Strong Women Characters
A number of people have linked to the article Why Strong Female Characters are Bad for Women. I’ve read it several times, and while I agree with a lot of what’s said, that title makes me cranky.
Strong female characters are not bad for women (or for men). Stereotypical, cardboard, badly done female characters, on the other hand? Not a good thing. Writers and filmmakers who have no clue how to create a strong female character? Also a bad thing.
A strong female character has to be a character. Characters are (usually) people. They have strengths and flaws both. They have their own goals — which don’t all revolve around a guy — as well as their own fears. They love and hate and yearn and regret.
I’ve found that as soon as the writer tries to define a particular type of character — “This shall be the black character” or “This will be the smart character” or “This will be the strong female character,” then it fails. The character becomes one-dimensional, defined by that label and a (usually) shallow and stereotypical understanding of how to portray it.
What about strength? Strong does not mean invulnerable. Strong does not mean perfect. Strong does not necessarily mean physical strength.
Strength is my daughter holding back tears after her little brother accidentally hurts her, because she knows if she cries it will upset him. Strength is my mother calmly shoving chocolate into my dad’s mouth when his blood sugar drops too low. Strength is Susan Boyle getting up on stage, ignoring the derision of the audience, and singing the crap out of her song.
Sure, strength can also be Uma Thurman kicking ass in Kill Bill — but that’s just one of many kinds of strength. When that’s the only kind of strength we see, it betrays a serious lack of creativity on the part of the writers. (And Thurman’s character is far from invulnerable. As the article notes, she is strong, but also flawed and human.)
Lastly, a strong female character has to be female. This is a “Duh” moment, but I think there are a lot of writers who have a hard time creating realistic female characters. Sometimes women seem to exist only as sexual fantasy objects. Other times people complain the female characters are just “men with boobs.”
Dangerous territory here. I’m not about to try to lecture everyone on what is and isn’t female. Nor am I going to claim I always get it right. What I do know is that sex and gender can affect our experiences and our identity, but they don’t define who we are, and there’s tremendous variety out there.
We’re not getting enough variety in books and TV and movies. Often we get a few narrow character types and ignore 99% of the female population. And hey, here’s a hint: if you have only a single (strong, of course) female character in your ensemble, it’s extremely difficult to show variety.
So no, I don’t believe strong female characters are bad for women. I do believe that, as a whole, we’re doing a lousy job of writing them.
Discussion and disagreement are welcome, as always.
ZombieJoe
March 11, 2010 @ 10:33 am
Interesting subject. And I am all for the creation of actual characters in movies, television and books. But then that brings up a question on my part.
Josh Wheaton has been praised for his strong female characters. What are your opinions of the likes of Buffy, Willow, Zoe or River? If you are familiar with Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, did you think that Penny was a strong female character?
Kristen Painter
March 11, 2010 @ 10:55 am
You should read this post: http://www.murdershewrites.com/2010/03/09/is-there-a-double-standard-in-romance/
Jason
March 11, 2010 @ 10:59 am
Ok.. first of all, I think the article just points out what we all knew to begin with.. Transformers was a crappy, badly written movie for the masses. It was made simply for big robots and boobs. I mean the fact that the Transformers are secondary characters in their own movie tells you something.
I also find it insanely funny that the writer LOVED Rachel Dawes, a character created SOLELY as a love interest to Bruce Wayne. She was flat and boring. Of course she’s not going to whip out ninja moves, she’s the girl next door damsel in distress just like Mary Jane in the Spider-Man movies. They’re both crappy characters.
Sewicked
March 11, 2010 @ 11:15 am
To use another Media example, look at the Buffy tv show, which had a range of strong female characters.
There’s Buffy; strong, socially secure, and great at kicking ass. There’s her friend, Willow; smart, responsible, and clever. Both have weaknesses; Buffy has problems being close to people, with her slayer duties and can be a little shallow while Willow has issues with stage fright and self-confidence. Cordelia, often seen as Buffy’s rival is smart but hides it to be more ‘socially acceptable.’ All three women grow over the course of the series; Buffy gets better at letting people get close to her; Willow gains self-confidence and Cordelia learns to do what she wants to do instead of letting her ‘popular image’ rule her decisions.
Less seen but also strong was Buffy’s mom. She’s a divorced mother trying to raise her daughter and suddenly finds out that daughter has been keeping a secret from her; a big one. There’s Faith; strong but not quite strong enough (spoiler alert), because she did become a villain after all.
Jim C. Hines
March 11, 2010 @ 2:48 pm
I don’t know that Joss Whedon is as strongly feminist as he gets credit for, but I’ve enjoyed most of his work, with the exception of Dollhouse. I liked Buffy and the range of female characters in that show. Likewise with Firefly.
Dr. Horrible … in part because of the format, it felt like she had less time to *be* a character, and she was there primarily to be wooed by the guys and then for the shocking Whedon-style ending.
Jim C. Hines
March 11, 2010 @ 2:49 pm
I think Buffy (the show) did a lot of things right. It wasn’t perfect, and like I said above I think Whedon sometimes gets more credit than maybe he should, but I really do like the range of female characters in that show. Firefly too, for that matter.
Jim C. Hines
March 11, 2010 @ 2:51 pm
Thanks. I don’t think the double-standard she talks about is in any way limited to the Romance genre, or to fiction in general…
Lynda
March 11, 2010 @ 4:18 pm
The huge race fail aside, it will be interesting to see how The Last Airbender they translates strong female characters like Katara for the movie. Even though the t.v. was for kids and was kinda cheesy it did a lot of things right especially with the female characters imo.
Liz
March 11, 2010 @ 10:12 pm
sometimes I wonder about all I missed by not watching Buffy… 🙂
@Lynda: Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of my favs!! I’m real excited about the rewatch at tor.com starting this Monday. Though, the movie has me a little nervous, I’m not a big fan of m. night s.
One important facet of strong female characters so far only barely touched upon is thought process. I understand that it is hard to get inside someone else’s head especially when that person doesn’t exist and is the opposite gender to yourself. I have read some really bad ones in my time, and it ruined the entire book. If she thinks like a man, then she really is just a ‘man with boobs’. That, as a reader, I find totally unacceptable. To leave you on a happy note: I think that Talia is a really good example of a strong female character. She is capable of awesome butt-kicking action, but has an inner vulnerability and is often wary or confused of her own emotions. That last bit makes her totally relatable, and one of my favorite characters.
Jim C. Hines
March 12, 2010 @ 2:47 pm
Thanks, Liz. I’m glad Talia works for you 🙂 One of my favorite reviews/discussions of the book talks about how Talia starts out treading toward that one-dimensional aspect, but as you keep reading you find that’s because she tries to only show that one dimension, when really there’s a lot more going on. (At least, I hope that’s what readers take away…)
KatG
March 13, 2010 @ 10:23 pm
Well I don’t like the article at all and here’s why: when a movie, or t.v. show makes use of a woman’s body and beauty to be part of the imagery of the work, straight women and sympathetic males tend to watch only the woman’s boobs and not her face any longer. They say, this woman is being objectified and then only view the character the beautiful actress is playing in objectified terms. They ignore the story, they ignore the emotions of the character and the relationships between characters. These are deemed “unimportant” because there’s sexiness in the movie, because the key demographic is young males, so clearly nobody cares about plot and nuance, so they stop caring about them and declare them, erroneously, non-existent.
I watch a movie for the story, whatever type of movie it is, and there’s always a story. I watch the performances. I actually look at facial expresses and listen to the dialogue, not just the bellybuttons. Sigourney Weaver is not just a hot babe in Alien in her underwear. I’ve seen Megan Fox in four movies now, playing three characters quite different from each other, and you know what, she’s pretty good. Not Streep good, but she’s subtle (at least on screen.) In the first Transformers movie, her character knows she’s sexy, but she’s getting tired of her sexiness being the only thing considered important about her and of being treated as subservient, which draws her to Sam. And when she says goodbye to Sam as he risks his life, and risks her life to hook up injured Bumblebee to the truck and then goes into battle with him, there’s emotion there. You’re not supposed to just look at her. And in the second Transformers movie, when she hurriedly shifts clothes to be in a girly dress to say goodbye to Sam, yes it’s sexy, but you might also notice that the character is freaking vulnerable, scared about her boyfriend going off to college without her. So yeah, it is a strong character, Fox is right — she’s loyal, smart, tough, vulnerable, uncertain, and passionate. Plus sexy and wearing tight shorts — to partly make a joke about it. So sue her.
One of my family’s favorite t.v. shows is Chuck, which is kind of like a modern Get Smart. Almost every episode, actress Yvonne Strahovski who plays Sarah, a CIA spy, is put into a bikini or similar outfit and given a long, lingering, sometimes slow motion shot of how gorgeous she is, deliberately over-doing it. They do this first off as a joke, making fun of spy movies, and second because Yvonne Strahovski is very sexy. But the character is also sweet, vulnerable, smart, etc., and has a complicated relationship with the lead character. She’s no more one-dimensional than any of the other characters on the show, and to not pay any attention to that is to miss half of what the show is about.
It is an interesting thing that at this point in our culture, I am offered male eye candy almost as much as female eye candy in film and t.v. Rippling muscles and smoldering eyes abound. But those male actors are not critiqued in performance and character nearly as much in the way that actresses are, as if their good looks were the only thing that mattered, and that if the movie decided to show off the guys’ abs, that means their characters are flat stereotypes and their performances suck. And I’m getting really tired of it. This isn’t feminism. It’s witch-hunting.
In written fiction, it’s not as big a problem, because it’s not visual. But when a lot of these women authors came on the scene writing contemporary suspense fantasy, they were promptly dismissed first for being women writers, then pronounced that they must be romance writers (because women always want to write about romance,) and now dismissed as promoting a sexy chick in leather male sex fantasy that is stereotypical and how dare they. That they are presenting active characters dealing with complex situations, that they have conflicting emotions and weak moments, that quite often they don’t see themselves as sexy, that the writers are writing interesting thriller stories equal to what the guys are putting out — all that gets ignored because they have their lead character wear a leather jacket once and their publisher got a little silly with the cover. It’s again not feminism, it’s backlash. Don’t make your women characters too strong, too weak, too sexy or sexual. Write like a man, don’t you dare write like a man. And worst of all, if the character has a healthy sex life, well then she’s being written like a man? What is up with that bad girl crap still going on? What people mean most of the time by one-dimensional is I was bored and that’s not the kind of character I like. Well the world is not your oyster, Over Thinking It.
But what’s most annoying about this article is that it doesn’t even realize what it’s saying. It complains that women characters need to fall down more. If I remember correctly, Fox’s character does fall down more than once in the Transformer movies, and women characters still are always falling down in films and t.v. — if people are running and someone falls, it’s usually a woman. And for the past ten years, it’s been a habit of films to make women character endearing by making them clumsy, like Lucille Ball. Go watch an Amanda Bynes movie. And then it lists other traits it wants to see more of — and the characters who already show those traits, characters like Hermione Granger, the lead female in the most famous and popular book series in the world, and the Simpsons, the most successful and widely known adult animation series in the world, and so on. And the author wants more neurotic women — have you seen a rom com lately; they’re all neurotic. The author can’t think of a film/show where women are shown as depressed — I could give the site a list as long as my arm on depressed female characters.
In other words, the article is complete caca trying to be clever social commentary by trashing Transformers because the author didn’t like the movie. They’re not over thinking; they’re just not thinking.
Harry Markov
March 14, 2010 @ 8:01 am
Incidentally, I have been thinking on doing a post on this same note with more or less comparison between urban fantasy [major offender in the carbon copy category] and other genres, where female strength has been portrayed in different dimensions with added depth. I’m quite disappointed to see that ‘strength’ is usually taken in the most literal sense.
Jim C. Hines
March 18, 2010 @ 3:16 pm
Sounds like a great topic. I’d be particularly interested in seeing more examples of female strength done with depth and variety.
Writer Wednesday Blog Tour #10 « W. J. Howard
March 24, 2010 @ 3:07 am
[…] I couldn’t agree more with author Jim C. Hines in his post Strong Women Characters. […]
World Wide Wednesday: Associations and Unreliable Narrators | Fantasy Literature's Fantasy Book Reviews
March 31, 2010 @ 11:11 am
[…] Take a read of that one here, then a follow up article written by Jim C. Hines (yep, him again) here. One last article I want to highlight takes a look at the role of female characters in fantasy […]
Donna Newton
April 7, 2010 @ 7:12 am
I love this post probably because I agree with everything Kim C Hinds had written
…..however, KatG. What on earth are you going on about? There are many male roles who are known for their torso’s. Does the name Matthew McConaughey sound familiar? Has he even made a film that requires clothes? Plus, and this is purely for the record, I am a straight female who has never watched an entire film starring at nothing other than the leading actresses boobs! Plus how can you compare any role Megan Fox has played to that of Sigorney Weavers ‘Ripley’ in Aliens? The two are on a different planet (excuse the pun).
I too was (and still ashamedly am) a Buffy fan but I must say, as strong as the character was physically I find her rather needy and always wanting to be the centre of attention.
Katie
April 14, 2010 @ 12:38 am
You have a lot of great points here. Way too many times a strong female becomes a flat player in the story. I just read a great book, Confucius Jade , that featured some amazing women, with more than just physical strength. I would strongly recommend it.
Burn
April 25, 2010 @ 11:38 am
It’s hard to portrait a realistic strong female character because they are hard to find in real life. 95% of women do not even come close to most of female characters generally regarded as “strong” (like Buffy, or any Anjelina Jolie characters). And these characters are not really strong.
Jim C. Hines
April 25, 2010 @ 12:10 pm
I agree that Buffy and Lara Croft and so on aren’t realistic, but as to the difficulties in finding strong women in real life? There I disagree.