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Women in fantasy

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Nameback

Troubadour
Either way, I'd run with it and see how it works. I don't find it works so well as a metaphor, however, because I think the underlying assumption that men generally fear a woman being in control of reproduction is a flawed assumption. Probably true in a minority of cases, but not as a general rule, so if you try to extend the metaphor to make a generalized point (sort of a universal truth) I think it will fall on its face.

Well, maybe "fear" is the wrong word, but there's obviously been a nearly-universal effort to curtail and control female sexuality in male-dominated cultures. I actually can't even think of a counter-example.

It makes sense, of course--men are at risk of raising children who are not their own, and women are not. So men naturally fear cuckolding far more than women do. Men also happened to seize most positions of political and religious authority throughout history, and so leveraged those positions to control female sexuality to ensure as many consequences as possible for female promiscuity and infidelity, including insults, shunning, damnation, forced pregnancy, rape, and death.

Now, you're right in the sense that while almost every culture ever documented has created restrictions and rules around female sexuality (and male sexuality too, though generally far less restrictively), that does not mean that every individual man shares those feelings. For the record, I'm a man, and obviously I don't if I'm writing about how misguided they are. So you're right that I shouldn't paint all men with that brush, but I think it's fair to paint all cultures with that brush.
 

Nameback

Troubadour
Nameback wants to pass to complement other, broader themes in their work. That's their prerogative because it's a priority to them; the fact that they view it as a flaw in their work has nothing to do with the fact that you find it irrelevant in your own.

Thank you--succinctly and accurately put.

I'm not saying everyone should pass it, or that stories are sexist if they don't. I'm just saying I want to pass it, because that would be consistent with my goals for the story over-all.

Also, for the record, I found a place in my book that was a male/female conversation that had no intrinsic reason to be, and changed it to female/female and now have a Bechdel-passing scene. It illustrated to me how, even though there was no essential gender component to the character I ended up changing, I defaulted to "male." While I've made an effort to make the POV cast inclusive, I may be unconsciously defaulting to male characters for the supporting cast.
 
I don't want to get into this debate either, but your logic is a bit off. Your premises are not guaranteed to be true and one does not follow from another either. My day job is a mathematician so again, I'm not even going to start to talk about what you've brought up in content, but in terms of logic, they are faulty arguments. Again, you're welcome to feel and think about those things whatever you like, but the conclusions you have arrived at do not follow from the beginnings of your argument.

In fact, there are even some contradictions as well on second review.

Could you please clarify what you mean? I argued in a PM that he was making an oversight, but I don't see any contradictions.
 

Nameback

Troubadour
In general, I want to mess with my readers' preconceived notions. I have very weird political and moral beliefs. I basically disagree with everyone on everything--even when I agree on policy with someone, there's about a 2% chance that I agree with their reasoning for it. And I've yet to find a single person who agrees with my vision of an ideal world.

Edit: just as a quick example from the news lately, I am pro-NSA spying. This is, in itself, not the majority opinion. On top of that, however, I am pro-leak. So while I approve of the NSA spying on people, I also approve of Snowden leaking the nature of that spying to the public. I won't go into why, because it's a long argument and irrelevant to the discussion. The point is, I've yet to find anyone who agrees with me on both those points at the same time.

Therefore, I have the outsider's perspective required to challenge people's beliefs in ways that they are less likely to have heard before. I have no intention of trying to convert people to my way of thinking; besides being impractical, it makes for a boring book. However, I love reading a book that makes me step back and realize that I have failed to ask important questions about my own beliefs. That I have made assumptions that I didn't even realize were assumptions, but took as natural facts.

For the record, I find that most pro-choice people also share, albeit to a lesser extent, the moralizing of intentions behind an abortion. Even most pro-choice people would find the notion of purposefully getting pregnant in order to abort abhorrent--especially if it was for some kind of material gain. I want to make them ask themselves: "Why do I find this abhorrent?" Don't just find it abhorrent and stop there. I want people to confront their feeling of disgust and interrogate it, come to understand it. Whether they cast it off or not is irrelevant to me.

So, while I don't care about making people become pro-choice, I do hope that, wherever they are on the spectrum of belief on the issue, they come away from my book having more strenuously examined their beliefs.
 
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Nameback

Troubadour
I want to do this as often as possible in my book, by the way: present something initially shocking or abhorrent, and then make the reader wrestle with it. Maybe they see a character they really like doing it. Maybe it ends up having a positive consequence for the world at large. And, conversely, I want to show them things that they will initially find satisfying or just, and then make them wrestle with that by showing its negative consequences, or having a villain exhibit that kind of moral action.

Obviously GRRM does this a lot--taking the traditional heroic values like honor and trust and love and showing us how people--especially the regular people--keep suffering as a result of these intransigent, unpragmatic beliefs. But I'd like to be less bleak about it, and challenge philosophical ideals rather than narrative ones. I think GRRM's interrogation of things like honor is one of the best parts of ASOIAF, and a big part of why people love it, so I don't think the audience will be too distressed when I do something similar.
 

Chilari

Staff
Moderator
Thank you--succinctly and accurately put.

I'm not saying everyone should pass it, or that stories are sexist if they don't. I'm just saying I want to pass it, because that would be consistent with my goals for the story over-all.

Also, for the record, I found a place in my book that was a male/female conversation that had no intrinsic reason to be, and changed it to female/female and now have a Bechdel-passing scene. It illustrated to me how, even though there was no essential gender component to the character I ended up changing, I defaulted to "male." While I've made an effort to make the POV cast inclusive, I may be unconsciously defaulting to male characters for the supporting cast.

(My emphasis)
I think this is an important point - when we think of characters, or even other people unseen, it is very easy to default to male. I've noticed I do when another driver does something stupid or dangerous on the road in my sight - When relaying the event I'd say "he cut me up" or "he pulled out in front of me" unless I'm refering to a car type (eg "A BMW overtook me in a no-overtaking area"). I assume other drivers are male unless I see that they are female. I caught myself defaulting to male for the antagonist of the story I'm planning, even though I'd not made a decision at the time (and have now - she's female).

I think this is defaulting to male thing is self-perpetuating: we default to male and write largely male casts. Thus the media we read has a lot of default male characters including protagonists, antagonists, side characters, mooks and monsters (ever noticed how most of the vampires in Buffy are male? Except Darla, Drucilla, Vamp Willow and a couple of others, all the vampires are male). Thus the default male mentality anchors itself more deeply in our minds.

That's part of why I think it is important to be deliberate in including women in all sorts of different roles within a story, because otherwise it's all to easy to default to male.
 
Could you please clarify what you mean? I argued in a PM that he was making an oversight, but I don't see any contradictions.

It's all gone now so I don't think I can remember them all.

I want to take a second to remind everyone that modern Politics are banned, especially political arguments on extremely controversial subjects, except as strictly related to the context of a story.

You may read our policy here.

http://mythicscribes.com/forums/news-announcements/3634-no-more-politics.html

Can you please delete the rest of that post of mine you halfway cut then even though I didn't engage in any politicking and deliberately avoided it? It looks a little absurd with just a bit of a quote from Nameback and nothing from me.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
Can you please delete the rest of that post of mine you halfway cut then even though I didn't engage in any politicking and deliberately avoided it? It looks a little absurd with just a bit of a quote from Nameback and nothing from me.

I'm sorry about that - I only meant to delete a segment from the Quote, and not anything from you, but I did it very rushed and am only seeing now that I made a mistake. The post is deleted.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
(My emphasis)
I think this is defaulting to male thing is self-perpetuating: we default to male and write largely male casts. Thus the media we read has a lot of default male characters including protagonists, antagonists, side characters, mooks and monsters (ever noticed how most of the vampires in Buffy are male? Except Darla, Drucilla, Vamp Willow and a couple of others, all the vampires are male). Thus the default male mentality anchors itself more deeply in our minds.

This brings up the question, "Can there ever be a 50/50 split between defaults?" IMHO it's more important female characters get fair representation as major characters than background characters. In TV and movies there are other factors that may come into play for minor characters other than fair representation. Maybe they couldn't find enough female extras that day of filming. Maybe they couldn't find a female actor for that day of filming that could do the physical feats required of that scene. Also if you think about it, there's a double standard where an audience won't flinch if a male character gets beat on, but if scenes contain a female getting beat on, especially if it's a guy doing the beating, there are going to be people who get uncomfortable because of the violence against women subject matter.

To me defaults of male or female are neither bad or good, they just are. They're a symptom of a patriarchal past, and will dissipate when society deals with root causes. And to me, giving this too much attention takes away from where focus should be.
 

Chilari

Staff
Moderator
Where should the focus be? And sure;y it's only by giving it this focus now that there will ever come a point in the future where we won't need to give it any focus at all, because it will just be by default fairly equal.
 

saellys

Inkling
To me defaults of male or female are neither bad or good, they just are. They're a symptom of a patriarchal past, and will dissipate when society deals with root causes. And to me, giving this too much attention takes away from where focus should be.

I'm having a hard time processing this statement. What, in your opinion, are the root causes of unequal treatment of men and women in media, and how will society ever get around to dealing with them if we don't place attention on the top-level problem?

In my experience, the deeper we go into the "root causes," the more abstract and easily manipulated the terms and statements become. I can go up to anyone and say, "Treat all people the same, 'kay?" and that person will inevitably say, "Okay, sure, that's what I do all the time." But if I'm critiquing the work that person has put out into the world, a top-level, seemingly superficial area, and I say, "You have a novel with eight major male characters and two females. The only time your two female characters talk to each other is when they're discussing one of the male characters, and that suggests to me that they're not truly fleshed out as characters to the extent that the men are. You should give them their own back story and goals that aren't tied to your male characters, which would also lead to a more interesting conversation where their agendas overlap or conflict. Also, keep an eye on this in the future to make sure you don't have imbalances like this by default--it's really easy to slip into the habit of underdeveloping female characters," that's specific advice that person can actually use, AND it has the potential to make them think about these issues later on, and maybe even do some honest self-examination of how they relate to other people of any gender, and whether that impacts their writing.

Point is, not only do I believe this is a problem that can be fixed from the top down, I'm convinced that top-down thinking will be a vital part of the solution.
 
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Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
Point is, not only do I believe this is a problem that can be fixed from the top down, I'm convinced that top-down thinking will be a vital part of the solution.

Yeah. Root causes tend to be irrelevant when addressing something that manifests as a bad habit such as "defaulting to male." You only fix a bad habit by focusing on it until it goes away. Otherwise the habit persists long after the cause.

That is, if someone is defaulting to male, it doesn't need to mean anything about them except that they have a bad habit. But that person will only fix it by naming it and thinking about it for a while. The cause could be anything.
 

Chilari

Staff
Moderator
Someone I follow on twitter just tweeted this:
You don't get equality by waiting until the other side wakes up and gets a clue

She was talking about transphobia, but it applies here too. A passive approach won't yield results, but a proactive one will - even if you do have to step on a few toes along the way.

Link to the tweet.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
Where should the focus be? And sure;y it's only by giving it this focus now that there will ever come a point in the future where we won't need to give it any focus at all, because it will just be by default fairly equal.

I stated the focus in my post. Focus on making sure when you look at story telling as a whole that there is equal female representation for main cast/main protagonists. To me focusing on background characters is noise. It dilutes the message.


I'm having a hard time processing this statement. What, in your opinion, are the root causes of unequal treatment of men and women in media, and how will society ever get around to dealing with them if we don't place attention on the top-level problem?

That's what I've been saying focus on the big problems instead of niggling at the small stuff. My response was to Chilari pointing out that most of the vampires in Buffy were male if you count all the background vamps. Why even worry about the faceless cannon fodder? Worry about the main cast. If we look at Buffy what are the significant vampires. On the male side it's Spike, Angel and The Master, and on the female side you got Drucilla and Darla. This is a 60/40 split. But if you look at significant female cast vs male cast, I'd say it's pretty even if not slanted toward the female side.

Again, I'm saying worry about equal representation in the big roles, not the small ones.

Yeah. Root causes tend to be irrelevant when addressing something that manifests as a bad habit such as "defaulting to male." You only fix a bad habit by focusing on it until it goes away. Otherwise the habit persists long after the cause.

That is, if someone is defaulting to male, it doesn't need to mean anything about them except that they have a bad habit. But that person will only fix it by naming it and thinking about it for a while. The cause could be anything.

To me, defaulting to male is a symptom of not seeing enough females in significant and diverse roles, in reality and in fiction. If all a writer ever sees is a male in a role such as... say...a cop, then that's going to be their default. Deal with the latter and the former will correct itself. Deal with the symptom and the cause remains and the symptom will manifest again.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
To me, defaulting to male is a symptom of not seeing enough females in significant and diverse roles, in reality and in fiction. If all a writer ever sees is a male in a role such as... say...a cop, then that's going to be their default. Deal with the latter and the former will correct itself. Deal with the symptom and the cause remains and the symptom will manifest again.

If you're defaulting to male, the solution is for you to consciously stop defaulting and take ten seconds to think about it. There's no other way. If you start reading stories about diverse characters, maybe the same thing is going to happen - eventually you might notice, and you'll decide to form a habit of taking ten seconds to think about it. But it's not just going to disappear.

What's wrong with bringing the habit to the forefront through dialogue?


"You don't get equality by waiting until the other side wakes up and gets a clue"

.....A passive approach won't yield results, but a proactive one will - even if you do have to step on a few toes along the way.

It's entirely possible to take an proactive approach without "taking sides" or trying to "step on a few toes." I think that kind of attitude can hold someone back.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
If you're defaulting to male, the solution is for you to consciously stop defaulting and take ten seconds to think about it. There's no other way. If you start reading stories about diverse characters, maybe the same thing is going to happen - eventually you might notice, and you'll decide to form a habit of taking ten seconds to think about it. But it's not just going to disappear.

What's wrong with bringing the habit to the forefront through dialogue?

This is assuming the writer is consciously aware that they're defaulting. And if they're already aware, then they're probably giving it thought already, whether they care to change or not. It's not about short term here. It's about the long run. Changing general attitudes takes time, and IMHO the best way to reach people is by example, not telling people what they should or should not do.

I never said it was wrong to dialogue about it. I said to not vilify it. It's neither good or bad. It just is. Everyone defaults, and not just in determining the sex of a character. Some default to male, others to female. Some default to comedy fiction, others to drama.

The problem is when sex is concerned more default to male right now. The ideal would be 50% of the people default to male and the other 50% default to female. That, to me, would be a sign that society feels that males and females have the equal right to be ignored, mistreated, misrepresented, and made fun of without any sexual bias.
 

Chilari

Staff
Moderator
I don't think ignoring the background characters is going to help. Consider the main characters as a priority, but if you're still defaulting to male for background characters, there is still a problem. How much time would it take, when we're writing novels (so there's no issue with casting etc, though I don't honestly think there are any more male extras than female - they seem to be more balanced in crowd scenes and so on so why not vampires too?) there's no reason not to stop for five seconds and think "does this pub landlord have to be male?" or "does this shopkeeper have to be male?" or even, "does this city guard have to be male?" and if the answer is no, consider changing it.

I don't see that dismissing it because it's less important than main characters is useful.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
I don't see that dismissing it because it's less important than main characters is useful.

I'll repeat myself. It's about signal to noise ratio. Do you expect to bust everyones chops if they don't balance their background characters? Should there be some one whose job it is to count how many female and male background characters there are in every book and every tv show and every film? And if it's not balanced enough, shame on them? Where does it end? Do we start counting guys and gals in the Where's Waldo pictures? There's a point where it gets to be too much.

If you nitpick at every old thing, people will stop listening and the real important stuff gets lost in the noise.

Also when you set your parameters to only include vampires, to me that's a bit of a strawman. What if I set the parameters to witches in Buffy. If memory serves they're all female. Is that fair or equal? Why not a warlock or two? If I set my parameters right I can make the category support any argument I come up with.
 
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