My Twitter stream regularly expresses a variety of opinion on the treatment of women, or of people of colour or unconventional sexuality, in genre fiction. This is, I presume to imagine, a reflection of the treatment of women, or of people of colour or unconventional sexuality in the wider world. It’s also a consequence of the people I choose to follow, because I tend to listen to a mixture of people who amuse me and to people who make me think. You have to be careful about that sort of thing. Twitter becomes a bubble of your own making, a window into the world deeply coloured by the people you choose to follow. There really are a hell of a lot of people who haven’t the first idea who Neil Gaiman is. There was a time when that would have come as a shock.
Back in my role-playing days I once carried out a little experiment. We were a mixed group, with players who played with gender in their characters now and then, and I distinctly remember a female player (I shall call her Tass after the Dragonlance Kender Tasselhoff. We played a lot of Dragonlance) turning to a male player and asking him not to do that because his version of role-playing a woman was crass and offensive and men in general just shouldn’t do it because they were incapable of understanding women well enough to do a good job of it. As I remember, the chastisement was given and received in good humour and was largely forgotten by the end of the evening, but it stuck in my mind because I was running that particular game and had a reasonably eclectic mix of characters interacting with my players and I found myself thinking shit, does that mean that half my characters are crap then?
Back to today, where day to day I live in a different bubble with different blinkers and I simply don’t see much of the sexism and the racism and the prejudice and the objectification that’s out there. In part that’s a consequence of the particular bubble in which I live. In part it’s a consequence of being an educated liberal-minded middle-class white male surrounded, mostly, by more of the same (and I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that we’re more subtle about it, which is perhaps worse). And i
n part, I’ve come to realise (and perhaps because of the above), it’s because I often simply don’t see it even when it’s right there in front of me. That came as a shock too. Realisations like that sometimes make me question whether Tass was right all those years ago, whether I should ever even try to write a character who experiences that sort of treatment: who lives with the ingrained expectation of being slapped down by systemic prejudice; or, perhaps more tellingly, constant ingrained expectation, anticipation, anxiety, possibly fear. Turns out I have enough blind arrogance to go ahead and write some characters who aren’t privileged white middle-aged males anyway, but I still think about it: how could I possibly do justice to living like that without turning out a crass caricature?
But diversity is good, right? So, what to do? Nothing? Do nothing is certainly an option. Stick to writing what I know? Doesn’t seem very helpful though. Probably shouldn’t be writing about dragon-riders and star-faring bounty hunters and the like either then, which makes doing nothing kind of dull too, although dragons and star-faring don’t tend to show up on the internet all that much, more’s the pity.
Well yes. Hum. I take your point but I have a bit of a problem with that. In such a world, if I make a character dark-skinned, aren’t I just taking a standard white male and painting him black for extra credit? If I create a minority character of any sort and remove all the real-world prejudices, does that actually mean anything? I really don’t know the answer to that. I suspect it’s in the eye of the beholder. Maybe some readers would find that approach hugely offensive for negating their real-world struggles while others would find it a wondrous escape. Maybe my speculations and my over-simplifications are already upsetting people. I realise, too, that there is an undertow of all manner of –isms in the unstated presumption that the white male is the benchmark in all this thinking. I don’t know. I don’t think I can know, I can only be told, and even that’s flawed because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few years – and boy did it take some learning – it’s to expect ecstatic praise and vitriolic damnation for exactly the same thing and that neither, in isolation, means a great deal. If you want to know the answer to something like that, you need a whole slew of opinions, if only to see just how wonderfully diverse they are.I’ve come across the argument, frequently, that writing secondary world fantasies gives a cheap and easy way out of some of this. Lo! Behold! A world exists in which there multi-cultural diversity and prejudice on the basis of race or gender or indeed anything at all has never evolved in the first place! You could do that and make it work and it certainly deserves thought (bear with me a moment while I make the massively gross and over-simplified sociological assumptions that very broadly and generally traditional pre-industrial gender roles evolved through the biological facts of men being generally stronger and also biologically more expendable and incapable of generating breast milk, and that racism is broadly derived from a more general suspicion and mistrust of the outsider and things that are different. In a fantasy world of magic and dragons (just, *cough* by way of random example), physical strength no longer need equate to dominance, protection and security; and in a fantasy world where all races and cultures have been fully integrated with one another for the whole of history, no one culture is an outside so where the hell would the anti-elf racism come from?)
I suppose slapping some sort of minority[1] identity onto a character at least acknowledges that such minorities exist. I suppose that makes it better than doing nothing at all. To me it feels hollow but I’m not sure my opinion should count much. Others may think otherwise. I simply don’t know how to judge the rights and wrongs of this.
Back to Tass. The group I used to game with stuck together for a good few years with a little coming and going and Tass was fairly constant. She used to complain, now and then, that no one ever listened to her because she was small and a girl (her words exactly) and after a time I took to watching and saw it was true that she often didn’t seem to be heard. One day, when she wasn’t there, I tried to act out the sort of character she tended to play in the way she tended to play them, just to see what would happen. I spoke softly and intelligently, I stayed physically fairly still, I didn’t raise my voice, I didn’t interrupt much, I didn’t tend to press my points and I didn’t make much eye contact and when no one listened, I withdrew into myself for a while. I played a character who was demure and thoughtful and extremely useful (and female, though I’m not sure how relevant that was). I think I thought I was going to prove that Tass was right and expected to be treated much as I usually was. What I got was exactly the opposite. We were all were fine for a bit during the initial action sequence but as soon as our characters were left to our own devices with a puzzle to solve and courses of actions to choose (it was a fairly political game so there was a lot of that), I might as well not have been there. I think I lasted about an hour before the frustration of being side-lined drove me to get up (in character, I hasten to add), wrestle someone to the floor and physically sit on them until they paid attention.
I am not small and I am not a girl. I got side-lined because I was quiet and didn’t throw my weight about and didn’t act big. I don’t doubt that there were many other factors at play and I don’t pretend my experiment was anything other than crude or that my acting was anything but terrible. I don’t know whether Tass being quiet and thoughtful had anything at all to do with being small and a girl. Nevertheless, I got the reaction I got. It was an experiment that only touched the tip of an iceberg. I’ll probably never walk past a building site and get propositioned (although I kind of look forward to a world where that happens), or wander past a gang of young men and wonder if today’s the day I get beaten half to death for no reason past the colour of my skin (I’ll pass on that one). I’ve spent a great many years close to at least one diagnosed emotional disorder and come to realise I simply will not ever ever, no matter how hard I try, understand exactly what it’s like to be that way. I’ll never truly know what it feels like to be anyone except me; but what that experiment told me was that I could listen to people who experienced the world in a different way and that I could walk a few steps in their shoes for a while and actually experience a touch of the same things, and that doing so really wasn’t that hard. The rest, the bits I’ll never be able to simulate and see for myself, well, that’s why we have an imagination, right?
So back to the title (yes, it’s a troll title) of this random wandering: I’ve written fiction in which white men lay the smackdown on other white men with barely a breast or a skin tone in sight. I don’t, personally, have a problem with that, although I’d worry if that was the sum of everything I did. I’ve written all manner of characters; but when I read or write a story, I cringe at a “female” protagonist, or a “coloured” one or a “gay” one or any other token[2]. Others may see things differently; but doesn’t every writer worth their salt owe it to all concerned to at least try to walk a little way in every character’s shoes? It’s what we ask of our readers, isn’t it? Isn’t it what our readers want from us? Characters to take us to places we haven’t been, to show us what it’s like to be someone different, and to make those differences more than a set of token adjectives, however imperfect the result. To make us feel it.
And hurrah if they happen to be anything other than a white male from the privileged elite of whatever world defines the setting.
[1] Minority in terms of representation in genre fiction, at least.
[2] And let’s not talk about the all-crushing dragon-rage-of-annihilation that comes when the Daily Mail decides it has to use those tokens ALL THE TIME.
Richard Marpole
Jennie Ivins
Thanks for this, Stephen. I think your points are entirely valid and I too have struggled to write female characters in the past. One author how comes to mind as refusing to back down against these kinds of challenges is Myke Cole. His characters (and protagonists) refuse to be simply white males. Not sure if you’ve read them? I very much like the diversity of characters in the covers:
Struggling to think of other really good examples, but I’ve come up with Garth Nix. Not sure if you’ve read his books, but I feel he wrote as an adolescent girl very, very well in his Abhorsen / Old Kingdom series of books and used more than one character to do it too 🙂
Anddddddddd, finally, I think this post links well to the one Aaron wrote on Archetypes vs Stereotypes. If you are looking for ways to make your character less stereotypical look at ‘who’ they are and you could end up finding that difference between a great character and a placeholder you should be looking for as a writer.
I think one of your problems is separating a character’s physical description from its context. A person is a product of both who it is and what it experiences. If you’re assuming that males and females in fantasyland are similar to males and females on Earth, then there’re more differences between them than just wardrobe choices. You’re definitely making a mistake in trying to ascribe terrestrial cultural differences based on skin color to your fantasy characters who didn’t live on Earth. Given that, you’d actually be less racist to portray a black guy in Dragonlance like a white guy with a tan than to assume said black guy fits a black guy stereotype of any culture from an Earth to which he has no connection. That’s where some of the really fun stuff of role-playing comes in, though, because you and your friends can create cultures and build a world the way you want it to be. Open your minds. Diversity isn’t a burden. It’s simply a manifestation of the freedom born of infinite possibilities.
I think stereotypes are a strange thing in fiction. I’m a big fan of comics and a few days ago when I was looking through some previews on a comic site and one of them was for a comic that had a street racing scene and one of the characters was a black man with baggy trousers, gold teeth and a wad of cash in his hand. Now I didn’t think anything about it at the time but when I looked at the comments there seemed to be a discussion on whether this was maybe unintentionally racist or not. Some users were saying that this was a stereotype and therefore racist but others were saying that there is people that look exactly like this in real life, especially in the street race scene and that should not be ignored and that also the writer himself was black.
So it’s a strange question as to what is and what isn’t a stereotype and when, if ever they should be used.
You had me with the title! I was expecting this to be a defence against not having women in a fantasy novel. I was disgusted, horified, outraged! And then I read the article and laughed at myself 😛
I think you make some good points. Perhaps work as you mention is going to be difficult and not get published but it is likely that it will make you a better writer in the long run. Who said writing’s a sprint anyways huh?
“[M]en in general just shouldn’t do it because they were incapable of understanding women well enough to do a good job of it.”
It seems like I see assertions like this more and more often. It’s extremely problematic for a number of reasons.
If it’s true that a person can’t write well about people not like them, then we might as well pack up and go home–literature would never be worth reading.
If (I think more often the point being made) it’s that a certain group of people are incapable of writing about another certain group of people, well, that’s bigoted on its face.
It’s used as a sword, and thus becomes an (at least attempted) object of censorship–I don’t like what you’re saying so I’m going to try to stop you from saying it.
There is this huge presumption that person A has the right and ability to speak for group A and to treat person B as nothing more than an indistiguishable member of group B.
It threatens to become a tool of censorship by not targeting those writers who fail to write people as they are but rather targeting those writers who fail to write people as the self-appointed censors think they should be presented.
There is a presumption against craft. Men are “incapable of understanding women well enough.” Not merely that they tend not to understand women well enough to write about them (almost certainly true for the average man that vaguely thinks he would like to write), but that they CANNOT. A verdict reached by gender and no more.
The flip side–the implication that women are not only capable of understanding men but spring forth from the womb intuitively knowing how–is equally problematic. Because the woman that believes that has no reason to try to understand men because she thinks that she already does. And women in general don’t understand men any better than men understand women.
It diminishes both the person lobbing the accusation and their target. For both their membership in a group is more important than they as individuals.
(Your friend’s depiction of women may well have been problematic. That’s not my concern, because your other friend’s words went far beyond that.)
Regarding how to write a character, I will say only that of all the people that I have met in my life, I have yet to meet anyone whose most interesting characteristic was their race, gender, etc.
Finally, I’ve lived in a lot of places among a lot of different kind of people. Unfortunately, and despite my best wishes for it to be otherwise, bigotry is part and parcel to the general human condition. If the people you live among don’t seem bigoted, then it is more likely that their bigotry doesn’t even register with you. (“[E]ducated liberal-minded middle-class white male” tend to be plenty bigoted. What do they think of conservatives? People who live in the country? The poor? The rich? The religious?)
I’d say much the same as Phoenix. If I’m writing a female character, I don’t set out to write “a woman” (whatever precisely that means), I set out to write a specific character whose gender is important but not all-important. In terms of race, inter-racial issues are going to vary depending on the history of that world. Assuming, for instance, that black people in every world are going to have the same issues resulting from institutional slavery that they tend to in our world is perilously close to saying that black people are naturally destined to be slaves. You don’t get much more racist than that.
The stereotype issue that Jonny raised is a thorny one. I think the point is how much diversity there is. If that particular character were the only black man in the story, it probably would come over as racial stereotyping. If there were a range of other black characters who were different individuals, then the argument that “there are people like this in real life” would be much more convincing.
This was a very enlightening article, simply as it showed a man putting himself in the shoes of a female character and showing that it is entirely plausible for people of ANY background to write characters of ANY OTHER background (caps lock makes things important).
The issue I find is, you write one female character who is undermined, suppressed, but has no issue, etc etc, i.e. a sexist stereotype, and suddenly you as the author are writing on behalf of all women everywhere. Surely, with such diversity, the stereotypes do exist (stereotypes come from somewhere), and should be able to be written. The true issue is when that is the ONLY view being offered. We need diversity in fiction as a whole as much as there is diversity in reality, and that doesn’t mean we have to stop writing the previous character types now seen as outdated etc etc.
I think I’ve veered off the topic, mostly as this is something I want to write about in an article myself, but from a different angle. But this article was just lovely to read simply because it wasn’t the usual anger I face as a white male discussing this topic. This article was the opposite, and showed diversity/equality/fairness in characterisation can exist!
“I create a minority character of any sort and remove all the real-world prejudices, does that actually mean anything?”
Yes.
Representation matters. Real-world people facing real-world prejudices (expressed, for example, in the utter lack of people like them in literature and media) will be reading your writing. It will be validating for people belonging to a minority to read about people like them. It can be potentially educational for people of the dominant group, especially if the minority in question is systematically invisibilized in society (for example bi, trans, gay, asexual and intersex people). In fact, representation can even play a role in people claiming their identities in the first place.
Of course, stories that are *about* someone’s minority status and the consequences thereof should be told (preferably by people of the minority in question or after adequate research), but *incidental* representation is also important.
I say this as someone belonging to a couple of underrepresented minorities.
Thank you for this comment. The protagonist of my first novel is a person of color (I’m not.) And in my case, I’ve deliberately written an alternate history that doesn’t have our world’s racial prejudices. I feel like one of the strengths of speculative fiction is it’s ability to help us imagine a better world.
At any rate, it’s encouraging to read that representation matters, and that just seeing a person like them on the cover of a sf/f book can be an encouragement to someone dealing with our world’s prejudices.
I get what you are saying, I used to write (now I just blog instead), but anyway for example race, I write what I know, so ok that might be white pseudo medieval Europe. I am sorry but that is what I grew up with, the myths I know best.
I did have women in my stories cos well…I am a woman and I know more about what goes on in a woman’s head than a man’s. Honestly no idea what men are thinking now and again 😉
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