flemmings | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Am feeling a little cross-grained and scratchy, as I tend to be when I get the notion, however unjustified, that people are Telling Me What To Do. In this case they're telling me to write female characters because it's misogynistic not to. Fine. Herewith, the reasons I am a misogynist.

1) I'm a gay woman, a fan of shoujo manga, a fan of the yaoification of shounen manga, and a childcare worker. Those are four areas where you find very few men, and by and large I don't much care for the men I've met in the first three. (The last is quite different, because men cuddling babies is hot hot hot.) Women are my reality. They're the air I breathe without even noticing it. My RL friends, my online friends, my coworkers are all (90%) women. I simply don't have much exposure to any version of male reality. Even the shounen I read is produced by women. Saiyuuki, Papuwa, FMA. There's a reason I couldn't keep on with Bleach.

The mysterious, the unknowable, the different, the- dare I say it?- romantic? That's guys. Not real guys, I hasten to add, certainly not slash's 'real' guys. Yaoi guys, fantasy guys, gender-fuck or gender-need-not-apply guys. Guys like the guys I work with, in fact, because actuality can sometimes trump fantasy five ways from Sunday, in a 'if you put that in a story *no one* would believe it' way. That's the guys I like to write. They have that difference to them.

2) I'm not an innovator. The reason I can write yaoi is because in my early fandom days I read a ton of yaoi. The reason I can (in theory, at any rate) subvert a manga character into being, well, anything I damn well please, is because I saw the Japanese doing just that: imposing erotic fantasies on characters in spite of canon, characterisation, probability and you name it. 'Oh, cool. This is a game where all the rules are off.' And off I went.

However, that means I have to see it done to be able to do it myself. I can't create my own female character who defies the societal givens and the archetypal defaults to be sui generis and hot on her own terms. From the evidence, neither can anyone else. There are damned few female characters who defy default expectations. They're wonderful when I do find them- Servalan, Haruka and Michiru, maybe the shounen ai characters in female bodies from Onii-sama - but there's nothing nearly like enough of them. The rest- all these 'kickass' women that people go on about- to my eyes are shadowed always by the defaults they're defying. 'Look she's brave and independent! and not a whiny clinging traditional female. 'Look, she can fight as well as any guy!' because she acts exactly like the guys around her.

This is old territory. Presumably I don't need to say again that simply swapping stereotyped gender behaviours on a 1:1 basis does not undermine those behaviours at all, it merely reinforces them. What I want is a quantum leap- a character who simply doesn't invoke the defaults at all. And, well, nobody much provides those, including the people who're paid to do so. The best one can hope for is a kind of tweaking: working with the default to produce something new and unexpected. That doesn't get done much either.

3. I suppose this is the next point. Really, there aren't that many well-rounded female characters to write in most series I know. No, I won't argue the fact. There *aren't.* Most men write women to male notions of the givens (Ikuhara is always the exception.) Most series here are written by men, and when written by women still have no overt intention of shaking the androcentric givens of society. (see below) It's not my job as a fan writer to make up for any creator's lack of imagination. I go with what I'm given; I don't do major rewrites. And that indeed is why I write yaoi for series where m/m attachment is canonically implicit. While I may admire the Japanese fen's ability to be utterly arbitrary about guys shagging guys, I can't do it myself.

So where can one look for models of the kind of difference I want, since I need them to create my own characters? It's a hit-and-miss thing. Yuri is useless for my purposes, unless it's that kind proposed by a Japanese fan ages back, as a f/f version of tanbi/ shounen ai. That I could get behind: tanbi has style. Alas, most yuri I see caters to either a male idea of what's hot, or a dyke one, and neither of those viewpoints has the kind of style that does much for me. In fact, IME it segues too damned often into hentai- boobs and wet, wet and boobs- with a healthy side helping of flushed faces and dewy eyes. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not my thing.

What's heartbreaking to me is that shoujo manga, a genre created for and by women (well, females, because half the shoujo market is prepubescent) has its own genre defaults, and interesting women doing interesting things in interesting ways is not one of them. Teenage girls behaving like, well, teenaged Japanese girls is. One can't complain. The genre is created with a certain audience in mind and middle-aged western people aren't it.

Some shoujo however manages to be inspiring. After a steady diet of Kawasou Masumi I think I could probably write a decent het sex scene with someone who isn't a virgin (first times are always easier.) Kawasou's characters, as I said somewhere, like sex and remain themselves- and likably themselves- while having it, which is actually a neat trick given what the defaults for sexual writing are like in English. (Bref: porn hostile or romance novel overdone.) Helps that her characters are grown women, not teenaged girls. Helps that some of them are pearl spirits and Great Western Mothers.

In fact, I have to wonder if the creatures of fantasy and folklore aren't possibly more useful for my purposes than any representation of human beings. What I usually find missing from female characters is a sense of authority, the kind of authority that male characters have innately just by virtue of being men in the usual earth kind of society: autonomous effective moral agents, with some measure of temporal power as a plus. Fox-spirits and shamanesses have that innate authority, going by what one sees in Ima Ichiko.

One can also give women authority by making them ranking members of an association. Alas that most fictional associations I know of have all been conceived of by American men, or follow the pattern of assocations conceived of by American men, because a generalship in the American army, or Star Fleet even, isn't what I had in mind. Not a hotbed of individual autonomy, those. In fact, the worst kind of dystopian squash-you-all-flat organization IMHO. But there was this Chinese opera clip

paleaswater showed me once, where the hero's mother comes in to (IIRC) berate the hero for some military failing. Hero's mother is a general. It's, you know, a family of generals: the father is a general, the mother is a general, the son is a general, etc etc. ('Once there was a poor family. The mother was poor, the father was poor, the children was poor, the butler was poor, the maids were poor...') I may be misremembering the specifics, of course, but I found the idea of Mama General quite inspiring. A female general in the Chinese army, and not one disguised as a guy, is much more to my tastes than female captain of the Enterprise, any Enterpise: the agenda may be quite as male but the uniform is cooler.

If I think long enough about Mama General I may even get an idea how life works for my female Rulers of the continents. Because otherwise I'm a bit stumped. The stumping part is that female dragons are bigger than males. Bigger and stronger and matrilocal, so how do my male dragon kings in their exceptional male-only palaces feel about them? You see the obvious trap: I have to fight to not think of my male dragons as RL females and my female dragons as RL males (different, foreign, uncongenial...) One to one substitutions, as I say, are no use at all. But female dragons don't even have breasts. I mean, what's a writer to do?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There was a line once which I vaguely remember in a book about girl's school stories, You're a Brick, Angela!, which I can't bring myself to try to locate exactly, but which was along the lines of: "Nobody would bother saying that a girl was "as good as a boy" unless the default assumption was that she wasn't."

I love Brust's Dragaera, where half the cast is female and nobody bats an eyelid at it. I only wish I could do that.

I love his Dragaera too, and I wish someone Japanese would do that. That might supply the je ne sais quoi that I feel, ungratefully I know, is lacking in the overall scenario. Very nice shortcake, but where's the strawberry on the top?

(I think it's half a problem of narrative voice: Vlad is not at all the kind of male to provide the, erm, emotional fanservice that Minekura does by reflex. Dumas pastiche doesn't lend itself to it either. I find a certain emotional coldness to Brust's characters, as if they're all kept at arm's length from the reader.)

I have a female character due to go into the dragon noir story -- when, that is, I'm not struggling with rpg freelance deadlines -- and I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to be able to make her what I want her to be. Annoying.

I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to be able to make her what I want her to be.

It's the thing about writing women. The defaults are always dragging at me. And it's not RL defaults in my case, which is why it's so annoying. It's readerly expectations and fictional tropes and genre givens and a whole bunch more. The way women have been presented and written, by men and women, at either end of the spectrum and anywhere along its length, are always all wrong for what I want to do. Especially as I don't know what I want to do until I see it, but generally by and large it's not anything I've seen anyone else do, much.

Rot it, it's someone else's job to be totally innovative, not mine.

Gee, thanks.

(I mean, I only want to write a bald female Taoist immortal with a fairy lover and a habit of hanging out at ghost brothels. What could possibly go wrong?)

Nothing, actually. Nobody has ever done bald Taoist immortal females (who tend to have hair down to *here* anyway) so there's no defaults to invoke.

Though you do need to look up the Great Western Mother, if you haven't already, just because. She's part of what's behind Minekura's Kanzeon, even if Minekura doesn't know it.

I'll look it/her up. Thanks.

I'm actually getting a visual reference from a bald female superheroine from Marvel, but one has to get the visual references from somewhere. :)

There's lots and lots of bald female buddhist wuxia monks in Chinese fiction, if you don't want to go western.

True. I've just got an old attachment to said superheroine. But you're quite right. :)

LOL! I have to agree with you on pretty much all those points.

The only females I find really interesting in a 'I wish there were dj's about them' are Ima's. But Ima pretty much fills in their stories so there isn't much room. And those women are insane.

There's plenty of room with Kinu, though. We just don't know how much she knows or doesn't know or can do and chooses not to. Alas that I actually prefer it that way.

The nice thing is that her women are no more insane than her men, by and large. Psychic ability screws up everyone almost equally. I'm not sure whether Kai or Tamaki is the more neurotic of the two, but my money is probably on Kai: who has the potential to do more damage. Equally I'm not sure who has the worst case of selective vision, Ritsu or Tsukasa; but Tsukasa's selective vision makes her oddly invulnerable, while Ritsu's just makes him blind to reality. And Akira, for all her quirks, remains far more cheerful and practical than anyone who's been put through the wringer by two quite malignant spirits should be, by rights.

(deleted comment)

The hyenas are helpful, maybe; but dragon females aren't intermediaries between the Jade Emperor and the men in any way. The Jade Emperor in my settei is a renegade, once a Daoist divinity like the dragons themselves, who aligned himself with the Buddhist upstarts and thus ceased to be properly one with the Way. (Not to mention having turned the ocean kings' grandfather into a mountain, which is an insult to all dragons.) So dragons don't revere the emperor, period, and rather resent any suggestion on his part that he has a claim to rule them as well as the rest of the universe.

In a properly Daoist world male and female are in balance and presumably in the wild past the dragon rulers and kings had their separate but equal spheres of influence. But we've all been settling down since then and domestic female establishments are increasingly the norm, on both sea and land, with only the top-most level of dragons keeping the separate thing going, in a sort of Heian kind of marriage thing. You go to her house, engender children on her territory, and then go back home: taking any sons you've begot with you, which is a departure from Heian usage.

So there's no reverence or fear at work. In certain cases there may well be a strong liking between partners, but the rest of the time it's half-business and half-diplomacy. We need heirs, so we negotiate. But when the chips are down, do the independent (Free Amazon) ocean dragons get to say yea or nay when a ruler pushes for an alliance? Maybe if the tatemae is that we're still good Daoists and always in harmony then we do a diplomatic minuet about the point. But if someone pushes really hard and the other party is unwilling?

The crux of the question is, where does dragon power reside in actual terms? I'm all for making it something nonintutive to a westerner, like a veneration of our great Daoist tradition. So that in spite of physical strength (where the advantage is to the females) or economic resources (where the advantage is more to the river and ocean dwelling males) no one has the clear upper hand.

I'm now wondering if one of the reasons that we find it difficult to write a society where women are genuinely equal to men, and what the women would be like in such a society . . . is that we don't know. What _would_ we be like if we'd grown up in a society/world where gender wasn't an issue in jobs, in social role, in social expectations, and so on?

Not like we are, I think. Not like any woman now is.

A world where gender isn't an issue? Maybe- if the world was the way it instinctively felt in school- boarding in your case, high in mine- with the wrinkle that some of the females about us were actually male but still registered no differently from the girls and women? Yes, it would be quite different.

The size and strength thing seems to be the crux, because AFAICS the basis of all female second-class citizenship simply is that in most societies most women are physically smaller and weaker than most males. Remove that and... I don't know. Is there just a simple reversal? Women dominate and it becomes a matter of common sense that men are the weaker sex, good only for menial work and procreation?

Though if we can evolve from societies where men are automatically first-class and women automatically second-class (admittedly there's a long way to go) towards ones which are equal at least in law, if not yet in practice, then theoretically one which was a simple reversal could in time evolve in the same way, towards a middle ground of theorised equality.

I'm not going to argue that "women" would be any different from "men" if the females were the physically larger and stronger gender. Hm. I'm not sure what I would argue. There are too many possible influences besides the strictly biological.

Thinking about it, with your dragons, we've seen that among the male upper class there are strong elements of tradition and accepted practice, in part to prevent the "wild" behaviour of ancient times and to protect the order of society. I can see a logical argument that the stronger and more dangerous gender might have developed these practices first, and the males copied them. Or you could argue that the males developed them partly to level the playing field, and the females copied them . . . or it could be something else entirely.

Or, and I've just had this idea, if things were really strange, back in the past the dragons alternated from one gender to another throughout their life cycle. Then something happened and all dragons became either male or female and stayed that way.

(You can tell it's getting late here.)

I've got a novel somewhere, _Califia's Daughters_, about a post-holocaust society where a biological agent has wiped out about 90% of males and left the remainder much more subject to infections. As a result, at least in the groups that we see, men are automatically forbidden from heavy or dangerous work because they must be protected. One of the cruxes of the novel is a societal group arriving where the men are less genetically prone to infection, and the host group having to come to terms with this and to consider whether or not to allow their own men more freedom in terms of duties and tasks.

I think the difficulty is when you have a story with both male and female, and there need to be some difference between the two. When most important characters in a story are all female, then it's easier to ignore the unconscious assumptions of gender. I wonder if perhaps you should just write then all as dragons, regardless of sex, and then come back later and embellish certain differences...

That may be the only possible route to go. We have an imperious and persistent Ruler seeking alliance and offspring; we have a reluctant and frustrated King who really can't afford the time away from his kingdom just now, but who can't refuse because of various complicated ties of obligation. Remove all gender connotations from that and write it as purely a problem of personalities and statescraft: and for fun, write it all with female pronouns and see where it goes. I think I'll do that. Thanks.

You make some very good points.
It seems the moment you state if a character is male or female they default to gender preconceptions; even if past actions have defied those preconceptions.

The brief description of your dragons has me very curious about your story; are there excerpts available online?

the moment you state if a character is male or female they default to gender preconceptions;

*Exactly.* Thank you for putting it so succinctly. They default to the preconceptions in both one's own mind and those of one's readers, one has to actively work to make them not default, and the whole thing drives me bonkers.

No, sorry, no excerpts. That story, such as it is still exists entirely in my head.

No, sorry, no excerpts. That story, such as it is still exists entirely in my head.
No worries, I am entirely familiar with stories that only exist in the head. ^_^

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only