Female Characters Need Agency, Too
(cross posted from my other blog)
A discussion on a site I frequent got me thinking about why I tend to identify more often with male characters than female characters. In fact, I generally like male characters better than female characters and have a far longer list of male favorite characters than I do female favorites.
Granted, there are obvious reasons, such as the fact that I’m not terribly feminine, or the fact that I tend to like types of characters who are usually male - adventurers, for example. But there was always some quality I couldn’t quite put my finger on that tended to put me off of female characters, even ones that “should” appeal. Why did I lose interest in Buffy? Why didn’t Alias appeal? Why did I look at the adds for Bionic Woman and have negative interest when many of my friends thought it had potential? Why, even though I’m a feminist, do I gag and run away from any fiction that gets labeled as feminist?
I always assumed it was simply my preference that fiction be fun - it can have messages, deal with issues, have social or political commentary, or anything else that serious fiction has, too, but if it isn’t enjoyable, why should I bother reading/watching it? I may appreciate realistic fiction, but, on the whole, I’d rather get my realism from non-fiction and my escapism from fiction. And that is, undoubtedly, part of it.
But something one of the other posters said about readers always knowing that female characters are at risk for victimization that male characters aren’t triggered the proverbial light bulb. Not because I agreed with what they meant, but because I agreed with what they said. It isn’t that a female character is more likely to be raped (hell, in half the stuff I read, that’s an equal opportunity possibility), but that female characters are more likely to be victims.
Before you start throwing things at me through the internet, let me explain.
All too often, female characters lack independent agency, true self-efficacy, an internalized power that male characters almost always have. Their control over their life is somehow more dependent on the world around them, as if female characters are merely allowed to have power over themselves. It isn’t something they innately have. At best it is something they struggle to achieve. And that is a massive turn off.
The funny thing is, this is one of the reasons why I hate the Chosen One plot. You’d think I’d have noticed that it applies to many female characters as well. And it isn’t just about female characters often being acted on by other characters (often male) in the story - the slayers were created, and not by the universe, Sydney Bristow was practically created by her father (and I don’t mean genetically), Jaime Sommers was turned into the Bionic Woman without her permission - though that is, obviously a recurring theme here. (Gag, they really are all The One, on top of everything else.) You see, all too many authors hamper or remove their female characters agency, reducing them to people who can only be victims, just as authors generally reduce their Chosen Ones from people to objects. Obviously having a female Chosen One is only going to make me run screaming that much faster. No wonder I had negative interest in the new Bionic Woman.
But, you argue, authors exercise godlike control over all their characters, so of course a female character’s agency is dependent on the author allowing them to have it. This is true. However, I can't recall having ever read or watched fiction in which I felt like the male characters lacked independent agency. Now I would be willing to concede that, perhaps, the real problem is bad writing. I certainly don’t subscribe to any literary conspiracy theories; as I already said, feminist fiction is just as likely, if not more likely, to suffer from this problem.
It may even be that the authors think they’re being realistic, including the struggles women face in real life in their fiction, but, if this it, it’s still bad writing because women, like men, are individuals - each one faces different struggles and faces them in their own way. Throwing the same tired issues at fictional women over and over doesn’t make for realistic writing, it just turns off part of your audience. When those same tired issues result in the same old reactions, it turns off even more of the audience.
I’m not sure whether my complaint boils down to writers not writing enough variety of female characters; not grasping that female characters, just like male characters, are individuals and should be written as such; being trapped by an archaic image of women as the weaker sex; projecting their own lack of agency into their characters; all of the above; all of the above plus explanations I haven’t even thought of; or what. All I know is that I want to read about characters who are in control of their lives, even when they’re not. The last thing I want to read about are characters who aren’t in control of their lives, even when they are.