Defying Gender stereotypes

Does anyone else like to give their female characters traits like lack of clothes sense or male characters traits like knowing about color coordination and couldn't lift a weight to save their life. But they're still straight? (or maybe gay guys that like sports , hunting and lifting weights and gay girls that like shopping and dancing)

I haven't done this, but now I think I will.

I do try to write in well-rounded LGBT characters whose whole lives don't revolve around their sexualities.

I write about people, not characters, so I don't find gender stereotypes (either following or defying them) ever come up. I think that's an important way to see it.

Does anyone else like to give their female characters traits like lack of clothes sense or male characters traits like knowing about color coordination and couldn't lift a weight to save their life. But they're still straight?

A better way to put it would be to give them, you know, personalities and lifestyles that lead to the mentioned traits. It's not enough to just say that the girl has no fashion sense—maybe she has no clue about fashion because she likes sports, or she just doesn't go out often enough to worry about more than practicality. Alternately, she's a hunter (see below).

(or maybe gay guys that like sports , hunting and lifting weights and gay girls that like shopping and dancing)

Those in themselves are stereotypes. Hard Gay and Lipstick Lesbian.

For the record: I don't think you quite understand what hunting actually entails. Even if you hunt for sport, hunting is really, really messy. It doesn't stop when you've killed your quarry.

You'll spend a lot of time covered in blood and entrails (butchering medium game like pigs or deer takes at least a couple of hours, and nobody shoots just one bird/rabbit) and the smell is going to stay on you for a few days. Even if you sell the meat and just use the skin, there's a reason leather is really expensive—you have to spend days to weeks letting the hide soak in hideous-smelling things like urine or animal-brain slush.

Hunting would be a perfect occupation for girls (and gay guys) who need role models.

edited 8th Jan '11 7:34:14 PM by Sharysa

I love creating characters who don't fit stereotypes. On the other hand, it's easy to fall into the trap of creating a character who doesn't seem to have any substance other than being a defiance of stereotype. So I try to make them fairly complex, having different (sometimes contradictory) facets the way a real person would.

I make my female characters non-feminine out of necessity—I handle social situations in the bluntest manner possible, so I don't know how to write a character who's "socially adept," and once that goes most feminine traits go as well. I guess my male characters aren't masculine either, since even though my stories have a lot of violence in them, I don't write many characters who enjoy said violence, and A Real Man Is a Killer. That said, I have used stereotypical traits on some characters (e.g. a female character who cowers in fear at the sound of gunfire)—it's all a matter of what makes for interesting interactions.

If you go out of your way to defy gender norms, you risk Unfortunate Implications of the Real Women Never Wear Dresses sort. Norms are frequently defied in good works, but rarely for the sake of defying them. A mixture of following and ignoring gender norms works best: the inverse of a stereotype is just as one-dimensional as the original stereotype, after all.

My characters LOVE to revel in stereotypes, granted not some of my characters seem to have made up stereo-types (what kind of stereotypes do tanks fall under?).

^^ I know that. I actually have girls who are girly because I hate Real Women Never Wear Dresses.

edited 8th Jan '11 8:38:00 PM by JewelyJ

I have thi kid,a boy, 14, his home life is a little... hectic, so to cope he has low energy interests and hobbies which include ballet, poetry, and his greatest passion is gardening.

I haven't decided on his orientation yet.

Er. "Low-energy interest" doesn't really describe ballet.

Neither is gardening, since it also takes quite a chunk of your time. Poetry too, in a way. I can attest to that.

edited 8th Jan '11 9:35:36 PM by Five_X

I must have an odd perception of reality or osmething.

Well it helps my character cope nevertheless so I stand by my apperently rediculous claim.

Hehe..in defiance of the usual gender stereotype of the heroines in tentacle hentai, a little girl faces off against such monsters...and wins! ... Without super powers!

@AC: Of course, collecting gardening items or watching ballet acts is a bit less stressful.

Ballet also keeps you on your toes...literally!

I write in a High Fantasy setting but I still manage to avoid the stereotypes by focusing on what the character's personality is and the type of image I want to project.

For instance most of my women where dresses but this has little effect on their personality: even the ones who wear dresses by choice do it simply because it's what they like, it doesn't define them in any way.

While most of my men are military only one of them actually adheres to A Real Man Is a Killer and I even have a man who enjoys sewing and cooking (and clean clothes) but is able to take charge of a situation.

It's like what Killer Clown said: it's a combination of following and ignoring the norms rather than actively trying to avert them.

edited 9th Jan '11 5:02:55 PM by StolenByFaeries

In my current work, I have a female character who has no sense of hygene (smells really bad and is often covered in grime/sludge or whatever you want to call it). Her occupation is at a mercenary company and she specializes in repairing engines and other machinery (which partially contributes to the smell and grime). As for her sense of fasion, I couldn't say since she wears shades of grey and brown. Oh, and she's insane, so there's that.

I actively ignore steriotypes anyway, so whether or not they can be applied to my characters is not important to the creation of my characters.

edited 16th Jan '11 8:59:00 PM by Talann_Zar

It's also important to have your characters' choices and actions MATTER. For example, in Pride & Prejudice, the Bennett family is pretty much socially inept. We don't think of Lizzie that way, because in our culture, she seems fairly normal. But it's important to remember that her clever, forthright manner of speaking was NOT normal, and was part of the reason that her family got snubbed.

Any time your characters go against the cultural expectations of the environment they're in, other characters should respond to it in a culturally-appropriate way, otherwise it feels inauthentic.

@ AC Drawings. Ballet is an extemely difficult, tireing, and potentially difiguring practice, I suppose it's not much different from some olympic sports, but it happens to be particularly dangerous becuase people think it's all 'delicate' and 'girly' so fail to take the proper precautions.

edited 8th May '11 9:50:20 AM by Mysteria

I do this without even thinking about it.

That's why I love this trope.

No, not really. All my characters are walking bags of testosterone. Even the biker girl.

Oh, wait.

Actually, I guess I do kind of stick to the gender stereotypes. Both of the life-science people are female (one's a cryptozoologist and the other is more or less a battlefield medic) and the hard-science people are male (astrophysicist and time traveler). However, the battlefield medic and astrophysicist are highly respected, and the cryptozoologist and time traveler are just seen as crazy.

I try not to consciously break gender stereotypes, and I think going, "Okay, I'll have a male gay character, but he likes sports, so that defies that stereotype! Go go Gadget Barrier Breakage!" isn't a way to go about it— it leads to clumsily handled tokenism, which is patronizing and not fun to read or watch. As someone mentioned earlier, you wanna create characters that fit the stories, not just husks with traits attached.

That being said, stereotypes are, themselves, "husks with traits attached," so I try not to do that, either. Basically, when I create characters, I have a concept, and I fiddle around with it until I have something that seems like an awesome character. It takes a while. No one said this job was easy. :P

I do think it's good to stand back and study your characters and see if you're being stereotypical and cliche with your characters— not just with gender stereotypes, but with everything. It helps break away from crass, often insulting portrayals, but it's also just good writing practice. Fiction thrives on originality, and if you can do something unique, go for it. Your work will be more memorable for it.

edited 8th May '11 11:01:04 AM by Ronka87