Friday, September 27, 2013

Strong Female Characters: How Shall We Define Them?

I have had trouble of late when it comes to keeping this blog active, but I still believe in its original mission: to engage science fiction and fantasy in the popular media from a Catholic Christian and conservative perspective. Consequently, when Gina Dalfonzo started talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Bechdel Test over at NRO, it got my attention. The important bits:

At the same time female characters are becoming more ambitious, driven, and successful, they’re also becoming weaker and one-dimensional. Movies and TV shows are full of women who are strong physically, and often intellectually as well. But, more often than not, emotionally, morally, and spiritually, they’re wrecks.

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Whedon has made a name for himself writing strong women like Buffy, a slender blonde teenager saddled with the responsibility of saving the world from various evil creatures. Buffy was physically strong, and as quick with a quip as she was with a stake. At the same time, she got into some of the most ill-advised sexual relationships of all time, with some of the very creatures she was meant to be destroying — creatures who (surprise!) treated her very badly indeed.

The young woman who simultaneously fought evil and slept with it is emblematic of our era: Buffy was out to change the world, with no clear idea of what she was fighting against, or what she was fighting for, or why she was fighting at all. In discarding a clear understanding of morality, Buffy, the favorite “strong woman” of many young girls, was ironically and sadly weakened.

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Rather than following movie characters around with tests and checklists, it seems to me, we’d do better to try to change our culture’s mentality about what a strong woman really looks like. And we could start by acknowledging that she doesn’t have to look like a Marvel action heroine. She can be kind and giving and self-respecting and caring and mature. Those qualities may be scorned as too passive or too stereotypically feminine by our cultural establishment, but that only means that they’re overlooking the very tools they need to start bringing their emotionally brittle heroines to life.

Now, we like Buffy here at Right Fans, but Dalfonzo has a point: If you want to write a truly strong female character, it is not enough to put a weapon in her hand and make her "kick-ass" and clever. It's not enough, in other words, to make her pseudo-masculine. There's nothing wrong with making a female character physically strong, of course - such women do exist - but it is more important to create a female character who is intellectually, morally, and spiritually centered.

This is going to get personal for a moment, but -- when I try to define what makes a "strong" female character in science fiction or elsewhere, my thoughts always turn to my own mother. Mom was one of the first women admitted to the Naval Academy, but she elected not to pursue a military career; instead, she chose to stay home to raise my co-blogger and me. She certainly isn't "kick ass"; as a matter of fact, her physical health is touch-and-go at best and has been ever since my childhood. Her life's pursuits - sewing and care-taking - are as stereotypically "feminine" as you can get. But - and this is critical - she is also a survivor. As a child and young woman, she was the victim of sexual abuse -- and ultimately, that has not destroyed her emotionally. There were rough patches - and an eating disorder - early on, granted, but she has been happily married to my father for 35 years and counting, has raised two Odd but reasonably well-adjusted children, and has forgiven her attacker. Based on my admittedly unscientific observations, this is astounding; others in her same situation have not done nearly as well.

Because the media - with only a few exceptions - have focused solely on physical strength and worldly ambition, they have left an enormous well of female experience completely untapped -- and that's a shame, because real women are more amazing than you can possibly imagine. You need only crack a history book - or a book on the saints - to discover that breathtaking reality. Consider the female Doctors of the Church. Consider Joan of Arc (who was way more awesome historically than she is typically portrayed). Consider Mother Teresa. None of these individuals really fit our popular culture's dessicated vision of what it means to be a "strong" woman, but the impact they had on the world is incontrovertible.

If I might make a suggestion to any pop-media writers out there: Look beyond the "strong woman" tropes that swirl around Hollywood and seek out some flesh-and-blood females to serve as your models. What's more, push past your coastal-urban prejudices and try to find women who don't necessarily live or think the same way you do. If you do these two simple things, what you produce can only improve.

10 comments:

  1. We like Buffy specifically because the message of the show is "DON'T DO THIS!!!!!!!" every time Buffy screws up. She's not a strong female character YET...she's BECOMING one. Her final comments on romance happen in the series finale in which she says she has learned that she shouldn't be in a relationship until she's ready. "I'm cookie batter...I'm not done yet" And then some day she knows she WILL be ready "I'm cookies...and if cookie me can find someone, then that person can...eat...me..." (typically Whedonesque use of humor to hammer home the message)

    Yes, this writer has a point...but this writer also missed the point of BtVS. :)

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    1. Yes. This reply is correct. But I thought it was more important to address the perennial complaint regarding female characters. ;)

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  2. Good thoughts here, certainly som things I try to keep in mind when I'm writng, in particular my younger female characters, because my daughters read my work. I want them to find strong role models, not sleep with every pretty boy.

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    1. Great point. As I well know, ugly boys need luvin' too.

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    2. Your remark in re: sleeping with "every pretty boy" reminds me of one of my other frustrations: Why can't we have a genre story with a female protagonist that involves NO ROMANCE WHATSOEVER? Yeeesh.

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  3. I try to make my female characters strong INSIDE not necessarily outside. Okay, I write Athena who is a mess, but all characters in that series are at best fractured. Kyrie in the shifters series, OTOH is strong, though she rarely engages in physical fighting. You see, most "strong women" as defined by NY publishing (and the movies) actually petulant children. They're best exemplified by the chick in Pirates of the Caribbean (2, I think) who runs around telling the men not to fight and thereby neglects the one task she was given -- guard the trunk!
    I really have very little patience with that type of female, in books or in movies or -- much less -- in real life. Examine Heinlein's description of the Fallen Caryatid by Rodin. She falls under the load, but doesn't complain and keeps trying to lift it. One of the examples he gives is I THINK of a mother working to feed a large brood, every day, no matter how tired. How many such do we know? And how many triumph even in their fall? But for NY and Hollywood, these aren't strong women. After all they're serving others. By neglecting the strength and purpose one finds in service and love, they've extirpated motherhood and most female strengths of meaning. So all they can create is caricatures of women with the macho swagger of a comic book hero, and no interior life. BTW -- that's why we like Buffy, she is doing it for OTHERS and upholding her responsibilities. Yeah, she makes personal mistakes, but she has a center to her life.

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    1. ABSOLUTELY. The more I got inside my female prot, the better I got to know her. Well-educated, mother of three, military wife...very short fuse and cusses like a sailor when she's eleventy-pissed. After everything goes to hell, a sort of mild nihilism settles over her. She's still desperate to protect her children and does what's necessary toward that end, but for the circumstances they find themselves in, surviving by inches every day, she kind of made a sort of...not peace, more of a detente with things.

      She was on the cusp of divorcing her Army colonel husband when SHTF and is caught in FL while he's in VA. Along the way north, she loses one of her kids and shortly after finds out that not only did her husband survive, but is in charge...which pisses her off because it's one of the main reasons she was going to leave him...duty. Now...marching northward, she has to juggle the emotions of getting closer to perceived safety for her kids with the knowledge that she's going to have to tell her husband that his only son is dead. She...is a pistol, that one.

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    2. I definitely hear you on the "petulant children" thing. It also bothers ME that "strong" in Hollywood is associated with the whole "getting what's mine" mentality. No -- that's not strong. That's being bitchy and selfish.

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  4. I've done the conventional "strong female character," but something strange happened in my latest story. The story opens with a girlfriend who's called her boyfriend because she's afraid of ghosts. I realized I needed to make her more than a "hysterical crying woman." But there was no space for her to take up a crossbow, or swordfight a shipload of Reavers. She's a nurse, so I added a car wreck. And had her push her boyfriend aside to administer first aid. Nothing superhero. She just kept it together and did the right thing. And that's what courage and strength of character is.

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    1. Yes, precisely. You don't need to be a superhero. Competence and moral strength are more impressive.

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