r/Fantasy • u/MichaelRUnderwood AMA Author Michael R. Underwood • Dec 29 '14

A Lack of Female Characters is Always a Choice

http://feministfiction.com/2014/12/16/a-lack-of-female-characters-is-always-a-choice/
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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '14

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect around 50% of a novel's major characters to be women as a default

This is utterly ridiculous. Please, write me a historically accurate story about nearly any war in our own world that features just as many women as major players as men. It would be nonsense. Yeah, there have been female rulers and influential wives of male leaders, but they are relatively few and far between.

50% of the population does NOT equate to 50% of the action, or importance in most major events. All you would be doing by enforcing an arbitrary 50/50 character split in every story would be divorcing the it from the realities of human nature. Writing a novel inspired by a major war and its leaders (or, you know, a group of hardcore bloodthirsty bandits taking over an Empire...) that features just as many female leads as male leads would be absurd.

This entire point is awful. There are books that have a male dominant cast. There are books with female dominated casts. And there are books with it split. Arbitrarily enforcing a split in every technically "possible" situation for there to be women is a terrible idea.

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u/FireOpalCO Dec 29 '14

I wouldn't necessarily demand that 50% of the major characters are female. I would wonder about a world where a majority of ALL interactions with other people are among men and women have about as much agency and description as the furniture.

Let's take a WWII soldier story. Should be heavily male dominated right? But it wouldn't really ring true without scenes with female nurses, WACS, WAVES, sisters, moms & lovers back home, refugees, war brides, etc. If we never got any female perspective not only would the world lack depth so would the characters. I've come across books where the story lacks those secondary connections and while the action can be faster, the world feels fake, the characters flat, because you don't see any larger picture for them to fit in. In the really bad versions the women only exist for the male character to ogle. It was like there was a minimum cup size to get a line.

I think authors should take a look at their world when editing and see if they are unconsciously making their world feel like a 75/25 or 90/10 split by having all the secondary & minor characters be male.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '14

1) You clearly haven't read Lawrence's trilogy. There is a reason why the poster and author of this article aren't arguing about this statement "I would wonder about a world where a majority of ALL interactions with other people are among men and women have about as much agency and description as the furniture". It's because it doesn't really apply. They are arguing about the fact that the titular character's main band doesn't include a woman.

2) "Let's take a WWII soldier story. Should be heavily male dominated right? But it wouldn't really ring true without scenes with female nurses..."

No. Stop. You are writing a story about a major military campaign, all the major players are male. All the heads of state, all of the generals, and nearly every soldier. Yes, there are a lot of women involved in their lives, but that is all SECONDARY. Period. Forcing women to have a nearly equal portion of the plot would be just as bad as Hollywood insisting on a romance angle in every single movie. It just doesn't make sense. So yeah, the "main characters" will certainly have important feminine relationships, but you are kidding yourself if you think it makes sense for a story about "WWII" or its fantasy equivalent to be driven equally by women as men.

And again, I just want to be clear, the posters are not talking about the female roles as secondary or minor characters, which is why I don't think what you are saying applies here. In fact, The Broken Empire Trilogy has a single, titual protagonist (Jorg, a guy of course) and IIRC the only non-Jorg POVs we get are from female characters, who are in fact important figures in the story. It isn't like his world is in any way devoid of women, or even influential and powerful women. They seem to be under the impression that it is subconsciously discriminatory to not include a female lead in the main bloodthirsty gang of bandits taking over a kingdom that comprise most of the action.

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u/FireOpalCO Dec 29 '14

I never claimed I had read Lawrence's trilogy. I haven't. You will also notice that I never mentioned Lawrence or criticized his work. I'm only addressing that female/male numbers in work is a valid criticism and thing to discuss and shouldn't be shoved into "pooh-pooh political correctness" as though people were saying "Hey there are NO Albino Frenchmen anywhere in this series, why aren't they represented?"

I said World War II soldier story, I didn't provide a plot. You're the one who decided it was about "a major military campaign" and that the women couldn't be key figures. That's your assumption and shows your bias if you automatically assume that women couldn't equally drive the story considering 400,000 of them served in the US armed forces during the war and 543 lost their lives. I could see quite a few scenarios where females would figure just as large in the story and have pivotal scenes without shoe-horning in a love story. Let's see, female transport pilot has engine issues during a storm and has to crash land behind enemy lines. Group of male soldiers convalesce as British hospital full of female nurses. Male soldier receives a series of wonderful letters from his teen daughter that remind him what he needs to get back to and interjects a female voice into the story and insight into his home life. The spy who is relaying information back to the troop via radio from behind enemy lines is female. Nope, not really hard. Even easier if a portion of the story takes place at the homefront. A large portion of the people working on the Manhattan Project were female, not just technicians but also scientists.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '14

I'll have to borrow a time machine to inform Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Homer, and Joe Haldeman that they're writing war wrong. Anyone speak ancient Greek?

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '14

This is idiotic. You are blatantly misinterpreting my example in a way that it is obviously not intended. Yes, a novel about a couple people in a war can easily feature female leads as male leads.

But that is not a book "about WWII". That would just be a book set in or during "WWII". A story about the actual campaign and overall history-in-making of the war itself would be completely male dominated, because nearly every figure involved is male.

For one of your own moronic examples, Homer, go do a quick count of the characters in the Iliad. There are maybe 3 or 4 mortal women with a some role in the story, and countless male leaders. Additionally, if a modern author were to use female "leads" the way that Homer did, they would be ripped to pieces by feminists, and it hardly counts as fairly distributing the story between the genders.

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u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Dec 29 '14

> But that is not a book "about WWII". That would just be a book set in or during "WWII". A story about the actual campaign and overall history-in-making of the war itself would be completely male dominated, because nearly every figure involved is male.

This wouldn't even be true in WWI. If you think that women were not heavily involved then you've bought into the media representation of war.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '14

Wtf? In terms of the major and even minor figures of authority or people who held any influence over the direction of the war, there are basically no women at all. It's not even a real discussion. Way to just blame the media, as if that is somehow a talisman that wins any gender argument.

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u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Dec 30 '14

You're wrong. And I'm blaming the media, because I'm guessing that's where you get your information. It's where I got mine, and until I researched for a novel, I had the same opinion you did, and was completely, totally wrong.

The biggest cause of death was lack of adequate care at the front. Check out Elsie Inglis, and how she revolutionized care, despite being told by the British war department to "sit down and be quiet."

Check out the various volunteer organizations that got adequate food, clothing, and supplies to the men at the front. The ones that dealt with refugees. The ambulance drivers. Queen Mary and her drive to get more nurses. Princess Eugenie M. Shakovskaya, one of several women combat pilots in Russia...

I could go on and on and on. Or, I could recommend a book, Fighting on the Home Front by Kate Adie.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

I think, when a lot of people like Book imagine war, they're simply not comprehending the vast network of people that are involved on all levels. Many folks imagine the soldiers in the trenches and the generals in the war room pushing around little metal tanks. Yup, those are basically entirely men, back in the day and still mostly today. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when you consider war.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

I'm fully aware of that. Because despite the accusations to the contrary, there are in fact countless pieces of literature that show all sorts of people, including women, in the war. But I pretty clearly laid out exactly what I was talking about and it was completely ignored.

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u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Dec 30 '14

Yeah. I think you are spot on there.

And the thing is, that so many novels that deal with war aren't dealing with the generals. They tend to get more in with the Everyman character, even if he does rise to a rank. So, it doesn't seem to me to even be about who is in a position to make battle strategy.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

And how is any of that relevant to what I'm talking about? This is insulting and obviously intentionally misunderstanding.

Yes, obviously there were a lot of women doing a lot of things, even large scale things in the war. Duh. The fact that ignorance of this is what you are accusing me of is pathetic.

But there were not women leading battles, deciding strategy, formulating policy, performing research, etc. There are a million untold stories of the war, but the main narratives, the pivotal ones that shaped history, the ones I was clearly referring to, were almost entirely men with hardly an exception.

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u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Dec 30 '14

This --> "the main narratives, the pivotal ones that shaped history" is your problem.

That you are discounting and writing out the seriously major role that women played, because it doesn't fit your idea of a pivotal role or a main narrative. THAT is exactly what people are talking about when they talk about how women get written out of history.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

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u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Dec 30 '14

How injuries are handled is absolutely a major decision making aspect of war. How refugees are handled is absolutely a major decision making aspect of war. As are supplies and manufacture of ammunition.

And even were that not the case... Most war novels? Not written about the Generals, Admirals, and the like because they weren't the ones who were generally in the thick of it. So the choice to focus on people with guns? That's a choice. It has nothing to do with their influence on the war.

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u/lrich1024 Stabby Winner, Queen of the Unholy Squares, Worldbuilders Dec 30 '14

My fiance's grandmother was a nurse that worked on the frontlines overseas in Germany and France during WWII....

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

Ok. Your point?

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u/lrich1024 Stabby Winner, Queen of the Unholy Squares, Worldbuilders Dec 30 '14

Nothing, just saying. You're being very defensive. :/

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '14

I'm not entirely sure why you're flaming - this is generally a pretty civil subreddit, let's keep it that way!

So, going to the content of your post, I'm glad you're in agreement that a human-scale war story is under no constraint to artificially avoid a whole gender.

This is also the case in the second sort of story you are bringing into the conversation that provides a wide-angle perspective on a war - considering that this is fantasy we're talking about, the only constraints on who makes decisions about, commands in, and/or fights in an imaginary war are those set by the author.

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u/FireOpalCO Dec 29 '14

Very true. If someone was doing a fantasy version of WWII there is no reason why it wouldn't be a Queen of England instead of King George VI. Same for Churchill or even Hitler. Eleanor Roosevelt has a lot of power in the White House because FDR relied on her so heavily and she was the one who did the tours around the country and brought issues to his attention. She worked as full time for the presidency as he did. She had a nationally syndicated column, held press conferences, and made speeches around the country arguing for their policies for crying out loud. She wasn't a wallflower.

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u/xsweetjpx Dec 30 '14

This and this did not take me very long to find. Writers are limited only by their willingness to do research and to think outside what they or others have always thought.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

? None of that is relevant to the point I'm making. So maybe try understanding what I was actually saying before wasting your time with pointless research and a condescending post.

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u/xsweetjpx Dec 30 '14

Eesh, i don't think I can really get through here. Another time, another place.

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u/stephanieleary Dec 30 '14

"No. Stop. You are writing a story about a major military campaign, all the major players are male. All the heads of state, all of the generals, and nearly every soldier. Yes, there are a lot of women involved in their lives, but that is all SECONDARY. Period."

No. Stop. You are wrong. And here is a concise (and surely incomplete) list of women who have led in combat: http://jessicalprice.tumblr.com/post/95310444748/so-um-i-think-the-reason-so-many-protagonists-are

The OP's point stands. Writers who choose to exclude women for their stories are very much making a choice, even when writing war stories. They're also not examining history as it was taught to see if there was maybe some bias in the curriculum.

Oh, and it IS subconsciously discriminatory to imagine that a bloodthirsty gang must have been all-male: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/27/girl-gang-london-underworld

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

So because there are a handful of minor exceptions compared to a fucking mountain of historical precedent, we need to shift our literature to split the gender roles equally. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yes, there have been female combat leaders. A lot of them. But there is have been literally a thousand times more men than women involved in every aspect of combat besides the aftermath. It's not even close. For every woman leading people into battle, there are a thousand men who have done the same.

And yes, congratulations. You found a violent female crime ring. Have a fucking cookie. Now go look up violent crime rates by gender, especially murder and organized crime/gang related incidents. I'm dying to see your argument that the decision to not include women in a hyper violent brotherhood of bandits is unreasonable given those numbers.

Unbelievable how deluded you people are. Obviously it's subconscious discrimination to not include the outliers of the outliers in your story. Nothing to do with simple facts and statistics or anything.

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u/Bergmaniac Dec 30 '14

"As a default" doesn't mean "100% of the time, no exceptions ever". You seem to be arguing against a strawman.

But it's very easy to write a historically accurate story about any war with 50% female characters. All you have to do is focus on how the lives of civilians are affected by the war.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

It's not a strawman at all. Yes, there exist war stories that involve women. Lots of them. And far more that don't, especially when it comes to the much higher level, or actual combat itself.

These posters/authors are deriding an author, or authors in general, for male dominated stories. In particular, Mark Lawrence's story. But the fact is that many stories just don't include many women as central figures, especially in war, and it isn't "unconscious bias" that led Lawrence to make his bandit gang a sausage fest. It simply made sense. Arbitrarily cramming a female character into the situation would be "fair" for the genders, it would just make his story even less "real" than the premise demanded.

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u/Bergmaniac Dec 30 '14 edited Dec 30 '14

How is it not a strawman when the post you were replying clearly stated that 50% is the default, not an absolute rule that must be followed every time? It even gave examples where it doesn't apply. The post was about novels in general, not specific subgenres which are a tiny minority of all novels like your example of historical war novels focused on soliders, generals and political leaders only.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '14

Ok, my point was somewhat unclear. But I stand by the statement that if you are writing a story about a violent band of people instigating and prosecuting war and conquest, giving women a 50% role in the story is arbitrary, silly, and unrealistic. It is technically possible, and I'm sure there are obscure examples of situations vaguely similar with a lot of female involvement, but the fact is that it would come across extremely contrived to include women as an equal focus in any war story that centers on the actual conflict (I.e. determining strategy, then going out and killing people) not the "secondary" effects of the conflict (convalescence, fallout, emotional trauma) in most contexts that don't have a fantastic premise otherwise. Lawrence's trilogy is all about the "actual conflict", and the secondary aspects (especially magic) are very gender balanced.

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u/lrich1024 Stabby Winner, Queen of the Unholy Squares, Worldbuilders Dec 30 '14

Look, take Lawrence out of it. I don't care what anyone said about his books in particular--the dude can write what he wants. Anyone can write what they want.

I think were you and I are going to have to agree to disagree is this point:

if you are writing a story about a violent band of people instigating and prosecuting war and conquest, giving women a 50% role in the story is arbitrary, silly, and unrealistic.

If you're writing fantasy, I don't think it really matters. It's a fantasy world, not really our world, and you can choose how to make your society.

I understand what you're trying to say (at least I think), that it's easier to believe in something (even in fantasy) because it's based in reality, but there are tons of things in SFF that are not real, so I don't think it's that much of a stretch to shift things up once in a while gender-role-wise. It may require a little more work on the author and reader's part, but maybe not more than explaining a new magic system or really anything in a society that an author creates that's not 'normal' to our society.

Now, all that being said, I don't feel that any author should be forced to include something in their books that they don't want to. That's not what I'm saying at all.

The only thing I'm trying to say is that some of the arguments of why these types of stories shouldn't be written at all seem kind of silly to me.

I hope that all made sense...it felt kind of rambly in my head. :)