Paul Tobin (he has a moustache now, though)
This week we’re discussing gender roles in popular culture. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart (and my writing) for a number of reasons.
It’s fair to say that I’m known for writing female characters. Spider-Girl, Annah Billips from Gingerbread Girl, Black Widow… and a host of others. I enjoy the hell out of writing female characters for two main reasons. First… I simply enjoy the hell out of women. It may possibly have something to do with my theory that women are pretty and smell nice. And another reason I like writing female characters is because it’s a step outside my comfort zone. I’m male. When writing a female character I have momentum from the very beginning, because I start by entering what is, for me, a fantasy world. I’ve no idea what it’s like to be a woman. Well, I have some ideas. Men and women are amazingly similar after all, and even some of our dissimilarities need to be tossed out when writing in the role of the opposite gender. One BIG mistake that men make when writing female characters is to make women relentlessly female. A big mental check-mark I have in my head is the “bathroom” test. Men and women pee differently. We do. But if I’m writing a female character, and I write a line of, “She went to pee, which she did by sitting down, because she is a girl and that’s how girls do these things,” … then I’ve failed as a writer. I’ve written a female character from a decidedly male perspective.
Swear to god... one day I will CUT you.
In writing, once a gender is established… it’s often best to leave it alone. A woman does not need to walk to the door with a decided roll to her hips that a man would not have. She just walks to the damn door. Likewise, a man does not need to reach out for a cup of coffee, all the time grunting, thinking about football, about how hard it is to follow a map, and how much he believes he could beat a tiger in a knife fight… the way we guys are always thinking.
Much of my writing to date has been done in comics, in a field where gender roles are very established, and they’re frankly not established very well. I’ll go on record as saying I’m not fond of balloon-sized breasts in comics, yet that is the way that most female characters in comics are depicted. When I first starting scripting for comics, I would put in directions to the artist to keep breasts no larger than normal sized. That didn’t work. That just meant the art would come back with women having breasts only equal to the size of their heads, as opposed to twice the size. So I began putting in notations that the women should have normal-sized breasts, and then add that I meant “normal” as in the real world. That didn’t work either. I eventually reached a stage where I would say that the women were entirely flat-chested. No breasts at all. Not even “A” cups. Zero. Flat. Nada. With those directions in place, I now generally get back illustrations of women in the C-cup range, which I can live with. I suppose what I’m saying here is that, in comics, women are seen in a very definite way: as pretty objects to look at and admire from afar, before getting down to the business of being a hero.
Hear me! I speak for WONDER WOMAN!
Women in comics, and in genre fiction, films, etc, are far too often just caricatures of female body parts. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m entirely in favor of beautiful women, it’s just that I don’t need to have a constant reminder that a particular beautiful woman has a really nice rump or a particularly fine chest. Really. Honestly. I got that. I wrote that down in my notebook, right after my notation on mammoth-punching. I keep hoping all this will change… that comics and other entertainment media won’t need the constant titillation factor anymore, now that the average person can amaze themselves by finding their weight in porn with a few clicks of a button. With the internet at our command, do we really still need a leg shot from Supergirl in order to make our day? Can’t we have a character bit instead? Maybe something about who she is, what she believes in, what she wants for dinner, the identity of her favorite painter, the identity of the one villain she wishes was a hero, and the one hero she wishes was a villain, so she could punch the crap out of them? Wouldn’t all of that be a tiny bit more interesting than the 1,697,453rd gust of wind that blows up her skirt and shows a bit of her panties? No? Well, hell… then let’s just move on to the other way that women are depicted in most fiction.
As tied up hostages.
Ho hum. Tied up again.
Yes, sir. Nothing says “strong female character” like being tied up, which is the other standard role for women in a lot of genre fiction. Also, “victim in alley” is a good one. Always room for new players in that role. These are a few of the roles I try to avoid in my own writing. It’s honestly fairly easy to do. Just give characters a sense of… character. If you, as a writer, start to think about the reasons why characters do something, what the end goal of a man or a woman might be… then the character starts to live on the page. Again, I think it’s often important to forget the gender while writing. Men and women want many of the same things. Money. Power. Sex. Love. Mixtures of them all. Men and women might have different definitions of what some of these mean, but the goals are similar. And we might have different ways of achieving our goals, but that doesn’t mean that each and every step on the journey needs to be feminine or masculine. It can just be about a person. Pure and simple. A person. That’s perhaps the most important aspect of a gender role in fiction, the fact that we, as authors, are very rarely writing about a gender; we are writing about an individual person. And an individual deserves to be treated in just that singular manner.
Paul's novel. Out NOW: He did his very best to make a masculine novel that still smells pretty and knows how to read a map. No tigers were harmed in the making of this novel.
Paul (@princejvstin) on May 14, 2012
Thanks, Paul.
I was always confused growing up, watching the Wonder Woman tv show and comics, wondering just why she was getting tied up all the time. At the time I wondered it was some sort of continual irony–Wonder Woman has a golden lasso, so having her is a reversal of that. Ha!
Now I know it was just bad writing, if not actively degrading to women and female characters.
Paul on May 14, 2012
I like “continual irony” as the name for the tied-up trope.
Quote of the day | ‘She went to pee, which she did by sitting down’ | Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources – Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment on May 14, 2012
[...] Paul Tobin, discussing the depictions of gender in fiction, but especially in reference to women in superhero [...]
Oric on May 14, 2012
Great article and that’s a fanstastic still from the WW show – Linda’s ironic look (intentional or not) fits in with your theme.
Paul on May 14, 2012
Yeah. I was looking around for a good visual to illustrate my point, saw that one, and… slam dunk.
Acer on May 14, 2012
Let me tell you, if it had been me who had taken over DC or Marvel a couple of years back…one of my first immediate acts would be to institute a creative mandate: all characters would be standing up straight–no T&A poses whatsoever. BUT, there’d be a catch–if an artist decides to do so anyway, especially with female characters, THEN he/she has to do it to the male characters to. So yeah, “they do a shot of Black Canary’s derriere, then we get the same for Nightwing”.
I swear, I think the only comics that avoid a lot of the stuff you mention above are GI Joe comics. I’ve never seen any of the women–except maybe Scarlett, Lady Jaye, Baroness or Zarana when they’re undercover or something–do any of the stuff you describe.
Paul on May 15, 2012
A lot of European comics that I favor avoid the problem. I actually don’t mind a little cheesecake here and there. It’s just the UNRELENTING aspect of it, for every character, that gets me down. I’d love a LOT more normal people in comics. Ones that don’t feel the need to wear fishnets and bend over a lot. Characters that simply aren’t mind-bendingly pretty. They don’t need to be ugly, just… normal. I think stories suffer for the lack of diversity.
I’m trying to picture a comic just stuffed full of Nightwing’s derriere. Not sure whether to smile in amusement or tremble in horror.
mazarkis on May 15, 2012
Great post. I really enjoyed reading this.
Paul on May 15, 2012
Thanks! Always good to know that people are reading.
some important writing advice (link) « shanepatrickboyle on May 18, 2012
[...] Book Writer Paul Tobin, writing for the Night Bazaar blog, recently offered some good advice for male writers writing female characters. Think of them as [...]
Billy on June 1, 2012
Paul, this was great!
Christine on June 14, 2012
Paul, for as often as I’ve shared a link to this post, I’ve never thanked you for it. Long overdue.
Thank you!! Awesome post. Possibly the best I’ve ever read on writing women characters.
Paul on June 15, 2012
Thanks, Christine! It’s always nice to know my words made sense.