i dont need no women in my fantasy

Fantasy Faction Fantasy Book Reviews & Community http://fantasy-faction.com I Don’t Need No Women In My Fantasy My Twi...

0 downloads 80 Views 108KB Size
Fantasy Faction Fantasy Book Reviews & Community http://fantasy-faction.com

I Don’t Need No Women In My Fantasy

My Twitter stream regularly expresses a variety of opinion on the treatment of women, or of people of colour or unconventional sexuality, in genre fiction. This is, I presume to imagine, a reflection of the treatment of women, or of people of colour or unconventional sexuality in the wider world. It's also a consequence of the people I choose to follow, because I tend to listen to a mixture of people who amuse me and to people who make me think. You have to be careful about that sort of thing. Twitter becomes a bubble of your own making, a window into the world deeply coloured by the people you choose to follow. There really are a hell of a lot of people who haven't the first idea who Neil Gaiman is. There was a time when that would have come as a shock. Back in my role-playing days I once carried out a little experiment. We were a mixed group, with players who played with gender in their characters now and then, and I distinctly remember a female player (I shall call her Tass after the Dragonlance Kender Tasselhoff. We played a lot of Dragonlance) turning to a male player and asking him not to do that because his version of roleplaying a woman was crass and offensive and men in general just shouldn’t do it because they were incapable of understanding women well enough to do a good job of it. As I remember, the chastisement was given and received in good humour and was largely forgotten by the end of the evening, but it stuck in my mind because I was running that particular game and had a reasonably eclectic mix of characters interacting with my players and I found myself thinking shit, does that mean that half my characters are crap then? Back to today, where day to day I live in a different bubble with different blinkers and I simply don’t see much of the sexism and the racism and the prejudice and the objectification that’s out there. In part that’s a consequence of the particular bubble in which I live. In part it’s a consequence of being an educated liberal-minded middle-class white male surrounded, mostly, by more of the same (and I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just that we're more subtle about it, which is perhaps worse). And i n part, I’ve come to realise (and perhaps because of the above), it’s because I often simply don’t see it even when it’s right there in front of me. That came as a shock too. Realisations like that sometimes make me question whether Tass was right all those years ago, whether I should ever even try to write a character who experiences that sort of treatment: who lives with

1/5

Fantasy Faction Fantasy Book Reviews & Community http://fantasy-faction.com

the ingrained expectation of being slapped down by systemic prejudice; or, perhaps more tellingly, constant ingrained expectation, anticipation, anxiety, possibly fear. Turns out I have enough blind arrogance to go ahead and write some characters who aren't privileged white middle-aged males anyway, but I still think about it: how could I possibly do justice to living like that without turning out a crass caricature?

But diversity is good, right? So, what to do? Nothing? Do nothing is certainly an option. Stick to writing what I know? Doesn't seem very helpful though. Probably shouldn't be writing about dragon-riders and star-faring bounty hunters and the like either then, which makes doing nothing kind of dull too, although dragons and star-faring don't tend to show up on the internet all that much, more's the pity. Well yes. Hum. I take your point but I have a bit of a problem with that. In such a world, if I make a character dark-skinned, aren't I just taking a standard white male and painting him black for extra credit? If I create a minority character of any sort and remove all the real-world prejudices, does that actually mean anything? I really don't know the answer to that. I suspect it's in the eye of the beholder. Maybe some readers would find that approach hugely offensive for negating their real-world struggles while others would find it a wondrous escape. Maybe my speculations and my over-simplifications are already upsetting people. I realise, too, that there is an undertow of all manner of –isms in the unstated presumption that the white male is the benchmark in all this thinking. I don’t know. I don’t think I can know, I can only be told, and even that’s flawed because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few years – and boy did it take some learning – it’s to expect ecstatic praise and vitriolic damnation for exactly the same thing and that neither, in isolation, means a great deal. If you want to know the answer to something like that, you need a whole slew of opinions, if only to see just how wonderfully diverse they are.I've come across the argument, frequently, that writing secondary world

2/5

Fantasy Faction Fantasy Book Reviews & Community http://fantasy-faction.com

fantasies gives a cheap and easy way out of some of this. Lo! Behold! A world exists in which there multi-cultural diversity and prejudice on the basis of race or gender or indeed anything at all has never evolved in the first place! You could do that and make it work and it certainly deserves thought (bear with me a moment while I make the massively gross and over-simplified sociological assumptions that very broadly and generally traditional pre-industrial gender roles evolved through the biological facts of men being generally stronger and also biologically more expendable and incapable of generating breast milk, and that racism is broadly derived from a more general suspicion and mistrust of the outsider and things that are different. In a fantasy world of magic and dragons (just, *cough* by way of random example), physical strength no longer need equate to dominance, protection and security; and in a fantasy world where all races and cultures have been fully integrated with one another for the whole of history, no one culture is an outside so where the hell would the anti-elf racism come from?) I suppose slapping some sort of minority[1] identity onto a character at least acknowledges that such minorities exist. I suppose that makes it better than doing nothing at all. To me it feels hollow but I'm not sure my opinion should count much. Others may think otherwise. I simply don't know how to judge the rights and wrongs of this.

Back to Tass. The group I used to game with stuck together for a good few years with a little coming and going and Tass was fairly constant. She used to complain, now and then, that no one ever listened to her because she was small and a girl (her words exactly) and after a time I took to watching and saw it was true that she often didn't seem to be heard. One day, when she wasn’t there, I tried to act out the sort of character she tended to play in the way she tended to play them, just to see what would happen. I spoke softly and intelligently, I stayed physically fairly still, I didn’t raise my voice, I didn’t interrupt much, I didn’t tend to press my points and I didn’t make much eye contact and when no one listened, I withdrew into myself for a while. I

3/5

Fantasy Faction Fantasy Book Reviews & Community http://fantasy-faction.com

played a character who was demure and thoughtful and extremely useful (and female, though I’m not sure how relevant that was). I think I thought I was going to prove that Tass was right and expected to be treated much as I usually was. What I got was exactly the opposite. We were all were fine for a bit during the initial action sequence but as soon as our characters were left to our own devices with a puzzle to solve and courses of actions to choose (it was a fairly political game so there was a lot of that), I might as well not have been there. I think I lasted about an hour before the frustration of being side-lined drove me to get up (in character, I hasten to add), wrestle someone to the floor and physically sit on them until they paid attention. I am not small and I am not a girl. I got side-lined because I was quiet and didn't throw my weight about and didn't act big. I don't doubt that there were many other factors at play and I don't pretend my experiment was anything other than crude or that my acting was anything but terrible. I don't know whether Tass being quiet and thoughtful had anything at all to do with being small and a girl. Nevertheless, I got the reaction I got. It was an experiment that only touched the tip of an iceberg. I'll probably never walk past a building site and get propositioned (although I kind of look forward to a world where that happens), or wander past a gang of young men and wonder if today's the day I get beaten half to death for no reason past the colour of my skin (I'll pass on that one). I've spent a great many years close to at least one diagnosed emotional disorder and come to realise I simply will not ever ever, no matter how hard I try, understand exactly what it's like to be that way. I'll never truly know what it feels like to be anyone except me; but what that experiment told me was that I could listen to people who experienced the world in a different way and that I could walk a few steps in their shoes for a while and actually experience a touch of the same things, and that doing so really wasn't that hard. The rest, the bits I'll never be able to simulate and see for myself, well, that's why we have an imagination, right?

So back to the title (yes, it's a troll title) of this random wandering: I've written fiction in which white men lay the smackdown on other white men with barely a breast or a skin tone in sight. I don't, personally, have a problem with that, although I'd worry if that was the sum of everything I

4/5

Fantasy Faction Fantasy Book Reviews & Community http://fantasy-faction.com

did. I've written all manner of characters; but when I read or write a story, I cringe at a “female” protagonist, or a “coloured” one or a “gay” one or any other token[2]. Others may see things differently; but doesn't every writer worth their salt owe it to all concerned to at least try to walk a little way in every character's shoes? It's what we ask of our readers, isn't it? Isn't it what our readers want from us? Characters to take us to places we haven't been, to show us what it's like to be someone different, and to make those differences more than a set of token adjectives, however imperfect the result. To make us feel it. And hurrah if they happen to be anything other than a white male from the privileged elite of whatever world defines the setting. [1] Minority in terms of representation in genre fiction, at least. [2] And let's not talk about the all-crushing dragon-rage-of-annihilation that comes when the Daily Mail decides it has to use those tokens ALL THE TIME.

5/5 Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)