Another Gender Topic: Does a Heroine need a Villainess?

With characters who have an in-story reason to be sexed up, you need to be careful that you're not including them just so you can have a sexed-up character. While it's reasonable that a beautiful spy might use her "feminine wiles" to collect intelligence, it's not inevitable, and sex appeal is certainly not the only espionage talent a woman can possess.

edited 4th Feb '11 2:11:34 PM by Karalora

While I wouldn't say that it's automatically wrong to make decisions by Author Appeal, it's at least worth examining why the story needs it, and don't just go there by default.

Also, manipulation via sex appeal isn't something only women do; there's a long history of male spies using it to get information from women or from gay men, for instance.

*coughJamesBondcough*

More seriously, while there's nothing inherently wrong with a little Author Appeal—goodness knows I indulge in it myself from time to time—there's such a long, fucked-up tradition of derailing female characters into Ms. Fanservice (often to the detriment of their characterization) that you need to be more careful with it than with other types of Author Appeal.

edited 4th Feb '11 2:16:46 PM by Karalora

Especially when it comes to heroines and their tendency to wear things that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination.

Oh yes! Villainesses. Give them fashion sense. Please. Dear God please. Is it a subclause of that profession to look like you've just trampled drunk through an erotic Halloween boutique?

edited 4th Feb '11 2:24:00 PM by Bur

Villainesses. Give them fashion sense. Please. Dear God please. Is it a subclause of that profession to look like you've just trampled drunk through an erotic Halloween boutique?

I have to clean my monitor because of that. You win.

@Kara: Oh yes, Ms. Fanservice is totally overdone, probably because historically nerds have been mostly men, and a good many but not all female nerds are bisexual or bi-curious. Again, it's a played-out trope because it works so well.

100% agreed, Kara. Both about Bond and about female characters being derailed into Ms. Fanservice to the detriment of characterization.

I've been very careful about my portrayal of a character who works in prostitution for entirely that reason. It's something that could be easily perceived as purely there for fanservice / Author Appeal. I don't think it is; the character is partly based on someone I once knew who was actually in that line of work, and it's neither made overly glamorous nor made moral-lessony horrible; it's just the road that circumstances and her decisions put her on.

Still, I'm going to run it past women I know when done and ask for their opinions on how I handled it, just to be sure.

Very good practice for writing a character of any demographic you don't belong to. Especially one...how to put this...less privileged in the larger culture than your own.

I've written stories where I had to go back through and change the his to her because I forgot the character was female.

I can see that perhaps a male author is less able to understand the minutiae of what females experience in our society but otherwise, for things like fantasy or sci-fi, we could easily overcome that by creating a whole new society that is gender-blind and thus easy to have interchangeability in the roles (in terms of gender). That is, when one goes "It's a warlord!", the characters in-universe do not immediately picture a man. They think instead of a person who is militant and has a large army rather than a ruthless man with a large army.

"Also, manipulation via sex appeal isn't something only women do; there's a long history of male spies using it to get information from women or from gay men, for instance." - Morven

But it's not the same thing. For one thing, I'd think that men using it on women would tend not to be as effective as the other way around. (And most people are straight.) For another, I would say the vast majority of people who would have access to such information in the first place tend to be heterosexual males.

Reminds me of this Cracked article, and its mention of Catwoman, where the very notion of her using sex appeal as merely one of her weapons had the author ranting about how supposedly anyone who thinks this way must just be some insecure guy who had a nasty breakup, but the author doesn't actually present a counterargument to the idea. o.o

EDIT: Also...

"I can see that perhaps a male author is less able to understand the minutiae of what females experience in our society" - breadloaf

Would you say the same thing for female authors not understanding the "minutiae" of what males experience in our society?

edited 4th Feb '11 2:42:07 PM by neoYTPism

Exactly. I know I'm not being intentionally offensive, but I know I'm quite capable of ignorance and cluelessness, and for that, one needs some outside checks. There's a difference between "meant no harm" and "did no harm", after all.

And I certainly don't like to offend, hurt or harm by mistake.

@neo: quite frequently secretaries, clerks and the like can access a huge amount of information, and in our sexist history, these people are frequently women. And the ability they have to cause harm tends to be underestimated for exactly that reason; those are Womens' Jobs, and therefore not important.

@breadloaf: If only it were so easy to redefine sexism (& other things) out of existence in our created worlds.

Would you say the same thing for female authors not understanding the "minutiae" of what males experience in our society?

Sure why not? If you're not part of the group, you have to gain the knowledge second-hand (as in, the best you can do is talk to a person in that group first hand to get a sense of what it is like) but it can never replace what being in that group is like. However, there is one thing going for not being in the actual group itself; you can be more objective.

@Morven

Well, I can always pretend there's no sexism. :)

edited 4th Feb '11 4:04:59 PM by breadloaf

I think women do understand men better than men understand women, if only because the male viewpoint is the default in our culture. Men's experiences are treated as universal human experiences, while women's experiences are treated as special-interest experiences. Women go through life hearing "What is relevant to men is relevant to you," while men do not hear the reverse.

Is it sexist that when I'm plowing through your average mooks and I find that some are female, I feel a bit more bad about it than usual?

Well, at least they weren't children. And no, I don't count teenagers as children.

^^ I've been plowing through World Of Warcraft and what are apparently Affirmative Action death cults for so long I've gotten jaded to that

@Thorn: it should at least make you think about why that is so, right?

Thread Hop, of course not.

More female Chessmasters, please. And not the catty Libbyish variant, the regular calm 'exactly as planned' type.

edited 4th Feb '11 9:58:16 PM by Ettina

I'd say that saying that a heroine can only take on a villainess is more Unfortunate Implications than giving her a male villain, because it falls into Cat Fight or Designated Girl Fight, and implies that a woman, no matter how heroic, is no match for a man.

I don't think anyone was saying that, Leigh.

If you want to have some fun just take whatever archetype you were going to do, change it into female and then just run the dialogue and everything as if it were male and see what it is like.

I don't think anyone here was arguing that. I was just saying that female hero/female villain could fall into Unfortunate Implications just as easily as female hero/male villain.

One of my favorite responses for why I was using a male villain instead of a female villain was "What!? And deny girls the opportunity to watch one of their own take down a man?" Of course, in story that wasn't the reason for the two were facing off (it had something to do with the mafia and territory during a Zombie Apocalypse).

Try this mental exercise: gender-flip Batman's gallery of rogues, without changing anything else about the way they do business. The FT Ms will probably seem faintly ridiculous, while the MT Fs are still just as scary. This is because Catwoman and Poison Ivy are such girly villains, while the Joker, the Riddler and the Penguin are just quirky wicked people.

I think you could have a male villian called "Cat Burglar" who filled the same niche as Catwoman, but Batman would have to be female. What makes Catwoman interesting isn't that she's threatening, but part of it was that she was dating Bruce Wayne, at least in the animated series. Dramatic Irony's where it's at.

Poison Ivy has the plant thing, and I think in Black Orchid they make rrefernce to her old college pals, who are mostly male. I could see it. Although environmental terrorism seems to be a girly thing in fiction for some reason.

And the whole seduction/ poison kiss thing, which I find roughly as rediculous when either sex does it. Sex as a weapon of evil just doesn't work for me.

You know what really makes people vulnerable enough to destroy and threaten to destroy their mind and soul? Love. And that's why Granny Goodness is probably the only fictional villain to ever scare me.

edited 5th Feb '11 12:24:49 AM by Roman