Strong Female Characters*

[Mouse]

I'm the wrong sex, see. I should've been a man cos I'm a crappy woman. If there was something that came along and said 'we now offer gender swaps' I'd take it. (It's not that I feel like a man, that I'm bothered enough that I'd want a sex change, it's that I'd rather be male if I was given a choice). If that makes any sense at all.

My friendships with my female friends are drifting apart because they have children and I don't. And that's terribly sad.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

It absolutely is. It happened to me the other way round - I had my first kid quite young - and was a real loss, but the gulf was there. (Or rather, my lack of ability to stay out late several times a week and still crawl into work the next day) My closest ones survived it, not the others. But I lost as many male mates at that time, too. Ironically, I'm getting to the stage of a bit of freedom - to the extent where I can suggest they go entertain themselves in a playground without having to catch them fallling off the end of it) and drink sauvignon and all my mates kids are too young, and I've lost touch with those who didn't choose to have any. Life's complicated, non?

 

[Mouse]

Someone once said to me (a male someone) trust your gut and not the script the world gives you. Which made me realise that it's okay that I'm not like other women, that I'm not all about babies (which, forgive me, but people with children just are and understandably so). You have kids, your focus changes and you become all about your kids. If I ever did have kids, I would fight like hell to stay me. And I'd be an awful mother!

So... I feel like I should say something vaguely on topic now...

 

[Jo Zebedee]

We're thread stealing! I'll Pm you J.

 

[Anne Lyle]

I'm the wrong sex, see. I should've been a man cos I'm a crappy woman. If there was something that came along and said 'we now offer gender swaps' I'd take it. (It's not that I feel like a man, that I'm bothered enough that I'd want a sex change, it's that I'd rather be male if I was given a choice). If that makes any sense at all.

Totally - I feel exactly the same way. Everything clicked for me a few years ago when I realised that I prefer hanging out with guys because then I feel feminine and "normal" by comparison - when I hung out with girls, I felt the only thing we had in common was an interest in guys

My friendships with my female friends are drifting apart because they have children and I don't. And that's terribly sad.

I've never been good at friendships with women. Funnily enough I have loads more female friends since I started going to SFF conventions - we have writing and geekery in common, and the ones who do have kids, their identity doesn't revolve around that. Not because the kids aren't an important part of their life, but it's not the only thing they think/talk about, especially with other writers. If anything, the ones with little kids really appreciate an opportunity to talk about "grown-up stuff"!

Off topic, maybe - but it might give someone an insight into the range of female personalities...

 

[Hex]

Let's wrench this back towards the topic. I'm wondering this:

Do you think part of the 'problem' may be that women in adventures (as, to some extent, in real life) are forced to choose between femininity and being an adventurer?

Until very, very recently men, not women, went on adventures/ to war/ off on expeditions.

I woke up this morning thinking of the Famous Five -- once my great passion -- where George had to basically turn herself into a boy to participate in the adventures while Anne was regularly left behind ("You stay here, Anne."). It made me think about the Narnia books, where Susan's interest in boys and nylons (which is, I assume, what CS Lewis thought femininity was about) means she's excluded from Narnia.

I resent being forced to choose between being a 'proper girl' and going on adventures. Also, I'm not sure about the equation of 'proper girl' with lipstick, high heels, babies and idiocy.

If we're really getting beyond men-go-on-adventures-women-stay-at-home, surely it should be possible to be both feminine and adventurous? Can I be interested in adventures without denying anything that makes me different from men?

Edit -- re friends and babies -- I lost touch with some friends when I had kids. Mainly, it was because I also moved cities and had to give up stuff like playing badminton (also, being enornmously pregnant/ having a baby has physical repercussions no matter how much it would be nice if it didn't). However, I kept up with the close friends. The same thing happened when I left school and went to university -- most of my not-close school friends vanished from my life, and then when I left university, I lost touch with another lot. In part, it's about different life stages, not about babies as the great evil.

 

[allmywires]

In my personal opinion, the lack of strong female friendships in women is down to 2 things:

- most women in literature, whether we like it or not, (and has been mentioned previously) are there to get the guy. Therefore, the other women are rivals. Sad as it is, if no female character has a clear love story they're usually portrayed as unfeminine and uninteresting. Why is this? Harks back to women and babies. Essentially, it's what we're for, and it's going to take a long time to change it.

- women are expected to be emotional. With men's friendship's there is almost always a hint of frisson, the forbidden, that these two men are unnaturally close, they'd do anything for each other, flirting with homosexuality. Since men are percieved to lack emotions - I'm hugely generalising, of course - or at least in comparison to women, their friendships seem more important. Women are expected to have loads of friends, and therefore it devalues the relationships.

On the female friends/kids debate, neither I nor any of my close friends have kids - I am only twenty, though - but I have plenty of female friends, though they change. I find it quite easy to flit between friends, and it doesn't bother me terribly when a friendship breaks down. Guys are easier to bond with because I can speak football, and after they get over the initial shock of it, it's a good starting point. Yet I have to say, in my experience, it's difficult to have a close female-male relationship that's purely platonic. I can't think of any off the top of my head in fiction, either. (Though bear with me, it's early...)

I do imagine, however, that I'll lose touch quite quickly with one of my better friends when she graduates university and no doubt marries her long-term bf and has children, and that saddens me. (Pop me in the anti-kids camp too, Mouse).

 

[Mouse]

Glad I'm not the only one, Anne!

AMW: it's difficult to have a close female-male relationship that's purely platonic. Nooooo!! I've slept in the same bed as some of my male friends and nothing's happened.

As for female/male friendships in fiction I can only think of my own characters who I mentioned earlier... Um. Oh, there's Hester and whatever the boy was called in Mortal Engines. (Though I've only read the first book so I don't know if they ever got it on afterwards.) And Lyra and Roger in His Dark Materials.

And thanks to everyone who's PM'd me, and sorry if you tried again and couldn't because my inbox is exploding.

 

[prizzley]

Isn't part of the trouble our changing view of male/female roles? When C S Lewis was writing, men earned and women did housework. Now it's all up for grabs. In my first novel I unintentionally (it was unplanned) gave women the housework role and was roundly criticised for it, but 'domestic' doesn't mean weak! Isn't 'strength' about what you do with the choices you have?

For the record, domesticity is very far from the roles of the leading girls in my next two novels.

 

[Ursa major]

I never hug my female friends. I hug my males friends though, no problem.

I never hug my male friends (and they don't seem to hug each other). Sportsmen do, I've observed, but I'm not sure they're representative of men as a whole. (And I'm sure I've seen sportswomen hugging, so something else is going on here, rather than expressions, or otherwise, of maleness or femaleness.)

 

[Mouse]

I know men don't hug men (generally speaking). Women hug women (generally speaking) and men hug women. But I'm a woman who doesn't hug women. TV shows like 'Friends' where they're all hugging each other all the time make me cringe!

 

[Gumboot]

Sorry, can't agree. I have many friendships, my strongest are female-female. And the most lasting. To say there was no biological reason for the child-nuturing sex to support and stick with each other seems to miss the point that unless kids can be raised, the species fails. And that takes women, mostly supported by women. So, they might go hungry if men didn't work in teams - child mortality would go up if women didn't and both threaten the survival of the species.

The thing is, the overwhelming majority of time and effort in a hunter-gatherer society is dedicated to gathering enough food to survive. Gathering - which is what the women did - is an inherently competitive activity (unless you like to pretend some sort of socialist utopia where the little proto-humans all collect what they can and pile it together to dish out evenly).

Women who are more competitive towards other women will gather more food for their family, allowing their children to grow faster and stronger and healthier and dominate the gene pool.

The other side of this, of course, is that gathering represented the vast majority of the diet, with meat from hunting provided only rarely, so a successful gatherer was far more important genetically speaking than a successful hunter.

 

[Gumboot]

For me, one of the challenges in my WiP is that I'm trying to build a highly realistic medieval-type setting, and the narrative primarily revolves around war. By its very nature, women just aren't going to feature as highly.

Fortunately, I've managed to uncover plenty of research that tends to reverse our male-dominated perception of medieval life, which opens space for strong and important female characters.

Having said that, even in the context of the stereotypical medieval scenario there's a great deal of enjoyment and challenge in creating strong female characters that still conform to the social position of their sex. A good example would be Cersei in A Song of Ice and Fire.

 

[Gumboot]

I woke up this morning thinking of the Famous Five -- once my great passion -- where George had to basically turn herself into a boy to participate in the adventures while Anne was regularly left behind ("You stay here, Anne."). It made me think about the Narnia books, where Susan's interest in boys and nylons (which is, I assume, what CS Lewis thought femininity was about) means she's excluded from Narnia.

I don't think that had anything at all to do with becoming "feminine". I'd argue there's more clearly two interpretations of what this means, possibly both at the same time.

A) She's growing up, becoming an adult, more interested in adult things
B) Bearing in mind that the Narnia books are Christian analogy, she has turned to "sinful" worldly interest and is no longer worthy of Narnia, which is a higher, purer place (generally only accessible to children because children are "pure").

 

[Jo Zebedee]

The thing is, the overwhelming majority of time and effort in a hunter-gatherer society is dedicated to gathering enough food to survive. Gathering - which is what the women did - is an inherently competitive activity (unless you like to pretend some sort of socialist utopia where the little proto-humans all collect what they can and pile it together to dish out evenly).

Women who are more competitive towards other women will gather more food for their family, allowing their children to grow faster and stronger and healthier and dominate the gene pool.

The other side of this, of course, is that gathering represented the vast majority of the diet, with meat from hunting provided only rarely, so a successful gatherer was far more important genetically speaking than a successful hunter.

Yes, but this ignores the central argument I responded with, which wasn't about women as gatherers, but rather as the procreator of the species, and that they needed to provide support to each other with this essential act.

In your scenario men join together to complete an essential team task, my response was that women do, too, so to use the team bonding argument for increased reciprocity within fiction seemed to stretch the argument.

I think sometimes with the increased medical intervention it's easy to forget how dangerous childbirth and mortality was, and to diminish women's role negates the central need to procreate, and provide the social support mechanisms to do so, and to rear children from infancy.

 

[hopewrites]

I agree with Spring. The men who work together hunting still have rivalry and competition because they each want to bring home the best for their families. Gathering would be done by children old enough to go out with the women, so it wouldnt be individual women competing against each other for the best berry bushes or grasslands, it would be families teaming up to cover the most ground in the quickest time. rivalry would be in skill and speed since protection would come from numbers.
this puts into the modern disposition, from centuries of use, both a camaraderie and a rivalry, into the basic frame work of friendship. we learn to socialize from observing those who raise us, and from practicing on our peer group, and since our peer group will generally be observing similar behavior to what we observe it takes a long time for societies to really change the way they think and act on their own.

 

[Grimbear]

I try to have a balance. Most things I write have a variety of POV characters and I try to have all ages, genders, walks of life etc because if you're world building you want a comprehensive view of that world. (Or I do at least)

I do have one WIP which is in the first person, single POV. It's a thirty-five-year old man who is, at the start, depressed and alone.

That said I find writing male characters simpler and easier. Writing female characters is harder, more complicated. I worry they aren't true to life and are two-dimensional. Maybe that makes me put more effort in though - which I guess is a good thing.

I don't write badass characters - male or female. they're mostly kind of ordinary.

But - I have this one character who is female who is a spy/assassin. hah

 

[Toby Frost]

To be honest, whether or not I agree with the hunter-gatherer concept, I think there are so many exceptions, and so much potential for societies to change these rules, that I'm not sure how much it helps on the characterisation front. My own feeling is that you're more likely to succeed by treating each major character as a complete individual.

 

[hopewrites]

My own feeling is that you're more likely to succeed by treating each major character as a complete individual.

truer words are rarely spoken.

 

[Tecdavid]

I bet every author has worried about this at some point or another. The fairer sex has cliché after cliché moulded around them for cases when an author doesn't know how to make a character act 'womanly', and so we wind up with Damsel in Distress tropes, Bitch tropes, and, most unfortunately, Mary Sue tropes.
And personally, I'm not sure why. I have three prominent female characters in my WIP, and really, they don't feel much different to write about than my male characters. Stereotypes and gender-based expectations don't cloud their thoughts or actions, as far as I can see. But this gets me worrying that... well, what if I'm doing something wrong? What if I'm not portraying mannerisms that should be shown? Are there any? Does a complete lack of gender-based mannerisms risk dulling down some characters? Will it make them seem too similar to a character that may be seen as their male/female counterpart?

I think I'm more concerned about my characters themselves, rather than how their genders behave.


Anyone else feel this way?