Amanita
Maester
I agree with the sentiment that calling sexists sexists would be more helpful in some instances than differentiating between feminists and people who don’t consider themselves such.
I disagree with quite a few things some feminists say and I’m not sure if I would give myself that label or not, depends on the definition, but if I read or hear someone say that they’re against feminism, I tend to believe they think that women are supposed to obey their husbands/fathers/brothers etc. again, aren’t supposed to have jobs outside of the house, are intellectually inferior and so on. I had a chat with Mindfire about this, so it can be cleared up if there’s a chance to, but if there isn’t, I tend to think the person wants to rob me of my rights which makes me less inclined to listen to anything else they’ve got to say.
In writing, I think it would be really helpful if all this fuss about writing female characters would stop. If a male writer takes his inspiration from the women in his life and writes the female character as a person with some amount of respect, he should be alright. The vast majority of people interact with people of the opposite gender on a regular basis, so why act as if they were an alien species?
Being white, I’m probably not supposed to say the same for writing non-white characters but I can state that it would be much easier to write them if they weren’t considered my statement on non-white people. The protagonist of my WIP “happened” to have dark skin and I didn’t think much about in the beginning but reading many online discussions about the subject, I started to wonder if everything she does would be considered a message of some sort. So I’ve decided to include more PoCs, some of very different background and hope this will be less so but I’m still left wondering if a character who is the son of a white man and a PoC woman counts as a PoC or not. This is a question I feel quite bothered by in itself because this kind of thinking is strongly discouraged where I come from.
I have to admit that I’m also slightly baffled by the way the entire discussion about racism and hatred between ethnic groups is always dominated by some dichotomy between “white people” and “everyone else.”
I probably don’t have to mention that “everyone else” is pretty diverse and the differences between say Chinese and Nigerians are probably as pronounced as the differences between Europeans and any of those ethnicities. I also highly doubt that a white westerner would be granted “privilege” because of this status in China.
The worst crimes against ethnic groups in the last century have been committed against people who didn’t look very different from the perpetrators at all.
Oppression of other ethnic groups (other cultures, religions...) is not something only white people do to others but something humans often do in some situations for a variety of reasons. Often, the “privileged” group is the one the majority of people in a given country and immigrants, minorities living in this country etc. are treated with distrust or worse.
I understand why a story set in present day USA should represent the population and issues relevant there at the time the story is written. I don’t understand why the same issues are supposed to be relevant in a fantasy world though. I consider it extremely complicated to create a situation similar to the one created by immigration by people from very different ethnic groups and the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the US and I don’t see any reason why I should try.
Discrimination, hatred against other groups, ethnic cleansings and similar play a huge role in my stories but they’re not linked to skin colour as the most important difference.
A characters’ background and experience should always be taken into account of course but if it’s a fantasy story it’s one in the fantasy society with its history that’s different from real world history because magic, dragons, undead, Orcs or whatever exist in this world while historical events of the real world do not.
I disagree with quite a few things some feminists say and I’m not sure if I would give myself that label or not, depends on the definition, but if I read or hear someone say that they’re against feminism, I tend to believe they think that women are supposed to obey their husbands/fathers/brothers etc. again, aren’t supposed to have jobs outside of the house, are intellectually inferior and so on. I had a chat with Mindfire about this, so it can be cleared up if there’s a chance to, but if there isn’t, I tend to think the person wants to rob me of my rights which makes me less inclined to listen to anything else they’ve got to say.
In writing, I think it would be really helpful if all this fuss about writing female characters would stop. If a male writer takes his inspiration from the women in his life and writes the female character as a person with some amount of respect, he should be alright. The vast majority of people interact with people of the opposite gender on a regular basis, so why act as if they were an alien species?
Being white, I’m probably not supposed to say the same for writing non-white characters but I can state that it would be much easier to write them if they weren’t considered my statement on non-white people. The protagonist of my WIP “happened” to have dark skin and I didn’t think much about in the beginning but reading many online discussions about the subject, I started to wonder if everything she does would be considered a message of some sort. So I’ve decided to include more PoCs, some of very different background and hope this will be less so but I’m still left wondering if a character who is the son of a white man and a PoC woman counts as a PoC or not. This is a question I feel quite bothered by in itself because this kind of thinking is strongly discouraged where I come from.
I have to admit that I’m also slightly baffled by the way the entire discussion about racism and hatred between ethnic groups is always dominated by some dichotomy between “white people” and “everyone else.”
I probably don’t have to mention that “everyone else” is pretty diverse and the differences between say Chinese and Nigerians are probably as pronounced as the differences between Europeans and any of those ethnicities. I also highly doubt that a white westerner would be granted “privilege” because of this status in China.
The worst crimes against ethnic groups in the last century have been committed against people who didn’t look very different from the perpetrators at all.
Oppression of other ethnic groups (other cultures, religions...) is not something only white people do to others but something humans often do in some situations for a variety of reasons. Often, the “privileged” group is the one the majority of people in a given country and immigrants, minorities living in this country etc. are treated with distrust or worse.
I understand why a story set in present day USA should represent the population and issues relevant there at the time the story is written. I don’t understand why the same issues are supposed to be relevant in a fantasy world though. I consider it extremely complicated to create a situation similar to the one created by immigration by people from very different ethnic groups and the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the US and I don’t see any reason why I should try.
Discrimination, hatred against other groups, ethnic cleansings and similar play a huge role in my stories but they’re not linked to skin colour as the most important difference.
A characters’ background and experience should always be taken into account of course but if it’s a fantasy story it’s one in the fantasy society with its history that’s different from real world history because magic, dragons, undead, Orcs or whatever exist in this world while historical events of the real world do not.
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