Sexism in our stories. No Way!...no way...

We want writting something, we like our proyect. We love it...but hey, nearly all of the womans are weak and/or evil.

...you`re being sexist?. Ok, you can save your work. This thread is for the ones who want fix it.

Good luck. Post your own sexism issues in your work.

Well, my own project centers around two male characters, which I don think is sexist in of itself, or else I wouldn't to it. That, however, means that the women are at risk of being defined primarily by those two. Mostly the best thing for me to do is think about who the other characters are without Caleb and Zane around.

Perfection:

@Kazuya Prota: Having a female character be evil isn't inherently sexist either, actually. Just putting that out there.

edited 14th Nov '15 3:31:46 AM by nekomoon14

It's less a particular female character be evil and more like all female characters are.

Same with them being weak.

The only sexist criticism I've gotten is that my main character is "a guy with tits", a phrase which utterly baffles me. One of the villains is female^note from a species with 10x more men than women, I've got an anti-hero who's female^note promoting human experimentation for the good of all of us, and a main character with a couple friends/sidekicks who are female, though more of them are male.

Assuming the character is female, my guess is that the critic thinks she doesn't act "girly" enough. But then again, some people simply can't accept a female protagonist.

One peice of advice for writing female characters is "write a guy and change the pronouns." You seem to have done that.

Ken Levine's advice is something to the effect of "just write a character, and then decide if they're male or female". For example, he wrote Tennenbaum's story first, and then decided the character seemed feminine to him, so he wrote her as female. He did the inverse with Andrew Ryan.

A few of my concerns;

• The Big Bad of one of my books, Sharon Roman, ends up falling for Matthew...though it is portrayed as very unhealthy mentally. By this point Matthew has Sorata, Angie, Shina, and Samantha all into him - while Matthew himself is virginal and happy to remain a virgin "well, until things calm down at least." Sharon ends up joining the heroic team in Book III due to mutual enemy Hector Gibbs, and while it seems she's Easily Forgiven, it is insinuated she's not given a very easy time of it.
• Grant Erdhart does something very, very, very disturbing to rich women in one short story. I don't want to type out what he does on here. I am worried that there isn't enough discussion during the mission between Matthew, Liam and Caryna about how bad it was. Though it is made very clear that what happened in the factory farm sickened them, and they lay a satisfying beatdown on Grant at the end.
• The issue of "Future Matthew" and the girl who was his cynicism catalyst. It is at a point in the future where Matthew is about 24, and a more jaded anti hero. The world's undergone a bit of a revival of certain monarchic tropes due to a catastrophe and the return of magic. He meets a sixteen year old princess. Long story short, she falls deeply in love with Future Matt, who is desperate for some kind of comfort and experience besides pain. They do it. Is it sexist on my part to present the affair between the girl and Matthew as "tragic" instead of skeevy and speaking of "taking advantage of" her?

The "guy with tits" term is a really good example of why you should actually think these things through and seek multiple opinions rather than just be immediately concerned at any criticism (a point that extends beyond sexism), since I think it's rooted in rather sexist assumptions itself.

That is true, yes. But on the other hand, it's useful if you use it to remind yourself that on the lowest level men and women are indeed the same (hence "man with tits") and most of the differences are basically cultural conditioning that you put on top of that.

And some people do start from the position that men and women are different and only pile their attempts to make them similar onto those broken assumption, resulting in what basically is a mess that would have been much better had they adhered to this advice.

There's an entire genre surrounding the 'differences' between males and females.

Do 'dating advice' shows also assume this, although to be fair for such advice there isn't really a reason to differentiate 'inherent differences' and 'society-induced differences'?

As a note, said character is a special forces soldier used to combat and military life. As I noted back, plenty of women in the military say themselves they act like guys.

May have to do with how femininity is associated with weakness and other things that are undesirable in a miltary context.

To be honest, I see the whole idea of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' as being a bit weird. Look at this cloud of words associated with 'masculinity'◊. Notice how a lot of them can be good traits whether you're a male or female, yet get associated to males or 'maleness' for some reason? Similarly, it seems that 'femininity' is also just a list of traits that society happens to commonly associate with females or 'femaleness'.

The result: when a female has 'masculine' traits, she is less of an woman, and even more so vice versa: when a male has 'feminine' traits, he is less of a man. We've at least evolved enough that a female with 'masculine' traits is still treated with some respect and referred to as an woman. Tough luck to the man with 'feminine' traits.

Thing is, everyone (male or female or otherwise) has their own preferences and traits, regardless of whether society associates those traits with 'masculinity' or 'femininity'. A man can like the color pink without wanting to be an woman, or being 'feminine', or even having any other 'feminine' traits such as having kids, or submission, or being attracted to males. I think those particular traits being considered 'feminine' are pretty... interesting in their own right.

I could go on and on. But the main point still boils down to: Write any character's personality, themes, and roles in the story first. Gender should not matter unless it's an explicitly sexuality-related theme, including "this character is a Knight in Shining Armor Noble Bigot who Would Not Hit a Girl, plus a lot of well-intentioned misogynism, so being a male fits best" (plus, this character being female would be another dyanmic entirely)), "this story is about how females struggle against the misogynism of the world they live in", and sometimes even "I wanted a male homosexual dammit". Though stuff like "this is realistic [time period when homosexual marriages would be illegal] and the plot calls for a spouse of a male character, which has to be female" could come into play as well.

Actually, there can be plenty of reasons to choose a sex and gender. However, there're also plenty of situations where such things don't, or shouldn't, come in. Why say "this person cooks, so she must be a female"?

edited 16th Nov '15 5:10:20 AM by hellomoto

When I write female characters, I have to remind myself that women have different EXPERIENCES than men. Most men (excluding trans-men) don't know what it's like to have a period or give birth or experience a discharge (so gross). So, I ask different women what it's like (FOR THEM) to be women.

I try to imagine what it would be like if I was raised in a misogynistic society by misogynistic parents (including mothers, because women can be more misogynistic than men at times), watching misogynistic movies and TV shows, constantly being SHOWN (if not TOLD) that I am inferior to my brother, whose probably an incompetent jerk. That all has to play a part in my character's personality or she's not really REAL enough. She's not a woman, she's just a guy with tits.

edited 17th Nov '15 1:14:21 PM by nekomoon14

I write about a misogionistic woman too. But she is a villain...eh, is a bit iffy territory, right?.

To Nick The Swing: Sharon make me unconfortable, Put her crimes to a total analisis.

edited 17th Nov '15 4:18:02 PM by KazuyaProta

Yeah, there is some validity to "guy with boobs" argument, although I dislike the term. Like nekomoon said, most women do have slightly different experiences because they are raised differently. And depending on the society, that can be very important to dictate.

Even in gender-neutral fantasy/sci-fi societies, it's important to keep in mind, because for some reason gender-neutral justifications always seems to be "everyone acts as if they were modern day dudes" with very little "everyone acts as if they were modern day women."

And again, back to how feminity is associated with all the 'bad' stuff such as weakness. Both males and females can be associated with masculinity, but try to market a male associated with feminity - or an entire fantasy society where all males act like modern day females*. Good luck.

Misandrism is downplayed or outright ignored even by males, although we are making big steps in enpowering females. The bad parts of being 'like a guy' aren't really dealt with the way the bad parts of being 'like a girl' are.

Society-affecting misogynism can and does affect females and make them different from males, but it doesn't really help when it leads to pigeonholing. Every female recieves different amounts and types of misogynism. Every female reacts differently to even the same amounts and types of misogynism. Not to mention how the type of story may not even be that related to gender, or gender discrimination. We've so far made out sexism to be something so bad it infects literally everything we do. Well it does affect plenty of things, but even as a female there're still many other things where sexism is, at best/worst, a minor factor.

Can't we just have a variety of female characters, some defined by their femaleness, some not, and everywhere in between?

What about a female writing a male, by the way? Does the male character end up feeling like a female's fantasy or such?

* Wait wait wait, what is the difference between 'acting like a modern day male' and 'acting like a modern day female'? High heels and dresses? How much you fight to get females empowered? Bwah?

Or is it about aggressiveness versus passiveness? The latter doesn't exactly make for an interesting character to watch and follow.

edited 17th Nov '15 10:09:40 PM by hellomoto

There's a difference between saying that "the effect misogyny has on women makes the experiences of women somewhat different" and saying that "misogyny affects everything women do."

Because experiences impact character, they are relevant when you write a story driven by character. But if you're writing a story set in the far future that is an exploration of scientific concepts, rather than about character interaction, I guess it might not be that relevant in cases like that.

In cases like that, trying to see how gender (discrimination) fits in just detracts and distracts from the real story.

And such cases are pretty common.

This

Missing the point for some reason. There are character-focused stories and plot-focused stories and stories that are some degree of combination. In a character-focused story, a woman's womanhood is important because it impacts her experience as a person. Misogyny doesn't necessarily equate to "discrimination of women"; it's about power dynamics and the expectations engendered by those power dynamics. An Amazon's experience of womanhood is probably going to differ quite a bit from that of a Japanese geisha or a Balinese shamaness.

Which Amazon?

Haha, I noticed that too. I was referring to the Amazons of Greek legend But I mixed in too many "real" kinds of women. You get what I'm saying tho, right?

edited 19th Nov '15 12:51:27 PM by nekomoon14

Indeed. Point is, if it calls itself a woman then it is a real woman, no matter how exactly she is. And her experiences are her experiences that are hers not because she is a woman, though that can influence it, but rather because they are her experiences.

Every woman, just like every man, is different. And whatever one woman experiences will be different from whatever other women experience, even if at the most basic level it's supposed to be the same (a fine example is menstruation; it might be similar but it's not actually the same for any two women, no matter what women you choose, because everyone is different and there are enough things influencing it that it can't really be the same).

Please elaborate, because I'm not understanding you.

Human beings are far more alike than different, so our experiences are going to be the same more often than not. Almost every woman has a period unless she's been though menopause or was born male or has some kind of health condition; it doesn't matter whether it's heavy or light, more or less painful, whatever - its something that she'll experience and her hypothetical brother won't. There are uniquely female experiences, just as there are uniquely intersex experiences and uniquely male experiences (though the latter are comparatively few).

edited 19th Nov '15 5:30:18 PM by nekomoon14