Fromn Baen's Bar, Sarah Hoyt gives a very interesting insight into the psyche of a female author:
Blame it on the girls
Sarah A. Hoyt
Let me start by saying I'm not allowed to read reviews of my own work. At least not unless friend, husband, son or trustworthy stranger has vetted it and told me it's "safe." "Safe" is defined as "won't set Sarah off" I think, mostly because setting Sarah off results in this.
Before someone goes off on this being a patronizing rule to me, as a woman, let me add I know three other writers who have this rule. They are all male.
This anticipated criticism - come on, ladies, admit half of you were thinking it - brings me neatly to my point. The proximate cause - as opposed to the long-simmering cause - of this rant is the fact that a friend let slip that a reviewer (not sure if professional or private) of my work was disappointed because the main character of Darkship Thieves cares what the man she loves thinks of her.
Sorry for the minor spoiler above. Yes, my novel contains a love story. Most of life (though not all) does. It's one of the things that makes humans tick. If you wish, I will apologize, too, that my characters behave like real people, not like political cliches.
My main character is a woman who was grown but not in any sense raised, who, as a child, was indulged but not loved, who was educated but not taught. There is a reason for this, and it is given in the novel. (Though not obvious by the time she falls in love.) There is also a D*MN good reason most of her peers are men and she never made friends with the women whom she considered her social inferiors.
Now, Athena is self sufficient. She has reason plenty to cry, whine and indulge herself in fits of vapors, but she doesn't (unless getting violent and doing stupid things is a fit of vapors.) If she asks anyone's pity or indulgence in the book, it is more than I'm aware of. (Yes, you're supposed to feel when she's down, but that's totally different.) She faces her problems squarely on and resolves them, though she often prefers the masculine solution of a quick uppercut. (There is a reason for this, not having been conditioned or in any way socialized.)
If her love is not returned, she's the sort that does a few stupid things to get rid of the feelings, and then life would go on.
HOWEVER, as Thena is exposed to normal people, normal families and normal feelings (for a given definition of normal. Everyone in the book is a little odd. Comes from the author) she's like a kid with her nose pressed to the shop window. Because she never partook of this, experienced it, or was part of it, she feels it doesn't belong to her. From which it's a very short step to feeling it CAN'T belong to her. Which bring brings feelings of unworthiness and confusion about what others must feel towards her.
Again, as she's faced with the real, normal emotions of real, emotionally sound (or differently unsound) adults, she becomes aware her way of reacting to things is often counterproductive, not to say causes others distress and problems. This too brings those feelings of inadequacy that result in self-examination and true growth.
In other words, Athena's insecurity when tumbling headlong into love with unhealed wounds to her psyche created by the way she was raised is, in fact, human, logical, and what most of us would feel.
This brings me to the point - you knew there was one, right? - of this. People are not political cliches. Real people are not mechanisms to push anyone's political point of view, ideological posturing or pet cause. Sure, there are things you can avoid doing to your characters - things that would legitimately set people off if your characters can be interpreted as a minority.
The main thing that sets me off is making your character into a walking billboard. I swear these days most of the books I find (but don't read past page twenty five) could successfully be written in the following way: The walking advertisement for my sense of victimhood and desire to compensate in writing for my failures in real life woke up. She did a series of things that validate my shaky sense of self and my regret that I wasn't born a rich white male. The end.
Mary Sue is more than a nice girl in fan fiction. She's boring, for instance. Particularly when she is the embodiment of any cause like... organized feminism.
Ladies, gentlemen, hermit crabs, bicycles and mandolins, first of all let me point out I'm not a joiner. Am I a feminist? Do I have to be because I was born with a vagina? (A characteristic I appreciate in many ways great and small, by the way.)
Right now I'm hearing half the women - no, they're probably not ladies. Or for that matter gentlemen - in the audience talk about how I should be grateful for the gains feminists have achieved for me by marching shoulder to shoulder. (To shoulder, to shoulder, to shoulder.)
Poppycock. Pernicious poppycock, at that.
There were some - minor - gains which were achieved for all women by organized feminism. Suffrage, probably, was achieved by political action unless there was a technological-change/physical reason why women obtained it, of which I might not be aware. (Perhaps the industrial revolution making it possible for a woman to earn a living, but I haven't studied the matter in detail.) Most of the gains in my lifetime - and in this, I was born about fifty "real" years before my peers in the US in terms of "liberation". When and where I was born a married woman needed permission from her husband to vote and get a job. A single woman needed permission from her family to get a job. (I have no idea if they could vote.) - came through technology and its influence on human life.
By the time I was eighteen, my life, except for cultural factors that made it hard to be out alone after eight (not that this ever stopped me!) was equivalent to that of my peers in the US. What changed it was widespread access to the pill, which saved women from unending pregnancies, a lot of household appliances that freed them from unending drudgery, and yet more technology that made it possible for women to earn a good living.
[Cultural factors remained a pain, but I will assure you that if every Portuguese woman (or even a majority of them) had dealt with the issue of men thinking she was a hooker when she was out alone after eight - night classes - by wearing stiletto heels and applying them forcefully to the crotch of the offending male, that too would have changed by now. Shoulder to shoulder isn't doing it.]
Yes, there were some protests and things at the same time, and they might have sped things up a little - maybe. Which still doesn't give anyone the right to demand that I be grateful to people who did things for themselves before I was born - things I never asked them to do, nor felt any need to have done. (Me living my life as myself, not as a cliche feminist.)
The idea of this ... biological-clan gratitude is antithetical to liberty, free thought and morality. By trying to make me fall in line and behave in a certain way because of what "they did for me" these women remind me of Victorian parents continuously telling the children how grateful they should be for this and that and how that demanded absolute loyalty. I think it works on most women because they were raised to be dutiful daughters. (Yeah, okay, so I was too. But it didn't take.) This gratitude and falling in line because you wouldn't want to offend a group that has "fought so hard for you" (though really for themselves) you give power to political shills who in the end use who you are and what you are to stay in power. And they will continue to justify their existence by fighting for ever-more-specious "rights" so you continue to be grateful to them and feel you need them. [Oh, you don't want to hear me on the subject of Herstory and womyn. Political battles should be fought without hurting innocent philology what never done any harm to no one.]
All of which reminds me of the sticky girls in kindergarten. This was a group, roughly composed of every other girl in the class, that clung together in smarmy self-satisfaction (the clinging aided by a quantity of fruity hard candy which to this day I can't smell without revulsion) "We're pretty and clean. We're not like those BOYS. If a boy is mean to one of us, all of the others of us must stop talking to him. If a girl plays with boys she's nasty. If a girl pulls our pretty curly hair, we'll cry till teacher or mommy punishes her. Wha, wha, wha." Note that when you actually needed the sticky girls they were never there for you. Heck, when one of them needed the sticky girls, they weren't there for her. They were a vast - I did mention sticky, right? - writhing pool of self-satisfaction and passive-aggression and they backstabbed each other continuously.
I'm not a joiner, as a rule, and when I join groups it is because I have thought long and hard and decided to do so. NOT because I was born with some characteristic that they think means they own me. No one owns me. And you don't have a claim to my loyalty or gratitude because you did something for yourself that you think benefits me.
Are there women I honor as having been pioneers of female rights? Oh, sure. Someone had to break the gender barrier, even once tech made the barrier not needed. I honor those women who - living their own lives - went into professions where there were few or no women and performed competently, quietly and in a way that earned the respect of their colleagues.
I don't feel *grateful* to them, as such. I presume they wanted to go into those professions - otherwise they'd be crazy - and didn't do it specifically for me. However, I do honor their bravery and autonomy in pursuing what they wanted regardless of what society told them. Mind you, I honor men, children and small animals who do the same: live their lives the way they want to and excel at their avocation regardless of social or physical obstacles.
Which brings me full circle into what started this. You see, what I want to do is write. Not only that, but I want to write real people, not walking billboards holding aloft a banner that says "I am for the rights of all women to behave like automatons who support what our purported leaders tell us is good for us." I want to write real people without being told I'm being anti-feminist or a mean girl "wha wha wah."
Had I made Athena into a creature who did not care what anyone thought of her, I'd have had to either make her a sociopath or a cardboard cut out. And while characters with issues interest me, sociopaths don't. As for cardboard cut outs, they don't do much. And, oh, yeah, it is normal for love to make men and women feel insecure. My husband was convinced I would reject his proposal though there was never any chance of that. Had Thena's attitude been "He'll love me because I'm all that" she'd have been repulsively self-satisfied or completely androphobic and convinced any male must be grateful for ANY female's attention.
Which brings me to me as a reader - not me as a writer: I am getting very tired of reading sociopaths, cardboard cut outs, women who view men SOLELY as means of sexual satisfaction and/or things to fight against. (And yes, the 'things' is justified.) A culture in which an historical romance cannot be published without the author making the woman some sort of anachronistic proto-feminist is a sick, sick, culture. More importantly, it's a boring culture. This trend is losing both male readers and those female readers who like males. Heck, it's losing every reader who hasn't been taught she has an ax to grind - or didn't believe it - because all these books are is Mary Sues defending the sticky-girl author against the mean boys and girls she can't take on in real life.
And if you are an author who is NOT a sticky girl and who only does this to avoid attacks by reviewers and rejections by editors, stop it. Stand up for yourself and tell the accusers to take a hike. (If you absolutely must have a group, join my gang. The other outliers and I might not hang together, profess the same goals or have the same ideas. We do however, metaphorically speaking, meet up behind the bike sheds after school to throw a bucket of chum over the heads of the sticky girls.)
The few men who venture to read the female characters who are billboards for top-down dictates by womyn would in fact be justified in either never having anything to do with women or being attracted to ideologies and religions that strive to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Heck, some of these books have caused me to foam at the mouth and growl about "damn girly writers" till my husband laughs so hard he sprains something. (He thinks I don't realize I'm a woman, which makes it funny. Of course I realize I'm a woman. I'm not, though, nor have I ever been a "sticky girl.")
So, to return to the point, yeah, my character will care what the man she loves thinks of her. How much she cares and how much insecurity she displays depends on who she is. For instance, Kyrie in the shifters' series, though in many ways also having a dysfunctional childhood, is much more self-sufficient than Athena. She was tried and survived before - instead of a poisonous combination of being emotionally put down and physically spared and indulged. So if the man she's involved with - Tom - is being asinine, she shrugs and goes about her business and/or gives the situation a sharp redirect, till it's fixed. It wouldn't occur to her to worry he'll judge her unworthy. It wouldn't occur to her to worry that anyone would judge her unworthy. But Thena is not Kyrie, and neither of them is me. They are their own people in their own world, who live lives in their own way and who are not merely vehicles for my point of view. I write them like I write my male characters: as logical products of their environment, upbringing and (to an extent) genetics.
I apologize if this annoys anyone. But if all you want is to see a reinforcement of received wisdom, you've come to the wrong place. You see, I despise fruity hard candy and my writing is not designed to bind us together shoulder to shoulder. If it's designed to do ANYTHING beyond entertain, it is to make you think. And that, I believe, will make life far better for future women - and men, and children, and hermit crabs, giraffes and mandolins - than any marching shoulder to shoulder.
*If you like the rant, please steal it. Post it on your blog, no matter how small. Right now, I'm keeping the first three chapters of Darkships on top of my blog, so I don't want to post this in mine. However, this issue disturbs me, frankly more as a reader than a writer (since as a writer I tend to ignore the sticky dictates.) Keep the attribution, but feel free to post it, reprint it, pass it on. If you hate it,(shrug) so, so bad. Like my characters I am my own woman. And my only transactions with the sticky girls consisted of saving them from the rough boys. This hasn't changed, nor is it likely to.*
posted by Andrew @ 3:11 PM
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