Came back from a few days away down in Bath to an interesting pair of posts from King Rat. It all began as a diffusely positive review of Before They are Hanged (though of course, nothing like as positive as I’d like), and then ended up accusing me of hardcore sexism. Perhaps I exaggerate. You be the judge. If you are minded to read on, beware of some very minor spoilers for the series:
“I do have something to say about the female characters in the book though. The word that comes to mind when I think about them is misogynistic. I know it’s a loaded word to throw out there, but I can’t think of anything else.”
Ouch. Misogynistic? Woman-hating? Bringing to mind as it does images of bible-thumping pro-lifers, hardcore sharia law and brutalist rappers, yes, that certainly is a pretty loaded–
“The vast majority of the characters in the book are male. Contrast that with Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls which I didn’t like all that much, but which included many female characters. I can think of only four in this book, three of them minor.”
Well, true, there aren’t that many women. The First Law was an attempt to do a retake on the classic fantasy trilogy, and epic fantasy, taking its cue from Tolkien, does tend to focus heavily on men, the women often restricted to the love interests of said men. Perhaps that makes it, in some ways, a fundamentally sexist genre, but it’s not unlike war films or westerns in that sense, or romances in the opposite direction, I guess, and I’d argue it’s more about the treatment of the individuals involved than the numbers. But by all means let’s have a look at the female characters one by–
“The one to get the second most screen time is Cathil, who serves little purpose except as a semen receptacle. One of the big parts of Ferro’s character is similar, she’s a former slave/prostitute who must shut out a life of being used sexually and uses that to fuel her rage. Female character three is West’s sister Ardee. While not a bimbo, she spends the entire book waiting for her male saviors. Practical Vitari is a pain-loving torturer list her co-workers. But, minor and unimportant spoiler here, she’s revealed to have a soft spot for her multiple children. All four women defined by very stereotypical attributes.”
Ouch. Granted, Ferro and Cathil both have histories of sexual oppression. Cathil suffers some during the second book. But if you’re going to look at the experience of female slaves, or of female convicts in penal colonies, or of women caught up in war, unless you want to avoid any sexual element whatsoever (which seems to me cowardly in an adult book) there’s really nowhere else to go and remain (to my mind) honest and convincing, which is always my prime aim. What is the alternative here that would make these characters “non-misogynistic”? That Ferro should be a well-adjusted, unmolested escaped slave? That Cathil should have been through incarceration equivalent to the Siberian Gulag without any event, then walked among a gang of sex-starved barbarians for a few weeks without it ever coming up that there’s a woman in their midst?
Ardee is forced to wait for male saviors because of her position in society. That may be stereotyped, but I don’t know that she’s necessarily “defined by that stereotypical position”. Could the same not be said for every female character in Pride and Prejudice? Are they, therefore, misogynist stereotypes? The argument seems particularly weak when used about Vitari. What, she’s got children that she cares for, so she must be a female stereotype, even if she’s a hard-bitten torturer? Mr. Rat doesn’t mention Carlot dan Eider at all, incidentally, who’s probably the most important woman besides Ferro in Before They are Hanged, and the only significant female in the books with considerable temporal power. Perhaps she should be considered stereotyped because she was once forced into an arranged marriage, though, I don’t know?
“An argument can be made that anything modeled on Medieval times should follow Medieval culture, a very patriarchal one. But if we get to build a fantastic world, one with majic and invented geographies and societies created from the mind, could we not discard the typical female roles for a while?”
Perhaps we could, but if we do, I think there’s a price to be paid in the relevance and realism of the invented world. I wanted to do something that was honest, that was truthful, that was firmly rooted in historical reality, becuase for me those are the fantasy worlds that I find most convincing, most concrete. I don’t personally have much use for the argument, “this is fantasy, so we can do anything we like.” I think it encourages some of the genre’s most lazy, shoddy, unimaginative excesses. Since I wanted The First Law in a way to be a re-examination of classic epic fantasy, and classic epic fantasy takes place in a pre-industrial, patriarchal world, that’s the backdrop I went for. And I would point out, as Scott Bakker has often done in response to similar accusations, that examination is by no means endorsement.
It’s funny. I haven’t read Scott Lynch’s Red Seas Under Red Skies, but I have noticed him getting quite a lot of stick for the exact opposite treatment of women (though one presumes from a different section of the readership) – he has a pretty ‘equal opportunities’ fantasy world in which there are a lot of woman soldiers, bodyguards, pirates, and so on. He’s been taken to task by a fair few readers for this being unrealistic, unconvincing, an imposition of PC modern values onto a medieval/rennaisance fantasy world. I guess this is one issue, as with so many in writing, where you’re pretty much damned in someone’s eyes whatever you do. Unless your world and characters are utterly bland and hence of interest to no-one, you’ll always be offending someone’s sensibilities.
If you’re a man, in general, it’s harder to write female characters than male ones. Fact. The book I’m currently writing has a woman in the central role, and I don’t mind admitting it’s a challenge. You can say – you should approach the women just like you do the men – and by and large that’s what I try to do, but men and women aren’t identical, physically or socially, and there will always be elements of the female experience that you’re guessing at. That tends to make you tentative, perhaps, especially when you know you’ll never get accused of being sexist in relation to your male characters, but you almost certainly will at some point in relation to your female ones. Back to Mr. Rat, who’s been thorough enough to post some additional thoughts:
“When a writer falls back on typical whore roles such as Joe Abercrombie or female as victim as Lauren Weisberger did, I think it reflects either laziness or a lack of imagination. Even if the character is a strong one such as Ferro is, when her strength is based on a reaction to common abused roles of women, there isn’t much stretching involved. Sometimes there’s a point needing to be made about women, their roles, or abuse, and sometimes these roles just work best in a story. But too often it just feels like a paint-by-numbers scene. That irritates me, especially in these cases. Do I know that’s what Joe Abercrombie did? No. Another reader might easily have a different take on these characters.”
The First Law is a series, like most epic fantasy, mostly about men, and so the women tend to be seen in terms of their relationships with those men. Perhaps a certain theme of sexual oppression did creep in without my noticing. Perhaps the women weren’t my deepest or most succesful characters, that’s not for me to say, and I think it’s always a risk for a male writer. But “misogynist”? “Typical
whore roles”? “Semen receptacle“? Seriously? That’s strong, man, that’s pretty damn strong. “Another reader might easily have a different take on these characters,” apparently. Pray God that is the case. Answers below, please…
EDIT (Feb 2012): Hmmm. I’ve just reread this post some four years after making it and, well, I hope I’ve learned a few things since. In fact I find it more than a wee bit embarrassing now. I’d kind of like to kick it in the bin, pretend it never happened, but I should let it stand as a monument to what was a probably inevitable knee-jerk reaction to being called out on this kind of stuff for the first time. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight I think I could have done a lot better with the female characters in the First Law in all kinds of ways. These days I tend to think the best policy when faced with accusations (or maybe just reviews) of this kind is to take a deep breath, mouth shut and ears open, do my best to think about it dispassionately and consider if there’s anything to be learned. In the end, all you can really alter is your own behaviour, and from my point of view that mostly means seeing how I can improve my writing…
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