aikaterini

From the author of “The Rape of James Bond,” (which I posted about here: http://aikaterini.livejournal.com/70414.html) comes this article, which is also very thought-provoking: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters.

Some highlights:

- “No one ever asks if a male character is “strong”. Nor if he’s “feisty,” or “kick-ass” come to that.”

- “Is Sherlock Holmes strong? It’s not just that the answer is “of course”, it’s that it’s the wrong question.”

- “We need get away from the idea that sexism in fiction can be tackled by reliance on depiction of a single personality type, that you just need to write one female character per story right and you’ve done enough.”

- “Richard has the spotlight. However weak or distressed or passive he may be, he’s the main goddamn character.”

- “Richard has huge range of other characters of his own gender around him, so that he never has to act as any kind of ambassador or representative for maleness. Even dethroned and imprisoned, he is free to be uniquely himself.”

- “Nowadays the princesses all know kung fu, and yet they’re still the same princesses. They're still love interests, still the one girl in a team of five boys, and they’re all kind of the same. They march on screen, punch someone to show how they don’t take no shit, throw around a couple of one-liners or forcibly kiss someone because getting consent is for wimps, and then with ladylike discretion they back out of the narrative’s way.”

- “Their strength lets them, briefly, dominate bystanders but never dominate the plot. It’s an anodyne, a sop, a Trojan Horse - it’s there to distract and confuse you, so you forget to ask for more.”

- “What do I want instead of a Strong Female Character? I want a male: female character ratio of 1:1 instead of 3:1 on our screens. I want a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness. Badass gunslingers and martial artists sure, but also interesting women who are shy and quiet and do, sometimes, put up with others’ shit because in real life there’s often no practical alternative. And besides heroines, I want to see women in as many and varied secondary and character roles as men: female sidekicks, mentors, comic relief, rivals, villains. I want not to be asked, when I try to sell a book about two girls, two boys and a genderless robot, if we couldn’t change one of those girls to a boy.”

Note: The article in particular stands out to me because I have indeed noticed that nobody refers to male characters as “strong,” whether they are describing characters in movies or books. And because nobody does really say, “strong male character,” I wonder if there could be another phrase to use when describing female characters who aren’t doormats or stereotypical.

There’s the option of saying that a female character is “empowered,” but, again, hardly anybody refers to male characters as “empowered.” One could say that the female character in question was well-rounded, well-written, complex, three-dimensional, or had agency. In that case, would the phrase be “a female character with agency?” A “well-rounded female character?” Or, in contrast to the term “argagonist,” which was created to describe a passive and/or useless character, could the female character simply be referred to as an “active female character?” (Or could a new term be coined?)

Of course, the point of the article is that there shouldn’t be this one well-written female character in a story to judge, there should be a variety of well-written female characters in the story. So, I’m not sure if coming up with a new phrase to use other than “strong female character” would really do anything about the issue that Sophia McDougall is talking about.

I think that the aim of this article coincides with that of the Bechdel Test. I’ve seen people criticize the test for being too vague, unhelpful, misleading, or nitpicky, and that may be true for some people. But I think that the point of the Bechdel Test shouldn’t be for writers to squeeze in one single 2 minute-conversation between two female characters about something other than a man just to pass the test. If a film or book does just that and then proceeds to either have the two female characters never talk to each other again or talk to each other about nothing but men from that moment on, I don’t think that that’s a sign that the film is now automatically a film with complex female characters. I think that the idea is that stories should have more than one female character (since you need another person to sustain that conversation), that a story shouldn’t have a token female character just for diversity or appeasement or whatever the reason may be, and that it’s really odd that so many films (and yes, this includes excellent films) apparently do have their female characters talk about nothing but men. Instead of a test per se, I think that the Bechdel Test is more of an indicator of a troubling trend, and a motivator, and a push for something more. It’s not the end-all, be-all.

Likewise, it’s nice when a film or book does have a Strong Female Character. But when she’s the only female character of note, she risks falling into the Exceptional Woman ™ trope or of becoming a cliché, or of becoming a Faux-Action Woman ™. It’s nice when there is a female character with agency. But it would be even better if there was more than one.