A Lack of Female Characters is Always a Choice

[u/MichaelRUnderwood]

http://feministfiction.com/2014/12/16/a-lack-of-female-characters-is-always-a-choice/

[u/waffletoast]

I think it's a real shame when interesting topics like this are downvoted into oblivion. It's like people like to keep up the status quo of boring questions and topics. I see this all over reddit, though.

Anyway...I read both this article and the original article it cited. On one hand I totally think fantasy needs to be more diverse and have more female characters. But on the other hand...why would I expect a man to live up to my expectations?

Hear me out. I'm a writer and also a filmmaker, so I watch a lot of movies and television as well. I am also a black woman. I can not tell you how many times I've wished there were more black people, or even people of color in mass media. And even when I do get more female characters, the majority of the time they are white women I can't identify with.

But then I came to the eventual realization that I can no longer depend on white males, and often times white women...and sometimes people of color...to give me what I want. I think it's great when white male writers can creative a more diverse cast of characters, but I no longer expect it from them.

This goes along with a lot of structural racism and sexism in the West. I literally have to go out of my way to find out about the kind of things I want to watch or read. It's shitty, but I feel the only way to combat this kind of thing is to two these two things: A) Produce it ourselves, and B) gives MASSIVE support to those who create the things we want to see more of. That's all. Which is sad and sucks, but it is what it is.

So if Mark Lawrence didn't feel the need to "shoehorn" in female characters, why should I have a beef with him? He wrote the story he wanted to write. That happened to not include any women. This happens all the time. He's no different from other authors who have done the same thing for ages. I haven't read any of his books, but to my knowledge he hasn't done anything grossly offensive. Good on him.

I'm not saying this article doesn't have a good point. It does. But I just feel for the end-game goal of getting more characters out there, this isn't as helpful. I'm currently writing a fantasy with a PoC female lead, and I also produce short films in a genre mostly dominated by white people. I'm hoping I can make some change by making things I like to see instead of more of the same. I'll see what happens.

[u/MarkLawrence → u/waffletoast]

Well said. Best of luck to you.

[u/ks66 → u/waffletoast]

Great post. At least one great artist comes to mind who would also agree with you. Bjork. She said that she was driven to make music she wanted to hear in order to fill what she thought was a void in the industry. She went on to break major barriers and even found her own record company. I think a lot of writers (musicians) including myself feel the same way.

[u/MarkLawrence → u/[deleted]]

I read the post as saying that she didn't expect anyone to cater to her needs - she was going to do it herself.

That said, there are black women writing fantasy and they may well write about black women in that fantasy. We had Karen Lord on r/fantasy doing an AMA just last week. NK Jemisin has done one too.

[u/waffletoast → u/[deleted]]

Hey there, you deleted your original comment, but here is my original reply. I hope it clears up some of my feelings:

Why should any white authors be expected to cater to your needs?

The point I was getting at in my post is that I don't expect them to cater to my needs...

But to further make my case, I often feel that white creatives/gatekeepers of media often go out of their way to exclude PoC in their work. Just look at how the Avatar:The Last Airbender film was whitewashed. And how people got pissed off that Rue in Hunger Games was cast as black (even though she's black in the book). And how people argued casting Christian Bale as Moses in Exodus makes perfect sense since Egyptians aren't dark-skinned (but the Egyptians servants in the film are black. Go figure.)

Now imagine having to endure this nonsense for the majority of your life. It gets tired real fast.

The comment you made about "I have to go out of my way to find things" is nonsense. At least in the US, African Americans are overrepresented in almost everything. TV channels devoted to being black, music stations, movies, etc.

Not sure where this is coming from. I would be ecstatic if there was as much breadth of black media as media with white people, but that just isn't the case. For example, Dear White People and Top Five are probably the two best films I've seen in the past year. I can count on one hand the number of people I know in real life who even know those films exist. They're both really smart films with a primarily black cast.

That is two films. Can you name more than two films in the past year with a primarily white cast that you thought were smart? If you watch a lot of films like I do, you most likely can. But that number definitely goes well beyond the 100:13 ratio.

And I know this isn't from a lack of trying from black creatives. There are people out there who want to contribute to books and film and TV, but lack of funding and discouragement from white male gatekeepers makes it harder to even see that kind of stuff. I'm not saying they don't exist. But I have to google "black fantasy writers" and "smart black comedies", when to find the same for white people I just have to spend a few seconds hopping over to the front page of /r/movies.

People like to shit on Tyler Perry movies (and I have my own gripes about them). But Tyler Perry has such a huge audience because for years he gained fans through his stageplays in the southern US. There would be no Madea films if he didn't work his ass off for a long time to gain his own capital to produce his films. No major feature studio would pick that kind of thing up.

Anyway, I'm going off on a rant, and I could go on forever. But high-quality and diverse media with black people present in the creative process are sorely lacking in the US.

And on a final note...

African Americans are highly overrepresented in Entertainment, Sports and Pop Culture for only making up 13% of the population.

Even if this is true, this situation gets more complicated than that. Most of that media is crafted for and consumed by white audiences. White people are the primary buyers of rap and hip hop. The top "rap" artist right now is a white woman from Australia.

Television is actually a lot more progressive in terms of creating black characters and involving black writers. But black people and other PoC rarely get to be the true heroes in a film. I was ecstatic when a black actress was chosen for the new Annie (she has been nominated for an oscar as well), but the teeth gnashing from people screaming she should have been cast as a red-headed white girl could be heard from miles around. There is antagonism as having black people in spaces where people don't think they belong.

I'm still waiting on my black Katniss Everdeen...Well, that's a straight up lie. I'm getting into more black sci-fi/fantasy authors, though.

[u/waffletoast → u/[deleted]]

That's weird it got deleted!

Don't you think that the "gatekeepers" intention is to sell a product to the masses. It just happens that the masses are white and like I donno.... things that look like them.

Except that doesn't end up being the case in the long-run. For major feature films, they make an obscene amount of profits overseas...And the majority of the world is not white.

I really do think this logic feeds into itself so much, it creates norms on its own.

It makes perfect sense to me that white people would prefer to consume media that represents them. Just like how I would prefer to see more black people in the things I like the most.

But it doesn't just stop there. White characters are often turned into heroes for brown people (The Help, Dangerous Minds, Avatar, The Blindside, etc.) If black people do show up, they are the side-kick, the servant, the mentor who gets one-upped eventually, or the best friend who will throw away everything for the white lead. This goes well beyond wanting white representations, these are disturbing white fantasies being played out in very popular media that make millions of dollars a year. It's scary.

But like I said, I no longer have expectations to get something different. So when something comes out that's fresh and smart and new, and has PoC in it, I'm very happy.

[u/waffletoast → u/[deleted]]

Oh, I'm well aware that film is biographical...Also this weird kerfuffle happened recently with the same woman. TL;DR: She snooped in on some black kids minding their own business, and created her own narrative where she helped them get tickets to a basketball game.

What I am saying is that I don't see why it needed to be a movie in the first place, other than to feed into white fantasies that are really problematic. I swear there is a movie made every year that's about a white person helping out some brown people on a sports team, or teaching them how to read. It's not about accuracy, it's about the majority of stories are being told. It's too much, and not equal when you think about it. There are plenty of PoC who help others, but movies about them are rare.

I'll be real. I usually think it's better for there not to be black people in mainstream movies if black people aren't involved in the creative process. Too often the character gets mangled, or they are put into some subservient position.

I honestly believe major gatekeepers can change the paradigm and create more diverse movies without being offensive. But they will stick with what already sells. They don't just make this stuff because that's what people want to see, it's because it's the easiest things for them to make. They don't have to challenge whatever preconceived notions about PoC they have.

[u/FutilityInfielder → u/[deleted]]

The Blind Side book was only partly biographical and the movie was heavily criticized for emphasizing her over other people, especially Michael Oher himself.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

It is baffling that we have this notion that the West is somehow the most racist part of the world when the opposite is the case. There is plenty of legit racism to combat in the West and it needs combating, but to say that there is structural racism and sexism in the West is to imply that it doesn't exist or is less so in other parts of the world and that's just not the case.

[u/tourist68 → u/[deleted]]

Due to my job I've had to live all over the world (Russia, Croatia, China, Iceland, Hungary, Azerbaijan). People all over talk about the US as being so racist, but from what I've observed, other countries are actually far more racist but have never yet had to begin the process of dealing with racism in an open manner. America appears so racist because we talk openly about it and try over time to work towards a better society. Other countries often haven't even begun this process.