Writing Strong Women, Part V: Where are the Strong Women?

Kate Beaton's 'Strong Female Characters'

Last time, we talked about the relationship between a woman and society--but there is also an odd relationship between the idea of the 'strong woman' and society: despite the fact that she's discussed so often these days, nothing seems to change about how women are portrayed--or at least, not for the better. As pointed out in great articles like A Plague of Strong Female Characters, Why Strong Female Characters are Bad for Women, and I Hate Strong Female Characters, as well as Kate Beaton's comics on the subject, 'Strong Female Character' has just come to mean emotionally damaged, commitment-phobic, laconic, and gun-toting.

Usually she'll have a rape backstory, too--and if she doesn't have one to begin with, a later writer will add one. It's really just another way to do 'damsel in distress', but with a female hero: in the standard formula, the bad guy shows up, steals the girlfriend, and then the male hero has to get revenge and save the girl; for a so-called 'strong woman', the villain steals the 'innocent girl inside her', and so she must go on a quest and get that part of herself back, by killing him. A lot of writers seem to think the natural state for a woman is frilly and sweet, but that a quick application of sex crime is all it takes to make her a violent buttkicker. Even Joss Wheedon, much lauded for how he deals with female characters, couldn't resist making the entire background for mystical female power in Buffy The Vampire Slayer into an extended rape origin story.

Lt. Ellen Ripley

Pretty trite, I know--but at least it's not as bad as hurting a female character in order to motivate the male hero--if there's one thing you learn from these articles, please let it be 'a woman's physical and emotional pain is not just a convenient way to make a man angry' (I'm looking at you, Christopher Nolan). Of course, just because people like Nolan and Whedon sometimes falter, that doesn't mean we should condemn their work out of hand--but if such respected creators can still fall into uncomfortable implication land, what can we do differently?

Well, the first thing to remember is that in the phrase 'Strong Female Character', the adjective 'strong' is there to modify 'character', not 'female'. We need to write a strong character, period. The old cliche is 'write a man, then change the sex'--which can certainly work. In Dan O'Bannon's original script for Alien, none of the characters had a gender until specific actors were cast to play them--that's why they were all known by their last names. Ripley didn't even have a first name until the second film. She's been heralded as one of the strongest female characters in any story (and certainly any genre film), and it's mostly because she was a character first, and a woman second. Like most male characters, she was given personality and motivations to set her apart, and these traits had nothing to do with how she was gendered.

A great illustration of character first, gender second comes from videogames, where you can often choose the gender of your main character. For those unfamiliar: in quite a few games, you can select whether the hero of the story is a man or a woman. Yet, throughout the story, they have the same friendships and relationships, make the same decisions, take the same actions, say the same words, struggle through the same hardships and losses--the only difference is a cosmetic one. (Unfortunately, this 'generic hero story' often means glossing over the culturally-specific experiences different people tend to have--for example, the fact that every character in the story treats a black female hero the same way they would a white male one, which is a subtler kind of whitewashing.) If it helps, you might want to think to yourself, as you're creating characters and writing dialogue, 'would I still write it this way if the character was of the other gender?'

At least the snake tail looks natural

But of course, one can also take the 'write a man, then change the sex' advice in a less productive direction, creating another cliche, the 'wo-man'--a standard masculine hero, only with a set of boobs bolted on, a la Michelangelo. Instead of this, we should try to recognize that in every person there are a lot of traits that have nothing to do with sex, or gender, or sexual preference.

That's part of what makes it unfortunate that, by the time Ripley does get a first name, her personal strength is transformed in to a feminine cliche: the strong mother figure--and then she has to imitate masculinity by picking up a gun and battling her way through a giant murder-womb ('nuke it from space!').

But she didn't need the gun the first time around to be heroic, so why add one now? Wasn't part of her strength the fact that she survived without being a napalm-fueled killing machine? It's the same problem we get with Sarah Connor in the Terminator franchise--hell, even before she gets pregnant, her whole life is defined by her role as a mother. She's important not because of her own competence, but because of her ability to produce a competent and important man at some point in the future--and she has to transform herself from a fluffy-haired waitress into a gun-toting, musclebound badass in order to do it--her femininity must be suppressed in order for her to be effective. Another strike against Whedon is that he did the same thing to Black Widow. Now, this doesn't necessarily make these women weak characters, but it does align them more closely with cliche feminine roles. Where's the film about the woman who protects her child without having to resort to laconic violence? Where's the woman who doesn't feel a need to be defined by a child in the first place?

I know there are certain biases built into fiction--expectations about how characters should behave in a story, even though real people don't behave in these stereotypical ways. My roommate in college once wrote a story with a generic heroine, then gender-swapped her. When he read the story in class, everyone was confused--specifically because at one point, when things weren't going well, the now-male character broke down and cried. This so upset their sense of narrative propriety that they spent the rest of the class period talking about 'what it meant' about the character, what must have happened in his past to make him this way.

Now, I've seen many men cry when things went wrong--even minor things, and especially if they were already stressed out. Some of them were big, strong, manly men, too. Yet somehow, in the context of a story, readers have trouble accepting this, and go searching for some larger explanation. Now, I happen to think that engaging your reader like this isn't necessarily a bad thing--undermining their expectations, forcing them to think--after all, my friend's classmates all praised him for making such a 'deep, complex character', but each author must decide for themselves how much they want to cater to traditional narrative expectations.

Ensign Sue Must Die

Another problem is a lot of writers think 'strong female character' means having no flaws--or only having flaws that could be broadly defined as 'being a woman'--but it's not a character's strengths that make them unique, it's their weaknesses. Ironic as it may sound, flaws make for a strong character. It means that they have an internal life, that they will come across as vivid, dynamic, conflicted, and motivated.

After all, what do we call it when an author creates a super-competent character who has no flaws? That's right, the much-maligned Mary Sue. Male characters are allowed to be off-kilter--even heroes like Batman or James Bond are allowed to be disturbed, or goofy, or troubled, or damaged--while women are all-too-often relegated to dull, unadventurous 'good-girl' stereotypes.

In movies, TV, and other stories, you often see these bland, sexy women characters onto whom the writers have grafted some skill--she's a scientist, she's a super-hacker, an archaeologist--as if that makes her personality any less weak. Really, giving them all of these 'powers' without actually making them competent or complex is just another way of putting a woman on a pedestal, which of course, is abusive behavior. No one can live up to the pedestal--no real person, and no character--so, sticking them up there is always going to be at the expense of their capacity to be sympathetic, down-to-earth, or realistic--their capacity to be flawed. Putting someone on a pedestal makes their life all about you.

Plus the fact that, when you start making these female side characters competent badasses, it makes no sense for the schlubby male protagonist to be the hero of the story. Why are they secondary to him, why are they the ones who get captured and he has to save them? Well, it's a combination of the need for a down-to-earth, everyman hero and the attempt to make female characters 'strong' by grafting on karate kicks and scientific acumen. Sure, it's possible to do this as a clever subversion, as in Big Trouble in Little China, but the difference is that when you look at Jack Burton's actions throughout the film, it becomes clear that he is an incompetent sidekick who mistakes himself for the hero. Like the Van Helsing example from earlier, what's important isn't the character's outward appearance, or what we are told to think of them, but what actions they actually take in the story. Do they generally succeed or fail, do they help others, or do they need help from others, do they tend to be proven right, or proven wrong, do they lash out insecurely when challenged, or take it in stride?

As you may have noticed as you progressed through these articles, pretty much everything I've said is just basic writing advice for any character--male, female, or sentient rock: a character should not just be a secondary appendage of other characters, they should have their own desires and goals, they should be active and culpable for their choices, implying that they have a life outside of the story instead of simply appearing when it's convenient and then disappearing back into the authorial toybox when it isn't. They should have just as much variety as any other character, not only in the roles they play, but in terms of personality type, appearance, morality, sexual preference, &c. This is basic stuff.

Same character, different voice actor

Most authors seem to be aware of these basic rules when it comes to their male characters, so why do they suddenly forget them when it's time to write women? Clearly, they must think of women as being fundamentally different from men, so they approach those characters differently. That's the secret to writing strong female characters: don't stop doing all the things you would normally do to create a good character, just because she's female. Don't start treating her completely differently than you would any other character. Don't rely on old archetypes like 'slut', 'witch', 'mother', 'nag', 'ice queen', or 'good girl' instead of giving her an actual personality. Don't write her as strong when she first appears, only to make her secondary and inactive the moment your nerdy, boring hero arrives on the scene.

Also, don't have her overcompensate, as in the Captain America example from the Sophia McDougall article I linked to earlier, where Peggy Carter physically attacks a man who talks back to her, then fires live rounds at the hero for kissing another girl. This kind of overcompensation is always a sign of weakness, not strength. It's like an abused dog who tries to bite anyone who comes close to it--it's the outward symptom of insecurity and fear.

A character who is sure of themselves has no need to lash out at every perceived threat--they carry themselves with natural confidence and can afford to ignore minor slights. Think of the old samurai cliche of the great swordsman who sits alone, trying to eat his rice in peace, paying no heed to the insults and threats of the local thugs, attempting to deescalate, until at last he is forced to defend himself (or someone else). If your female character has to attack people and yell her way through every other scene in order to assert herself, that's going to read as stark insecurity--a sign that she does not possess the inner strength to do what needs be done. The whole cliche of the unemotional, I-don't care-what-you-think 'strong woman' is built on someone who is so emotionally damaged that she's lost the capacity for trust. Antisociability is not the same thing as self-reliance.

It's a common dynamic, one we can see in the hidebound movie scene of 'man says something inappropriate, woman slaps him'--though I wonder how often people consider what that implies about the characters. If two men were talking and the same thing happened, we'd read the slapper as being weak and over-emotional, because he's responding to mere words with physical violence--he's overreacting. And yet, we tend to accept it from female characters, so why is that?

What it suggests about our culture is that a man's words simply have more power and authority than a woman's--and hence, that either the woman can't come up with a suitable comeback (because women aren't allowed to be witty and biting), or that no matter her reply, it simply wouldn't be taken seriously (because she is a woman so her words have less weight). So instead, she resorts to physical violence, and we accept this response as fair, suggesting that a man's words are as powerful as a woman's actions. That's some thorough disempowerment there

Another thing you may want to consider in your stories is exploring not just one woman--or even a few female characters--but actually looking at female interrelationships. I don't mean female rivalries, because those are all too common (the idea that 'women can't get along' is a pretty tired cliche), but actual female friendships, and mutual reliance. There are so many paeans in this culture to the 'bromance': The Odd Couple, Buddy Cop films, Jay & Silent Bob, Adventure Time--while women in stories often exist alone, relating mainly to male characters, or at most engaging in catty, petty rivalry with other women. Remember, people are social animals, they don't live in isolation, and interrelationships are a huge part of who we are. By absenting female socialization from stories, you isolate female characters, so that they have no opportunity to develop outside their relationship to men.

Beyond that, if the setup on the show is a bunch of men and one or only a few women, then the representation of how people socialize and how friendship works is going to be masculine by default. The women in the story end up existing only in relation to men, and as such, they are also defined by the masculine default--but as being secondary, or outsiders, or the butt of jokes--again, they're just the 'group chick', set apart solely by their gender, by how much they deviate from the 'male norm'.

Xena: Warrior Princess

One of the unique things about the old Sword & Sandals show Xena: Warrior Princess was that it was fundamentally about female friendship. Just as Hercules and Iolaus palled around, joking and relying on one another through thick and thin, so Xena and Gabrielle demonstrate that the same formula can be equally effective when applied to women--indeed, their exploration often had more depth and pathos than the goofy bro-dom of Hercules. The fact that both ladies were butt-kicking warriors made it a bit silly--but then, so were their male counterparts, so part of it is just the genre

And hey, as long as we're creating female interrelationships, we can also make women strong by stressing their social power. Of course, this can start getting into cliches of 'men are physical, women are social', but if that is a common value in the society you're portraying (as it is in many societies) then it can be a very effective way to make a strong woman character without resorting to a lady knight or some other anachronism of 'male role+boobs'. Hell, I'd suggest it's equally important to stress the social power of your male characters--far too many of them end up wholly reliant on their physical abilities, while never highlighting the social struggles that would naturally crop up in any story, which means we're missing out on the aspects of personality those struggles might reveal.

Overall, we don't want female and male 'equality' in a mathematical sense (one woman for every man)--it's more like the way that different types of animals are equally competent at their particular niche. People often misrepresent evolution--it does not mean that more recent forms of life are in any way superior to earlier forms. Being human beings, with all our cities and electric lights and such, we might sometimes imagine ourselves to be 'better' than squid--to be more 'highly-evolved'--but stick a human being a few hundred feet under the water for a couple days and see how that goes. Human beings and squid and every other animal on the planet are equally as evolved--they're just all evolved to deal with different sets of circumstances.

It's the same with 'character equality'. It's not that men and women need to be represented as being the same, having the same strengths, weaknesses, desires, habits, and roles. The idea is that each character--independent of their sex--has their own personality, their own dreams and fears, their own flaws and motivations, their own moral center. Every character should be fully-formed. Even if they sometimes lose, or give up, or make bad decisions, it's important that they do these things because that's who they are--not because of some narrative expectation, or because it plays into some social ideal or fetish, or genre cliche.

Don't write a strong woman, write a strong character. She can fail, she can cry, she can give up, she can be irrational or angry or ignorant, she can be physically weak, she can get stuck in bad positions, she can be incapable of physically defending herself--all of those are fine, as long as she's still a vivid character with an internal life. Don't make her a type--don't make her strong 'because she's a mother' or 'because she was raped', don't make her weak because 'she's over-emotional and in touch with her feelings', or because she's a valuable object that men compete over, don't make her a threat because 'women use sex as a weapon'--in short, don't seek out cliches of femininity in order to excuse her behaviors. She does not need to be excused. She needs to be set free, to have just as much variability and complexity in personality as any other character in a story--and she needs to exist in the context of a whole world filled with other women who are completely different sorts of people.

That's the big message here: never just represent one woman, demonstrate that in your story, in your setting, all women are living their own independent lives. Don't ignore or downplay fifty percent of your story's population. They need to be present, not just as a token example (or three), but as an integral part of society--of life, of politics, of art, of relationships, of family, of religion, of war, of rebellion, of wealth, of poverty, of race, of caste, of class, of risk and curiosity, and every other thing that makes us human--just as they are in the real world.

So, that's the end of my series on writing female characters--at least for now. Next week is another request article from one of my readers: my list of suggested comic books. Until then.