Millions of girls grow up with an ideal of what they should be when they grow up. They play with her, brush her hair, develop stories around her love interests and her friendships, and hope one day to have her do-anything-look-perfect kind of life.
Of course, I'm talking about Barbie.
She of the impossible waist, the feet bound and shrunk for high heels, and the flowing golden locks. She's one of the first toys girls get and the one they hold onto for the longest time.
Many play with her by putting her in her dream Corvette, drive her to her Dream House (tm), and arrange perfect dates with her dream man Ken. They pay attention to her dresses, the accessories they can buy, the many different personalities they can try on with a new outfit and new friends.
Me? I built her a cardboard box and sent her down the waterfall in the creek in my backyard. And when that cardboard melted and sank, I realized I'd have to rethink my engineering.
I built Barbie tree houses in the bushes in the backyard, hid her under the jack-in-the-pulpits and pretended it was a rainforest, cut my own clothes for her out of fabric scraps, and had her kidnapped by a wizard (but because I had lost my Ken doll, she had to save herself).
Any response to playing with a Barbie doll is appropriate. Whether you want to take her on wild jungle safaris or give her the damsel in distress role, she's a doll. The only limit is your imagination. Barbie can be a mom, a CEO, an explorer, an astronaut, a movie producer, a builder, or a writer. She's a foil, a tool, a plastic model, and she can become what the girl wants her to be.
The problem comes when people start to ascribe a certain personality or role to us based on Barbie's body shape, plasticity, or general silence. The idea that women should hold to a "quiet dignity" as the plastic doll does is insulting to all women, no matter the roles they choose in life. The idea that we should aspire to her body destroys young girls' self perceptions and their health.The idea of Barbie as a role model limits us to her pre-approved career packages and personality types.
Barbie isn't the problem. A world of people who want to be seen as merely dolls and nothing more is.
I took my Barbie and imagined all the things she could do. As a stand-in, she became my heroine, my warrior, my damsel, my mother, my child, and my ingenue. She was a toy for a world I created, and the ideas I spun in those days of early childhood still inspire me today.
It's when she becomes more than a toy that she becomes a problem.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Feminist Character Struggle
While procrastinating my work today, I stumbled across something on Tumblr.
http://gingerhaze.tumblr.com/post/52252821543/feminspire-alyssakorea-tumbling-over-the
It struck a bit of a chord with me because I've been struggling with this same dilemma. I'm writing a science fiction story centered around a war. However, though the military features significantly in my story with several characters having military backgrounds and interacting with various battles across the plot, it is not military fiction. It is a story about a cast of characters thrown into difficult circumstances and how they manage to balance their own needs and desires and the needs of the worlds around them.
It's a very character driven story, but it is very much science fiction. Aside from the obvious signposts of multiple planets and space travel, the science of this universe plays very heavily in the story. I spent nearly a full year learning the basics of physics in order to build a system of space travel that seems possible. In the past few weeks a good friend of mine helped by building accurate stats for my planets including escape velocities relative to the planets' masses, the orbital periods, length of rotations, and more. It's a character story with many of the key elements of hard science fiction.
Still, as a woman writing for a largely male-dominated field, I have to consider how much of what I'm writing will be perceived. I want my female characters to be strong, independent, and utterly competent, but how one goes about that can be difficult in this genre.
The temptation for a lot of writers is to write strong women as indistinguishable from men. They write their women scientists and engineers as identical to men. If a man wouldn't say a certain thing or be treated in a certain way or portrayed in a certain light then they don't portray their women that way. But is that right?
My struggle falls in line with the second panel of that comic. If I make my women strong am I somehow implying that traditionally "feminine" features are negative? For instance, my main character is a woman. She is a pilot, an incredibly brilliant woman who does her job well and isn't distracted by concerns about romance or friend drama. She sleeps with who she wants to, has no desire in being a mother, and has a tendency to be emotionally distant. She also has severe insecurity when it comes to her past and an incident that has haunted her for years. The one time (so far) that she breaks down and lets anyone see a glimpse in her armor, she is immediately seen as fragile and in need of comfort and protection. In fact, several of the males in the story have protective feelings toward her.
Is this because she's a woman? Am I inadvertently contributing to the weakening of this character and the relegation of her to someone needing protection from the men in her life?
I don't think so, because, for one, she is just as likely (or more so) to come to the rescue as anyone else in the cast. She is strong, competent, and fiercely loyal. She takes the lead, can be combative, and is an agent of the plot rather than its object or victim.
She's also not the only female on the cast that is like that. On the ship are three very different women:. And then I introduce another. The fourth woman, a mercenary, may look to fit the trope of the warrior woman, but with a name like "Millie," an effervescent personality, a love of cooking, and a girl-next-door look, she's hardly the standard action girl. So how do I write them and not fall into the trap of writing tropes instead of people? How do I make strong women without decrying "feminine" traits or eliminating them altogether?
Of course, I go through similar processes with my male characters, so I guess I avoid the trap of the third panel. My suave primary male character is constantly trying to prove himself and has a fear of ending up alone even as he pushes people away. My other leading man is loyal and protective and incredibly kind, but for most of the time, that's a problem. He is too used to playing second fiddle and doubts himself. There's a warrior male, too. Stoic, intimidating, gruff. Am I falling into trope categories with these characters, too? Are the limited in who they are and am I failing as a writer?
Then I remind myself to just keep writing, and let the characters grow and change. They each have their own motivations. If I stay true to those, who cares if I'm writing characters that are female or male, feminist or traditional? They'll be real, and they'll be honest. In the end, I think that's what matters.
http://gingerhaze.tumblr.com/post/52252821543/feminspire-alyssakorea-tumbling-over-the
It struck a bit of a chord with me because I've been struggling with this same dilemma. I'm writing a science fiction story centered around a war. However, though the military features significantly in my story with several characters having military backgrounds and interacting with various battles across the plot, it is not military fiction. It is a story about a cast of characters thrown into difficult circumstances and how they manage to balance their own needs and desires and the needs of the worlds around them.
It's a very character driven story, but it is very much science fiction. Aside from the obvious signposts of multiple planets and space travel, the science of this universe plays very heavily in the story. I spent nearly a full year learning the basics of physics in order to build a system of space travel that seems possible. In the past few weeks a good friend of mine helped by building accurate stats for my planets including escape velocities relative to the planets' masses, the orbital periods, length of rotations, and more. It's a character story with many of the key elements of hard science fiction.
Still, as a woman writing for a largely male-dominated field, I have to consider how much of what I'm writing will be perceived. I want my female characters to be strong, independent, and utterly competent, but how one goes about that can be difficult in this genre.
The temptation for a lot of writers is to write strong women as indistinguishable from men. They write their women scientists and engineers as identical to men. If a man wouldn't say a certain thing or be treated in a certain way or portrayed in a certain light then they don't portray their women that way. But is that right?
My struggle falls in line with the second panel of that comic. If I make my women strong am I somehow implying that traditionally "feminine" features are negative? For instance, my main character is a woman. She is a pilot, an incredibly brilliant woman who does her job well and isn't distracted by concerns about romance or friend drama. She sleeps with who she wants to, has no desire in being a mother, and has a tendency to be emotionally distant. She also has severe insecurity when it comes to her past and an incident that has haunted her for years. The one time (so far) that she breaks down and lets anyone see a glimpse in her armor, she is immediately seen as fragile and in need of comfort and protection. In fact, several of the males in the story have protective feelings toward her.
Is this because she's a woman? Am I inadvertently contributing to the weakening of this character and the relegation of her to someone needing protection from the men in her life?
I don't think so, because, for one, she is just as likely (or more so) to come to the rescue as anyone else in the cast. She is strong, competent, and fiercely loyal. She takes the lead, can be combative, and is an agent of the plot rather than its object or victim.
She's also not the only female on the cast that is like that. On the ship are three very different women:. And then I introduce another. The fourth woman, a mercenary, may look to fit the trope of the warrior woman, but with a name like "Millie," an effervescent personality, a love of cooking, and a girl-next-door look, she's hardly the standard action girl. So how do I write them and not fall into the trap of writing tropes instead of people? How do I make strong women without decrying "feminine" traits or eliminating them altogether?
Of course, I go through similar processes with my male characters, so I guess I avoid the trap of the third panel. My suave primary male character is constantly trying to prove himself and has a fear of ending up alone even as he pushes people away. My other leading man is loyal and protective and incredibly kind, but for most of the time, that's a problem. He is too used to playing second fiddle and doubts himself. There's a warrior male, too. Stoic, intimidating, gruff. Am I falling into trope categories with these characters, too? Are the limited in who they are and am I failing as a writer?
Then I remind myself to just keep writing, and let the characters grow and change. They each have their own motivations. If I stay true to those, who cares if I'm writing characters that are female or male, feminist or traditional? They'll be real, and they'll be honest. In the end, I think that's what matters.
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