Identifying with the boys again
I was reading a lot of the posts on metafandom about identifying with boy and girl characters and naturally it started making me think about characters I identified with growing up. I tend to identify with both male and female characters, but when I think of the characters I was really into, they were probably more often male. wemblee wrote something that really stuck out to me.
wemblee:
Like, I told a friend of mine, "When I watched Robin Hood, I identified with Robin Hood, not Maid Marian. I wanted to have the adventures." And she replied that, yeah, she identified with Robin Hood, too, but also wondered why he couldn't be a girl and thought, wait, he should be. Or could be.
But at the same time, it's like... should I beat myself up because I didn't manage to make that leap of progressive logic at age six?
First, I think it's always difficult to go back to something as mysterious and instinctive as identifying with characters and try to fit it into one universal meaning. Not thinking Robin Hood should or could be a girl doesn't necessarily say anything about which person is going to grow up to be the bigger feminist. One could want Robin Hood to be a girl and then spin tales in one's head where he marries Little John and is rewarded with a life of domestic bliss, after all. I think gender and identification with characters is just too complicated and personal (different for every reader and every character they identify with) that it's hard to ever come up with rules for why one identifies with any one character.
When you try to explain why you identify with a character or find meaning for it it's probably further complicated because suddenly it needs to be something that can be explained in words to others and to yourself. You're trying to put words to something it might be impossible to fully put into words, or intellectualize something that isn't intellectual.
What struck me about wemblee's example is that I identified with Robin Hood as well at 6. The Disney version, mostly. I remember tying string to every hanging light fixture, climbing up on things and trying to swing off them. I never wanted Robin Hood to be female (or human, actually, since he was a fox in that version). But the thing is, I also never wanted to be a boy. Never in my life can I remember wanting to be a boy, and that, I think, would have to include those times when I was identifying or pretending to be Robin Hood. If *I* was Robin Hood in my head then Robin Hood obviously could be female because I was female and doing all these things he was doing. One thing I sort of liked about the Disney version too, I think, is that Robin and Marion were exactly the same. They were both drawn as foxes, which indicated to me that the difference between them was superficial and circumstantial. Marion clearly could be Robin Hood, because she was a fox too (and to be honest I spent probably as much time pretending to be various animals as a kid than I did pretending to be other people…)
I mentioned I've been reading books for a work project, and I've had a mix of male and female protagonists. Of the characters I really felt connected to (I identified with the pov character as I was reading, but the ones I really felt myself projecting into) I would say I truly identified with Bud (male), Nahmo (female), Tree-Ear (male). I didn't identify as much with Moose (male) and Anita (female) and Brian (male).
Analyzing things, I think it mostly came down to the issues the character faced and the way s/he faced them rather than their gender. Bud, Nahmo and Tree-Ear all just clicked as wanting things I would want or responding to things in ways that swept me along. Moose, Anita and Brian didn't, as much. Comparing Nahmo and Anita, I don't think it's fair to say that Nahmo is the more feminist of the two just because she's less interested in boys and fighting for independence, but Anita does tend to be more about that kind of thing. It doesn't make her less brave, it's maybe just the way she is makes me recognize her as like a lot of girls, but not like me. Anita brings up things about the female gender that I don't enjoy as much. Perhaps people who automatically identify with female characters because they are female are just more willing/interested in taking all that on all the time while I'm not, you know? Perhaps I compartmentalize in ways they don't.
And damn, I've just realized that if I'm honest with myself the character I was really more drawn to in Anita's book was Oscar. Is it because he was male? I don't think so. Anita has two friends who are boys, and has romantic feelings for both of them at one time, but I never identified with Sam. In Moose's book the character that most intrigued me was a girl he mostly overlooked. I identified with Oscar because of his personality and his role-the inside of his head automatically seemed interesting to me. Oscar is the same personality type as many of my favorite characters, male or female. An interesting thing about Nahmo and Brian is they both have similar stories in that they're both left alone in the wilderness to fend for themselves and I can't help but see their attitudes as representing big difference between Western/non-Western and male/female thought. (Right down to their tools--Brian has a hatchet. Nahmo has a boat.)
Perhaps I do, then, tend to identify more with male characters. But I still feel completely confident that I'm feminist. My identification with male characters in no way spills over into more identification with males in life. Growing up I tended to get along with both boys and girls depending on their personalities, but I wasn't a tomboy at all. Most of my closest friends have always been female, but I still like men a lot too. I'm not incapable of identifying with female characters. It's possible, actually, that the reason I find males easier isn't that I want to be a male but that if a character is female there's almost too much to identify with. I remember Diana Wynn Jones once talking about how she had to work up to writing female protagonists because at first she found them too distracting. She identified with them too much physically and found herself going off track on side-issues and the physicality. The male protagonist kind of freed her from that, giving her some distance. That might be part of it--I know when I write female characters I often tend to want to make them very different from me superficially for that reason. If they're too much like me it's maybe harder to write them as themselves.
Identifying with male characters may be more escapist for the same reason--I automatically bring more to a female character because of my natural identification with her. Where as with a male character I can really pick and choose because there's so much about being male I have no experience with--they can be not so much male but male as seen from the female pov. It's not like I always feel the need to be true to the male experience in my identification, after all. When I was playing at being Robin Hood, as I said, I was me. If, for instance, Robin Hood got hurt in my personal story he could cry if I wanted him to without any thoughts about male socialization making crying a bad thing. There's probably plenty of things Magpie!RobinHood would do that a boy identifying with the same character would find "girly." Isn't that a common complaint in slash, after all, that writers don't put enough effort into making the male characters they identify with "male" in some fundamental way?
Probably the real answer is that gender is a completely complicated thing with different meanings in different contexts to different genders and on and on. But I do wind up thinking that the question of whether one identifies exclusively with members of one's own gender or the opposite gender probably has more to do with the way one relates to aspects of one's own gender rather than either a desire to be the other sex or any coherent political ideas about gender politics. Politics can come into it--I don't think it's a bad thing to challenge yourself on why you have the preferences you do instead of just latching on to a flattering justification and waving it at other people (such as: "If you were the kind of girl who wanted to be the hero of your own story you ALWAYS identified with the male characters!"). You just have to accept that there's probably not going to be an easy answer.
wemblee:
Like, I told a friend of mine, "When I watched Robin Hood, I identified with Robin Hood, not Maid Marian. I wanted to have the adventures." And she replied that, yeah, she identified with Robin Hood, too, but also wondered why he couldn't be a girl and thought, wait, he should be. Or could be.
But at the same time, it's like... should I beat myself up because I didn't manage to make that leap of progressive logic at age six?
First, I think it's always difficult to go back to something as mysterious and instinctive as identifying with characters and try to fit it into one universal meaning. Not thinking Robin Hood should or could be a girl doesn't necessarily say anything about which person is going to grow up to be the bigger feminist. One could want Robin Hood to be a girl and then spin tales in one's head where he marries Little John and is rewarded with a life of domestic bliss, after all. I think gender and identification with characters is just too complicated and personal (different for every reader and every character they identify with) that it's hard to ever come up with rules for why one identifies with any one character.
When you try to explain why you identify with a character or find meaning for it it's probably further complicated because suddenly it needs to be something that can be explained in words to others and to yourself. You're trying to put words to something it might be impossible to fully put into words, or intellectualize something that isn't intellectual.
What struck me about wemblee's example is that I identified with Robin Hood as well at 6. The Disney version, mostly. I remember tying string to every hanging light fixture, climbing up on things and trying to swing off them. I never wanted Robin Hood to be female (or human, actually, since he was a fox in that version). But the thing is, I also never wanted to be a boy. Never in my life can I remember wanting to be a boy, and that, I think, would have to include those times when I was identifying or pretending to be Robin Hood. If *I* was Robin Hood in my head then Robin Hood obviously could be female because I was female and doing all these things he was doing. One thing I sort of liked about the Disney version too, I think, is that Robin and Marion were exactly the same. They were both drawn as foxes, which indicated to me that the difference between them was superficial and circumstantial. Marion clearly could be Robin Hood, because she was a fox too (and to be honest I spent probably as much time pretending to be various animals as a kid than I did pretending to be other people…)
I mentioned I've been reading books for a work project, and I've had a mix of male and female protagonists. Of the characters I really felt connected to (I identified with the pov character as I was reading, but the ones I really felt myself projecting into) I would say I truly identified with Bud (male), Nahmo (female), Tree-Ear (male). I didn't identify as much with Moose (male) and Anita (female) and Brian (male).
Analyzing things, I think it mostly came down to the issues the character faced and the way s/he faced them rather than their gender. Bud, Nahmo and Tree-Ear all just clicked as wanting things I would want or responding to things in ways that swept me along. Moose, Anita and Brian didn't, as much. Comparing Nahmo and Anita, I don't think it's fair to say that Nahmo is the more feminist of the two just because she's less interested in boys and fighting for independence, but Anita does tend to be more about that kind of thing. It doesn't make her less brave, it's maybe just the way she is makes me recognize her as like a lot of girls, but not like me. Anita brings up things about the female gender that I don't enjoy as much. Perhaps people who automatically identify with female characters because they are female are just more willing/interested in taking all that on all the time while I'm not, you know? Perhaps I compartmentalize in ways they don't.
And damn, I've just realized that if I'm honest with myself the character I was really more drawn to in Anita's book was Oscar. Is it because he was male? I don't think so. Anita has two friends who are boys, and has romantic feelings for both of them at one time, but I never identified with Sam. In Moose's book the character that most intrigued me was a girl he mostly overlooked. I identified with Oscar because of his personality and his role-the inside of his head automatically seemed interesting to me. Oscar is the same personality type as many of my favorite characters, male or female. An interesting thing about Nahmo and Brian is they both have similar stories in that they're both left alone in the wilderness to fend for themselves and I can't help but see their attitudes as representing big difference between Western/non-Western and male/female thought. (Right down to their tools--Brian has a hatchet. Nahmo has a boat.)
Perhaps I do, then, tend to identify more with male characters. But I still feel completely confident that I'm feminist. My identification with male characters in no way spills over into more identification with males in life. Growing up I tended to get along with both boys and girls depending on their personalities, but I wasn't a tomboy at all. Most of my closest friends have always been female, but I still like men a lot too. I'm not incapable of identifying with female characters. It's possible, actually, that the reason I find males easier isn't that I want to be a male but that if a character is female there's almost too much to identify with. I remember Diana Wynn Jones once talking about how she had to work up to writing female protagonists because at first she found them too distracting. She identified with them too much physically and found herself going off track on side-issues and the physicality. The male protagonist kind of freed her from that, giving her some distance. That might be part of it--I know when I write female characters I often tend to want to make them very different from me superficially for that reason. If they're too much like me it's maybe harder to write them as themselves.
Identifying with male characters may be more escapist for the same reason--I automatically bring more to a female character because of my natural identification with her. Where as with a male character I can really pick and choose because there's so much about being male I have no experience with--they can be not so much male but male as seen from the female pov. It's not like I always feel the need to be true to the male experience in my identification, after all. When I was playing at being Robin Hood, as I said, I was me. If, for instance, Robin Hood got hurt in my personal story he could cry if I wanted him to without any thoughts about male socialization making crying a bad thing. There's probably plenty of things Magpie!RobinHood would do that a boy identifying with the same character would find "girly." Isn't that a common complaint in slash, after all, that writers don't put enough effort into making the male characters they identify with "male" in some fundamental way?
Probably the real answer is that gender is a completely complicated thing with different meanings in different contexts to different genders and on and on. But I do wind up thinking that the question of whether one identifies exclusively with members of one's own gender or the opposite gender probably has more to do with the way one relates to aspects of one's own gender rather than either a desire to be the other sex or any coherent political ideas about gender politics. Politics can come into it--I don't think it's a bad thing to challenge yourself on why you have the preferences you do instead of just latching on to a flattering justification and waving it at other people (such as: "If you were the kind of girl who wanted to be the hero of your own story you ALWAYS identified with the male characters!"). You just have to accept that there's probably not going to be an easy answer.