Women’s stories

There is more than a little irony in the fact that I consider myself a catholic consumer of texts both written and visual and I consider myself a feminist, and yet I find women’s stories to be largely uninteresting.

This lack of interest isn’t universal. I’ve found a quite a few stories, novels like Terry Pratchett’s excellent series about budding witch Tiffany Aching (Wee Free Men, Hat Full of Sky, and The Wintersmith), or like Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire, or Tanya Huff’s Valor series, to name a few, both riveting and well constructed. But mostly, stories about women’s experiences usually dissatisfy, and this dissatisfaction is something I’ve struggled with for a number of years. But I’ve finally realized why.

For the most part, stories about men feature characters who do things. They solve crimes¹. They disrupt international terror rings². They tame the wild west³, get the cattle to market⁴, and make the farm work⁵. They fly experimental, AI controlled fighter planes⁶. They lead the free world⁷, explore space⁸, score the winning goal bringing honor back to their school or town⁹, and figure out how to save the company¹⁰.

Stories about women feature characters who spend a lot of time worrying about, trying to repair, or trying to establish relationships with men. Women twist themselves into pretzels to get men interested in relationships. They wonder why men don’t call. They wonder if they should call. They wonder if they called too often, or not often enough. They try to figure out how they can keep the man they’re already in a relationship with interested. They cry over what went wrong with the relationship they have with a man. They wonder if they’re good enough for the man that’s interested in them. They try to change a man they’re interested in. They despair when he won’t change. They struggle with attraction to the “bad boy” when they think they should be interested in the “good, stable guy.”

But for all the celluloid and paper and ink devoted to telling these stories, for all the expenditure of emotional energy, women don’t actually do very much. And even when a woman does things – like running the dive bar on the wrong side of town while making a little extra cash smuggling or catching bail jumpers¹¹, or finding the artifact that turns her into a supernatural being with extraordinary power¹², or serving as a test pilot in one of the Navy’s most elite fighter jet units¹³ – there’s always a man lurking in the background. There’s always the shadow of a relationship around to complicate things, to tell our heroine in either an overt or subtle way that if she keeps acting the way she’s been acting that relationship will either fail or never come to fruition.

One area where this isn’t true, where women do and dare, succeed and fail and have adventures that might “normally” feature a male lead character is science fiction. Military science fiction, space exploration, xenobiology, post-apocalyptic colonization: all of these are sci-fi sub genres in which women play key roles that require them to actually do rather than simply nurture and obsess. But even in sci-fi this isn’t always accepted. Just look at all the fuss around the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Some of the fanboys weren’t happy that the part of Starbuck, an ace pilot, hard drinker, and dare devil with no interest in settling down changed sexes from male to female in the new version.

What stuns me, though, about the limited roles given to women in these fictional texts is that it’s no longer just an issue of overall culture creating an atmosphere in which a contemporary story with a female lead that acts would be unthinkable. Nor is it just that men are the primary creators of texts and they, naturally, write stories about characters who look like and talk like their authors.

No, what stuns me is that women create the bulk of these texts in which female lead characters do nothing but obsess about their relationships. And while it’s true that women create quite a good chunk of the texts in which female lead characters do and strive, these stories don’t represent the bulk of what is written about and for female characters.

Maybe it’s because I’m disconnected from “the average female experience” by my orientation. Or maybe it’s that I’m disconnected from the fixation on relationships because my definition of friendship and loyalty are markedly out of step with modern times.

Or maybe it’s because women really don’t want to do anything but manage their interpersonal relationships.

Regardless of why, it saddens me that if I want to see or read about characters that do something, anything, by and large I will be seeing or reading about men.

Text references

1. Anything by Raymond Chandler or in the film noir genre
2. Bond, James Bond, among many others
3. See: Oater, printed or on film
4. Ibid
5. Ibid
6. Stealth (film)
7. The American President (film) plus just about anything with Jimmy Stewart in it.
8. Star Trek, Star Wars, among others
9. Sports movies are too numerous to mention.
10. Really? You want a reference for this too? How about Wall Street (film)
11. Barb Wire (flim)
12. Witchblade (comic and TV series)
13. Stealth…again