innocuous things I say or do (a byproduct of being autistic).
I don’t have to push myself far out of my comfort zone in real life nowadays. It’s much harder for me with a story, however. I know there’s a line involving what’s acceptable and what’s not, but like with so many other things, I struggle to draw a bead on it.
It’s the same personal failing I’ve always had, honestly. I can’t mitigate it in a story by being polite and compliant, so I try by completely avoiding the scenarios that could cause unfortunate implications that I lack experience with. I need to overcome a mental barrier.
I’m still of the opinion that if you have a range of female characters in a range of roles, you have a better chance of making tropes that would be icky in a story with only a single female character work. It’s because you’re demonstrating through your story that all women are not X trope. That’s not always the case, but all female characters certainly don’t have to be upstanding. (Of course, it’s a different issue whether your story has too few upstanding characters in general, male or female, but I can’t say from here.) I will say that yeah definitely good call not to make that attacked-in-the-bath scene happen with a female character. If you’re worried, I recommend getting beta readers who are female themselves, who know you well enough to be able to give honest feedback and whose opinions you trust, to have a look.
Generally, people’s reactions are useful barometers as to what’s innocuous and what’s not. Think of it like this: others’ negative reactions are just as legitimate as your discomfort when faced with those reactions. You’re both feeling poorly here and surely at the very least, that’s something relatable. Bottom line is, it’s not an issue of them reacting too strongly or unnecessarily or vindictively. It’s an issue of you gaining an understanding of what they’re reacting to and why/how not to do it. In a lot of cases, it might even just boil down to miscommunication.
I’ll also say that if your comfort zone means not interacting with women at all, and if your goal is to avoid and get rid of internalized sexism (and it sounds like it is!), staying in it is really gonna hinder you.
I highly recommend bell hooks for some good Black feminist thought. Audre Lorde too, though her works can be kind of hard to read when she writes academically. I’m glad you’re working on overcoming that barrier — hope this helps.
Switching pronouns works in most cases, as it were. Women are humans, first and foremost, as are men. There are differences, of course, both by nature (although those are largely biological and mostly tied to reproduction) and by nurture, but there aren’t half as many as you think.
Switching pronouns doesn’t work if you want to address specific feminine topics (such as pregnancy or the menstrual cycle), but I doubt you want to do that, so that’s not a problem for you.
Apart from that: there are women who are devious and spin intrigue (some even claim women are better at that). There are women who are physically violent (less than men, but that might be nurture more than nature). There are women who treat everyone as ‘lesser’ than them.
I agree that the bath scene (although the MC would be naked, not the woman per se) is probably better with a male assassin. I also agree that punching your female best friend wouldn’t be a good idea (but nobody says that you have to make all other characters women).
I could see that politician as a woman, even if being manipulative is something often associated with women. Yet, if you watch the Star Wars prequels (even if it might hurt), you’ll see that Palpatine is no less manipulative than that. He’s a guy. Politicians in general tend to have some manipulative tendencies, that’s part of their job – convince people with words. ‘Manipulative politician’ is a trope in itself.
First, I’ll say that I was reluctant to keep talking about this, because I assumed that you guys would probably be very annoyed with me making excuses right now. However, I realized that it was unfair to assume that when you’ve been so patient and helpful so far. I also realized that a sudden lack of follow-up would probably seem as if I chose to just walk away when faced with points I couldn’t refute (not that we’re arguing).
I’m taking the feedback into account. Though I wanted to avoid unprompted explanations of my story, I feel it might be valuable here to show how the feedback is helpful, and how I do give deep thought to everything you’re telling me, even if I seem like I’m just rejecting your ideas.
For example, thinking about both “female mercenary” and “danger to the MC”, and thinking about what it’d take for a character to stand up to the MC in an even fight, I realized that the MC’s abilities all have logical weaknesses (whether that be by internal logic or external logic). It was perfectly reasonable to make a character who happens to be equipped to exploit those weaknesses, without it being a contrivance, and without having to justify it in the context of the story. (The MC has a combination of abilities, which are all decent individually, but together have synergy which he milks for all it’s worth, like a powergamer in a game without proper beta testing.) And so, from those weaknesses, I developed a character I really like – a woman in enchanted plate armor who rides one of the only two dragons which weren’t extirpated from the two main continents, and leads mercenaries hired by the main antagonists.
When thinking about her legendary weapon being made from blessed silver, and in the context of her being a flier, I realized there was an opportunity to create a parallel to the motif of hell and demons the MC and his mercenaries invoke, which was also fitting given that the main antagonists are a religious group. Given that the MC frequently takes inspiration from others in the story, including his enemies, this group could even be the inspiration for his own mercenaries when he eventually gets the wealth and the inclination to found them.
All of this is to say that I’m really glad you guys have been patient with me and have given me ideas that I feel are helping me improve my story. I really am taking all of this to heart.
About upstanding characters – it’s integral to one of my story’s messages that no major leader is an ideal person. That intended message is that you can’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. There’s what I feel is a really harmful idea that’s often propagated, that because leaders aren’t ideal, or because none of them are doing exactly what you want them to do as aggressively as you want them to do it, they’re all the same. This leads to indifference and inaction as people frame leaders who aren’t as progressive as they like as being “part of the system”, in league with those working directly against their interests. It leads to people seeing smaller steps towards the end goal as mutually exclusive with the grand, historic leaps they would prefer to see.
Despite the flaws of many leaders, we should still strive to make progress. The aforementioned leader, for example, may have those flaws, but he stood against and destroyed the slaveholding class that backed his ancestors, even at risk to himself. His paranoid snd controlling nature, in part, come from knowing what sordid things he was willing to do to see his vision through, and because he wants to deny his opposition the opportunity to undo what he did.
Personally, I feel that moral messages fall flat when the story makes morality easier or more rewarding than comparable scenarios in real life. That’s not to say I prefer edgy grimdark worlds where people are never allowed to have hope for the future, though. I actually prefer more cynical story environments *because* I like hopeful messages; I feel that hopeful messages are at their strongest when they shine through in an environment trying to snuff them out. Frostpunk’s message of hope in the face of an apocalyptic ice age is, to this day, the most touching message I’ve ever experienced in a video game, and I will shill that game till the day I die.
I’ll follow up on other points in another comment.
On the note of internalized sexism – that’s an interesting thought. I never saw it that way, because, from my perspective, I’ve never seen women as lesser, or evil. My hate has generally been directed to myself. I’ve always seen myself as a failure of a human being, given my struggles throughout life. The reactions others have had to me has generally reinforced that, rather than causing me to hate them. (If you’re used to being told something’s wrong with you, you’ll likely look at the common factor first when someone else reacts negatively to you.)
The fearful reactions hurt because I believe they *are* justified. I don’t blame a person for wanting to protect themself from someone who can hurt them – I blame myself for giving them a reason to believe that I might want to do so.
Because of that, I’ve tried very hard to avoid giving people reason to see me as someone who hates, or who’s a danger to, women and children. Throughout my life, people have often made comments to that effect – many times jokingly, but sometimes seriously, like when I was told there were concerns about me playing with my niece when her friend was over. Though I used to just awkwardly brush off such comments, they’re now one of the few things that will make me lash out lividly against people I would otherwise be friendly or courteous to.
This fear of being associated with that sort of idea is part of what I’m trying to work against here. I think the context of a story amplifies it because I’m even more conscious of what ideas I want to convey to the reader than I would be in normal conversation, and I tend to overthink minor details. (I know I mentioned that I don’t believe everything in a story is necessarily a message, but I still agree with the general idea; I’m only against the extremes of that idea, which I think would preclude story complexity and common sense.) I think a beta reader would be a really good idea; one could help alleviate my fears. I’ll have to remember that.
I don’t even think women are more likely to act antagonistically against me. Most antagonistic behavior I’ve gotten has been from men. It’s just that when women do so, it’s much worse for me; not only do many other people join them, I also have no hope of any sort of accountability. For an example of how extreme this can be, I had to drop a trade school because of a woman who was sabotaging my equipment, calling me slurs, and making death threats against me, because I didn’t want to be in an environment where I was free to be subjected to that treatment. She was never held accountable; I wish I could say I did something to warrant those things, because the full story sounds like cartoonishly hamfisted satire, which ironically makes her “side” of events far more believable. (Again, I’ll reiterate that vile people like that are, by far, the exception.)
To make an analogy, I work in aviation. You don’t have myriad fail-safes on a plane because you’re counting on things failing. However, despite the weight and space all of these fail-safes take, you include them, because it’s disastrous when an exceptional failure happens and those fail-safes aren’t there. Likewise, I don’t count on women being malicious; however, when they are, it can be disastrous for me.
I’ve always seen myself staying away from women and children as best for everyone involved – I do neither them nor myself any favors by being present where I don’t need to be, and I don’t put myself in a bad situation. Because I have to go out of my way to associate with people outside of a professional setting, it’s not been particularly hard to do. Honestly, perhaps you’re right; I’ve always had qualms about my defensive attitude in that regard, but I’ve never seen how others would benefit from me changing it, especially given that I’ve never been in a position where my subconscious biases could hurt others. Because I associate my thoughts with hate for myself rather than for others, I’ve never thought of them as morally wrong, even if I’ve had qualms about them, and I’ve never thought to associate them with an -ism word.
It’s fun to see you putting thought into this — plus, I love dragons, so that mercenary character sounds super cool, and certainly the mercenaries she leads have every reason to be diverse in gender as well. That also presents you with plenty of opportunities to give her an interesting character personality, as well. I’m a big fan of the “gruff, direct, and a bit crude” archetype, because that’s one that’s not often given to female characters—but there’s a whole world of possibility there. Give her flaws, give her quirks, let her be grimy and complicated and imperfect. In a story about non-ideal leaders, that would make a lot of sense (and that’s a cool theme, by the way).
In fact, I’d even say it’s an important message to send that female leaders can be just as imperfect as male ones, because there’s a kind of tokenism where because so few prominent leaders are female, people like to point to any flaw and be like “and that’s why women can’t be leaders!” So showing women being both capable leaders and flawed, just as flawed as their male counterparts, can actually be a powerful statement.
Anyway, I like your view of hopefulness in cynical settings, and I wish more stuff did that rather than being relentlessly grimdark without a point to it. (Somehow I’ve never heard of Frostpunk — I’ll have to check that out.) It’s just about impossible for a story to have no message, intentional or not, and when stuff is grimdark, the message is often “why care?” which just isn’t something I can get invested in. (If your message is “why care,” then I have no reason to care about that message!)
Re: the heavier stuff, the thing about internalized sexism is that it’s subconscious, and that’s what makes it so difficult to deal with. To some degree, we all have to. The whole idea is that it’s not obvious; you can be completely feminist and still have it slip in. Sexism isn’t even necessarily founded on explicit hate in all situations—a lot of it can be patronizing or infantilizing or paternalistic, like the whole chivalry attitude. That’s happened to me, with accidentally writing things into my old stories when I was young that, looking back, are kind of misogynistic. (Mostly the “not like other girls” trope.) Those didn’t come from a place I’d characterize as hatred, but they were no less sexist nonetheless. Knowing about the internal parts is the first step to addressing them, so I’m very glad you’re doing that! And I’m sorry to hear you’ve been burned in the past, with your nieces and with that horrible saboteur at trade school.
I think it’ll help to keep thinking of anti-sexism as a moral and not a purely practical thing, and it sounds like you’re starting to do that. I’d say that being sexist alone on a desert island is still wrong, even if it doesn’t hurt anyone. At the very least, clearly avoiding women and children doesn’t make you feel very good (and I hope any female colleagues, who are already in a male-dominated field, aren’t being disadvantaged by that hesitancy). So I’d say that both yourself and others would benefit from the self-work you’re doing. You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but self-hate isn’t productive. It’s also helpful to remember in general that bigotry doesn’t all come from one place or demographic. It’s complicated and it sucks. Everyone has to work on it.
All that said, you’re definitely not wrong that a lot of those people are being prejudiced against you in those examples, and as you’ve mentioned elsewhere, there is the awful historical perception of Black men as threats to women’s (specifically white women’s) purity or safety, and just as being aggressive in general. People have been killed on a white woman’s claim that a Black man threatened her. And that’s indescribably terrible and unfair and as a non-Black person, I don’t think I’m able to truly appreciate the depths of that awfulness. For what it’s worth, from one internet stranger to another, that racism is not your fault, and not justified.
Incredibly glad you’re taking this all to heart and doing the hard work of self-reflection.
I’m so glad I had the opportunity to come up with her now. And that’s exactly the sort of personality I had in mind, and it would contrast with the rest of the female characters in my story so far. It’d show that she’s a woman who expects her actions to speak for her, who hasn’t needed to be versed in pleasantries.
The rabbit hole I’ve gone down as I’ve tried to find her place in the story, and as I’ve thought of ways to establish her threat, revealed to me many areas where my story was lacking. Even beyond the character herself (who I now wish I thought of much earlier), there were several elements I realized I could better connect, making my story feel less like two disjointed parts. I also realized I needed another nation, which I included (and which has a female leader).
I didn’t even think about the potential message regarding female leaders – I’d have an opportunity to show women being imperfect leaders just like men, in a story which doesn’t (particularly) drag them through the mud for it, and I’d be squandering it.
Thinking about it more, I’ve already accepted that my story will be controversial in quite a few ways, because I believe traditional portrayals of some things in fiction do more harm than good. I’m prepared for people to say that I’m justifying things like forced assimilation, because my story doesn’t treat them the same way stories would traditionally treat immoral or unethical actions. I think I have a much easier time accepting that, however, because anyone who’s familiar with me would know I don’t support those things; I feel I have more liberty to show things like those in a more nuanced light that explores how and why they’re done, rather than just some evil that exists for the heroes to vanquish.
By contrast, anyone who’s familiar with me would know of negative experiences I’ve had with women. I think one reason I’ve been particularly worried about writing anything involving women because I can’t easily disconnect those potential interpretations from myself as a person. I don’t really care if someone somehow gets from the story that I’m supporting forced assimilation, because someone the MC has to work with explains why he feels he’s justified in snuffing out minority languages in his empire after the MC calls him out on it; I haven’t had to fight against being seen as a cultural supremacist my whole life.
And I think it might be a result of internalization. I run into the very prejudice I try to avoid being associated with, in my efforts to avoid it. I try so hard to avoid it both because prejudices against me have caused me problems and because I don’t want to even remotely associate my feelings with the absolutely vile community of people known for growing resentful towards women based on bad experiences.
At the end of the day, however, even if I’m not a hateful person, I’m not perfect. Just like the intended message of my story, I can’t let the pursuit of perfection prevent me from acknowledging and working on my shortcomings, and I can’t let an imperfection equate me to the terrible people I associate it with.
That’s a really good point about the manifestations of sexism – the “not like other girls” example is a perfect way of showing how sexism doesn’t have to be tied to some form of hatred. It was something I didn’t realize was sexist until I heard someone ask “what’s that supposed to mean?” in response to it.
I think this case is a good example of the attitudes you mentioned – in a work where I’m allowing men to have all of the dimensions of real people, I’m hesitant to allow the same for women. I limit the roles they would have in the story because I don’t want portrayals of them that might be construed as negative, in a story where that’s an inherent requirement of most major story roles. The MC is allowed to flounder about as he learns how much of his morality he’s willing to sacrifice for the sake of others, and how much hatred he’s willing to bear, but the top female protagonist never has to question her own morality, and any hatred she gets is always framed as unreasonable.
All of this inadvertently leads to a world where it’s okay – or at least par for the course – for men to have significant flaws, but women who do might as well not exist. And that’s not a message I want to send. Even being aware of it, however, doesn’t make the hesitancy go away, though I do think I’ll have an easier time letting go of the paranoia.
I appreciate the kind words and empathy, and I appreciate your patience. I feel it’s really helped me, both with my story and outside of it.
Editor’s note: I’ve removed a comment explaining more about the story in question because the premise was inherently misogynist, and it would be unfair to put female commenters in the position of having to explain why.
The short version is that while there is a lot of important ground to cover about the racist ways that men of color (Including but not limited to Black men) are portrayed as more threatening, blanketly attributing this as women’s fault is not it.