All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.

Josh Tyler has written a post called We Don’t Need More Female Superheroes. (Thanks to Sinneahtes for first spotting it and to Juno Magic for the heads up!) This post was in response to a post by Thera Pitts that deconstructed the female characters in recent superhero movies, coming to the conclusion that women tend to be “characterized” toward the negative extreme of whatever role they occupy. “Did you ever stop to think that it isn’t just the actresses who sully your favorite movies but the comic book movie industry’s lazy attitude towards women characters in general?” asks Pitts. “The actress is only as good as her material, and the material is seriously lacking.” She notes that women overwhelmingly tend to be characterized as helpless victims in need of rescue, “moody emo-bitch[es],” or as the fateful She Who Ruins All by tempting, betraying, or distracting the hero unto his ultimate doom.

This is an insightful observation, and it echoes a broader trend across centuries of legend and literature. No matter what a female character’s role, she is shoved to the most negative extremes of that role. If she is strong and autonomous, then she becomes a bitch, a ball-breaker, a man-hater. If she is kind and compassionate, then she becomes weak; she is overwhelmingly the victim incapable of helping herself; she is the one who trips on a flat stretch of land and can’t do more than squeal and kick futilely as she is raped/murdered/abducted by her stronger male attacker. And then there’s the Eve effect: Women who, through their failings, bring about the destruction of the male hero, the kingdom, the world. From the rise of pre-Christian patriarchy, these one-dimensional negative archetypes have been women’s lot in literary life (for tempting Adam to the apple, of course). These archetypes are old enough to put the Old Testament on the New Releases shelf, and even as literary styles changed drastically over the centuries, this one thing did not. Women, when not being marginalized or ignored entirely, were maligned in literature, a trend that has extended to film as well.

Of course, when women done went and got uppity and started to complain about their shallow, scathing treatment in literature, men got all pie-eyed and innocent-like because it was only fair! It was only reality! It’s just the way that women were/are! They (the wise male authors) were being true to their subjects! And, anyway, what woman wants to read that ol’ fusty Tennyson when Danielle Steele has a new novel on the bestsellers list?

This is where Tyler’s post comes in. Rather than tackle Pitts’ argument (which is one of characterization and fair treatment in fiction to, oh, more than half of the human race), he attempts to nullify it altogether by … well, I don’t think I can paraphrase it well enough to capture the full wow-factor of Tyler’s words, so I’ll let him dig his own grave:

Men and women simply have different interests. Men are interested in action movies with heroes blowing things up and saving the girl. Men are interested in imagining themselves as ass-kicking heroes. Women are interested in movies about relationships and romance and love. Women are interested in imagining themselves finding the right guy and dancing till dawn. Little boys play with guns, little girls play with dolls. Neither version of play is superior to the other, it’s just different. Nobody is out there trying to force men to get interested in movies about romantic weekends in Paris, so why are we so dead set on forcing women to get interested in movies about beating people up? There’s something unintentionally sexist about it, it’s as if we’re saying women’s interests are somehow inherently inferior, and to be validated they must instead find ways to be more like men.

In the comments on this post, there is much hand-raising from women who did not spend their childhoods wiping the plastic asses of doll-babies but rather careened around the backyard on fantastic quests, using exhausted wrapping-paper rolls for swords and wearing bathrobes for ceremonial robes and converting a quarter-acre swatch of trees into a dark, deep, ominous forest as full of potential for danger and adventure as it was for conquest and reward. Okay … that was my sister and me. But I don’t think I need to go thrusting my hand into the air for playing Hero more than House, and I don’t think I need to poll the women reading here to know that far more of you got together with girlfriends, sisters, and cousins to go battling the hordes of dark minions in your backyard than to play princess tea party in order to prove or validate women’s interest in subjects beyond boy-meets-girl love stories culminating in domestic bliss.

Nor do I need to ask how many women here got far more excited this summer over the release of Prince Caspian or The Dark Knight than Sex in the City or Mamma Mia!.

Of course, this does not make stereotypically “women’s movies” or “women’s interests” inferior. In that sense, I agree with Tyler. But … I think his self-righteous defense of the fairer sex is a straw man bigger than the one in which Nicholas Cage was torched by a bunch of misbehavin’ womenfolk back in 2006. Hollywood doesn’t have a problem making the sorts of movies that Tyler believes serves the “female interest.” In any given week, there is a romantic comedy or somesuch in theatres that is aimed at women. Nor do women have problems going to these movies, if that’s their thing. Witness Bride Wars‘ quick ascendency to the #2 spot in U.S. box-office sales this weekend. Witness the fact that men being “dragged” to “chick flicks” by their excited wives and girlfriends is perennial fodder on primetime sitcoms. Tyler makes it out like Sex in the City was a come-from-behind indy flick and Hollywood reject, or as though there are lines of people pegging tomatoes at women as they walk into Nights in Rodanthe. Not hardly. In our family, the lists of new movie releases are, weekly, the source of first excitement, then scrutiny, then inevitable disappointment because neither my husband nor I are interested in this sort of movie, and they often seem to crowd out the independent and limited-release films that rarely make it as far as our rural corner of the world. Trust me, there is never a dearth of chick flicks, which means that there is no dearth of women lining up to see them. If it doesn’t sell, Hollywood doesn’t keep making it. (Which–as in the constant peltering of Friedberg & Seltzer spoof flicks–can often act as a sorry commentary on the state of our species.)

Nice try, Tyler. Pardon me if I’m writing this blog post instead of getting signs painted to march on the Mall this weekend in recognition of women’s unalienable right to see chick flicks or in defense of the women “forced” to see “movies about beating people up,” an issue that surely deserves its place right alongside my outrage at sex slavery. This feminist finds it far more frightening that, in the year 2009, anyone seriously makes the argument that one’s interests even tend to divide neatly along the same lines as the possession or lack of a Y-chromosome.

This kind of thinking–not arguing for more female superheroes in movies–is what is sexist and offensive.

It has nothing to do with validating women’s interests by how closely they fall to the interests of men. It has everything to do with perpetuating stereotypes that have, for centuries, been used to dismiss and subjugate women as inferiors to men. In the comments to Tyler’s post, a few people expressed outrage at his generalization about how girls play with dolls. He retorted by asking, where was the outrage for the little boys pigeonholed into violent gun play? And I’ll be the first to speak out against stereotypes, whether against males or females. But the stereotyping of women is more dangerous. It is more offensive. Why? Because the stereotyping of men and the interests of men is not used to excuse the subjection of men to women’s benefit.

(In fact, I must speak out against offensiveness in this post that goes beyond that which affects me as a woman:

Of course some women actually are interested in superheroes, just as there are guys out there who are really into touchy-feely musicals. Most of them are British, but even here in America you’ll occasionally run into a guy with a twisted love of Mamma Mia!.

As an American, I despise when my culture and language is thought automatically inferior because of stereotypes like the ones that Tyler is embracing here. For the love of all things heretical, stop with the chest-thumping, my-balls-swing-harder-than-yours nasty rhetoric implying that British/European men are less “manly” than we red-blooded, steak-eatin’, pickup-truck-drivin’ ‘Mericans because we like seeing things blow up more. It is “twisted” to enjoy a musical more than an action movie if you are a man. Veiled homophobia much?)

Inherent in Tyler’s argument is the assumption that women are predetermined to be softer, gentler, and more nurturing. They are incapable of strength, assertiveness, or competitiveness. This has been used to keep women illiterate, ignorant, without the vote, without rights, under the thumbs of their fathers, under the thumbs of their husbands, stuck in the home, barefoot and pregnant, married against their wills, out of schools, out of jobs … need I go on? Do you see, Mr. Tyler, why your opinions on female superheroes are so offensive? Why recognize the spectacular range of human interests–i.e., not confined to or deemed acceptable for one gender or another–when we can pigeonhole people tidily into interests based on what is most acceptable to the dominant patriarchal culture?

Ironically, Tyler’s argument ties back into the root cause of the phenomenon that Pitts’ observed in her post. Women have been maligned and misunderstood in literature–which now extends to that which is written for the screen–for a very, very long time now using arguments just like those that Tyler uses to dismiss a woman’s demand for better-written female characters. Women deserve no better than to be sluts, bitches, poisoners, traitors, witches, victims, and agents of downfall and destruction because we all know–as Tyler points out to us–that this is simply the way that women are. It is against our own best interests when we dare to argue otherwise. Thank you, Mr. Tyler, for the enlightenment.

Wemyss first seized on it in his rather cumbersome retort On the responsibilities of writers. Here’s a paragraph that sums it up pretty well:

The idea that it is a writer’s responsibility, if not to write to pattern, then at the least to go back and ensure that the work is politically Bowdlerised, is not only utter balls; it is the high road to writerly ruin. The writer’s responsibility is to write the story that clamours to be written, take him where it may, and to write it in the best possible English. The writer’s responsibility is to her story and its characters. Failure to remain true to that responsibility is always fatal.

But …

Stellaluna didn’t say that.

I think it’s fairly clear from the examples that she uses that Stellaluna certainly prefers stories that positively portray characters of color, women, and GLBT characters. But I find it difficult to see–even with Wemyss’s use of bold italics underline to show where Stellaluna transgresses into advocating for self-censorship–where she actually says that a writer must consider what a story says “between the lines” and that a writer must edit and censor a story to portray typically ignored or maligned groups positively.

Instead, it seems to me that she is saying that writers should be aware that their stories and their characters might be seen by some readers to carry a message about these subjects and that writers should keep this in mind when writing. She also makes the argument that readers have a right to analyze a story for such messages, even (presumably) when the author doesn’t wish them to do so. Not knowing Stellaluna personally or being familiar with her fandom(s), I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that she is directly addressing authors who find their stories undergoing critique for seeming, to some readers, to express support for racist/misogynist/heteronormative ideas and stereotypes and defend themselves by arguing that “it’s just a story,” hence trying to have their cake (keep offensive depictions in their stories) and eat it too (still be regarded as progressive and hip to prevailing fannish ideology). With that argument comes the assumption, then, that offensive, insensitive, or stereotypical depictions of characters belonging to a particular group don’t matter. Stellaluna argues that stories aren’t just stories, and these depictions do matter. I would agree with her.

However, I would not argue that authors should sanitize their stories in the name of so-called “political correctness.” Nor does Stellaluna–Wemyss’s post notwithstanding–make this argument. But authors need to take responsibility for what their stories say. If they write in a way that depicts all gay men as effeminate theater majors interested in sex with anything with a dick, then they need to take responsibility for the reaction that may cause in some readers. Does that mean that they need to change the story? Of course not. But neither does it mean that they get to act all pie-eyed and innocent and claim that, no matter how offensive the ideas their stories seem to support, that these ideas are meaningless because they are, of course, fiction and are, therefore, beneath discussion.

In the comments to his first post, Wemyss likes to draw the comparison to religious fundamentalists. Their ideas of morality are at odds in many ways with the ideas advocated by most people in fandom. Why don’t they have the right to make similar demands as those who are politically correct, demanding that all stories have to be revised “with a list of boxes to be ticked off” to assure that they meet a particular fundamentalist creed?

They do have the right to author stories that meet these standards, and they have the right to comment on stories with these ideas in mind. Who is saying that they do not? Actually, this sentence nicely summing up Stellaluna’s thesis could apply just as easily to a fundamentalist creed as it does to a “PC” ideology, once removed from her examples:

I need to think about what my story is saying the subtextual and metaphoric level as well as what’s happening in the surface action of the story; and I need to think about whether I’m making any unconscious assumptions regarding gender or race or sexual identity that I did not intend.

I have just written a story intended to uphold a fundamentalist ideology. In the story, I have two gay characters. Clearly, I want to portray their homosexuality negatively. However, in the course of also demonstrating that I “love the sinner, hate the sin,” they come off as too empathetic for my audience, who accuses me of a GLBT-friendly agenda. Just as Stellaluna cautions, I should have thought about “any unconscious assumptions regarding … sexual identity that I did not intend.”

If I was to make one critique against Stellaluna’s post, it would be that I don’t think there is enough emphasis on the fact that readers can be wrong. Not all readers will agree. And where one reader is applauding the depth with which the female characters are treated, another is complaining that the story is misogynist in places; one of my stories earned just this reaction. Who was right? Well, neither and both: each was correct in that no interpretation is wrong, but this also means that no interpretation can be universally correct either.

Ironically, Wemyss wrote a second, lengthy post in reply to comments on the first post. Now, I was not the only person who questioned whether he “got” Stellaluna’s post in the first place or was accusing her of a liberal agenda where he wanted to see a liberal agenda (versus where there was actually evidence of a liberal agenda versus generally good advice using examples clearly aimed at a liberal audience). Yet, he doesn’t address this point at all in the second post.

However, perhaps most revealing, he does use the second post to go off on a lengthy diatribe attempting to debunk the notion of privilege, using a definition of privilege that likens it to an abacus: earning privilege here and losing it there (+5 for being gay! -5 for being male!) to come up with a sum total at the end. This, I think, reveals that he not only misunderstands terribly the concept of privilege but also that he entered into this debate with his own agenda, which I suspect was baiting a contingent of fandom into an argument over the existence of privilege and “political correctness.” I could be wrong here and guilty–as I think Wemyss is–of reading too much into the words of someone with whom I clearly disagree politically, but I find it interesting that as many people questioned whether Stellaluna was saying what he thought she said, that their concern was ignored entirely in his rebuttal in favor of disproving privilege.

Regardless, I think it was much ado about nothing. I believe Stellaluna was saying that writers need to be conscious of the fact that readers may take messages from even the most innocent and frivolous of writings. Therefore, it is prudent to think about these things when writing and revising, and writers should be prepared to take responsibility for their words. I would mostly agree with this, subjective interpretation notwithstanding. And I really think that was all that she was saying.

One of the thoughts that has crossed my mind and is currently sticking in my mind like a cockleburr and annoying me and refusing to be dislodged is how a similar conflict exists between writing and fandom. I say “fandom” because this blog is largely aimed toward fandom and because fandom is where I am most comfortable, but really, I think it applies to any sort of group that encourages (or is even based solely or primarily on) creativity and is maintained by a collective effort by members of the community. For example, I am also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I find many of the same conundrums that I experience in fandom arising there as well.

Writing or creating artwork is a selfish endeavor. It is done alone, usually in solitude or silence (as, indeed, I am alone right now in the house with the only sound the humming of my laptop; even the dogs are outside). At times, the drive to write and escape from social obligations drives me to the brink of madness, and I become a truly unpleasant person to be around. Luckily, Bobby understands this and packs me off into an empty room with my laptop and a couple of hours to write. I am not the first writer to lament the words on the page and how they might have translated better into folded laundry or dishes put away or time spent in the company of others who might feel hurt that I am not around. I sometimes feel like an exceedingly selfish person for my writing. (In fact, I should be finishing a school paper right now and even feel a little guilty that I am writing this instead.) For the few years that I participating in NaNoWriMo, November was such a time of peace and relief. It was something official and even impressive-sounding (”I am a participant in this year’s National Novel-Writing Month” *polishes fingernails on the front of waistcoat*), and it was a good excuse to avoid other activities and write instead. I remember when Bobby was playing in a particularly far-off hockey league, and I used to go to all of his games so that he was not driving home exhausted and alone, and I used to take my laptop and write while he was playing. And, sometimes, people I knew would sit down with me and make conversation, and how I longed to say what I was thinking: “Would you just fuck off and let me alone to write?” Only that was exceedingly selfish, so I never did, and who knows how many words didn’t get written because of it. I feel guilty, even now, lamenting those lost words when, clearly, socialization was the right and proper and human thing to do, and people were just trying to be nice to the lonely eccentric woman over by the soda machines. But when NaNoWriMo was going on, everyone was warned up to a month in advance, and I was left alone, and I didn’t feel guilty about it. I was, after all, serving a project larger than myself; it was not so selfish as writing simply because I wanted to.

Fandom, on the other hand–or groups like the SCA–are entities that value unselfishness in the form of service to the community. Forget the above paragraph for a moment and meet Dawn the Archive Owner and Webminister and Volunteer. One of my most passionately uttered values is the importance, as part of a community from which one derives as much enjoyment as I do fandom and the SCA, of contributing in some significant way to that community. Fannish communities are built almost entirely on the contributions of members of that community; if, tomorrow, the co-moderators, volunteers, writers, and reviewers of the SWG all decided that they wanted to leave the time and effort that they spend on their various contributions to someone else, then there would be no SWG. That is the surest way to shut us down.

But the SWG (and many other fannish groups) is by name and definition a group of writers and artists, people whose work is by its very nature selfish and solitary. Almost four years after I formed the SWG, I’d have to say that my only regret, in creating this group for fandom and doing all of the service that that entails, is again, the lost words: the stories that I wanted to write and didn’t because obligations to the community. I am beyond proud, delighted, and thrilled with the SWG and what it has accomplished, and I would never ever unwish it, but sometimes–in the midst of doing the fannish equivalent of changing dirty diapers or playing stuffed-animal tea party–I lament the lost ability to be selfish and wonder what I could have produced in the last four years if I’d never created the SWG.

I have always been proud of my involvement with fandom–and this, quite unexpectedly, has increased the more that I study literature–because I see its collective, shared creativity as more of a return to the creativity that has been natural to the human race since our distant ancestors first started singing verses around the campfire at night, adding and changing where they saw fit. I see the recent turn that creativity–writing in particular–has taken, with its obsessiveness over possession and markets and profit, as the abnormality, not the desire to create based on what has already been done by others. But, at the same time, writing is largely a solitary act. How does that fit into a collective community? For me, I find that I have the same balancing act as that described by mothers who are also writers, who have to make the choice between a crying child and a whispering muse (1), only my choice is between the whispering muse and a webpage that needs updating, emails that need answering, a newsletter that needs writing, announcements that need posting … all of these things that need to be done in service of the fannish ideals in which I believe so strongly and which, almost always, trump my creative ideals, in which I also believe but are easier to defer: They are selfish.

The first creative communities, artists/authors produced songs and stories for the entertainment of an audience that was usually not artistic itself; the artist/author might find able subsistence from this audience: “singing for one’s supper,” if you will. In the modern “real” writing world, markets exist that seek and publish fiction to provide to an audience and, hopefully, these markets compensate writers fairly for their work (excuse me while I have a good laugh at that last point ………….. thanks, I’m better now). In both cases, the artist/author is independent from the majority of consumers of his or her work, and the “community” in which she or he operates is also maintained by people who are not usually themselves artists/authors. Therefore, the creation and maintenance of the infrastructure by which such creativity is produced and shared does not interfere much with the actual production of that creativity.

Fandom is different: The same people who are producing creative works are usually also those who are building and maintaining the communities necessary for that work to be produced and shared. Most archive and group owners are themselves writers; most of our volunteers (and all of my co-moderators) with the SWG are also artists or writers, and so whenever they give their time to their group, then that is taking time from their writing. The audience for fannish works is also, largely, the same people producing those works, so whenever I hear of people who review x number of stories for the MEFAs or review everything posted on a particular archive or community, then I can’t help but to think that that contribution comes at the expense of their own creative endeavors. But, of course, they are making a very necessary contribution.

What is the solution here? There is no solution. What is beautiful about our communities–that they are collective and run by those who are themselves artists and writers (versus those looking to turn a profit on the efforts of others)–is also to our detriment: Those who believe most strongly in service to their communities will feel the pull of both obligations, and it won’t always be pleasant, and the “selfish” and creative will most often lose out, which is itself a loss in words unwritten and ideas unexpressed.

I do wonder, also, to what extent this is a manifestation of fandom being a “female space,” as some like to call it (amid much controversy, of course). Most cultures teach young girls to be selfless, to be helpers, to put their needs below the needs of the group. In women, selflessness is still valued, as evidenced by the continued fervor of the debate over whether or not mothers belong in the workplace. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to value more their individual accomplishments, and it is understood that a degree of selfishness is to be expected. (I remember reading once, when I was very young, that American culture teaches us to see psychopathology in the mother who chooses her needs over those of her children but not in the man who uproots his family, takes his wife from her family and friends and his children from their peers and familiar home, in order to pursue a career that will not benefit that family in the least; in fact, might be to its detriment as the responsibilities of said career take him away from home even more than he already is and, possibly, to a city or living conditions that are ideal to no one but him. That might have been the moment when I became a feminist, being as this point has stuck with me across, literally, almost the entirety of my life. I only wish that I could remember where I read or heard it to give proper credit.)

I wonder how these values that are still taught to girls and esteemed in women have shaped fandom, and I wonder how this will affect our creative accomplishments. Is there a connection? I don’t know. There are, of course, men in fandom, and several Tolkien-based writing groups are run by men, and I do not intend to dismiss or diminish their contributions. But the Tolkien-based writing community is 95% female (at least) and so, presumably, the culture of that community is female as well. I wonder, sometimes, what male-dominated fandoms (and they do exist) look like compared to female-dominated fandoms, like the Tolkien fandom. Do they feel the same conflict between personal creation and contributing to the collective? And this goes, I think, beyond something so large as creating a group or archive. Do they drop everything to write a ficlet for a collection dedicated to a friend whose going through a rough spell? Do they read every story participating in an award or fest and leave comments for all the authors? Do they set their own work aside because a friend needs a last-minute “emergency” beta-read? Most of the people that I know in the Tolkien fandom–male and female–have done at least one of these things at some point, but the Tolkien fandom–being dominated by women–would of course have evolved a value system created largely by women.

To what extent are these values female and not merely fannish and expected parts of any collective community?

These are questions whizzing through my head lately.

An Afterword …

I don’t often write about my experiences as the owner of the SWG for the simple fact that such “confessions” seem to result in an outpouring of gratitude and back-pats that I think people feel are obligatory and that make me feel bad and slightly dirty, as though I have solicited something undeserved for an endeavor that I find very enjoyable and gratifying without people feeling the need to regularly prostrate themselves before me. I make a conscious decision to continue as the owner of the SWG because I love my group and am proud of what it has accomplished. I am breaking my personal rule about writing about my experiences with the SWG here because, as the owner of a mid-sized fannish group, I work well as an example for this topic; nothing more and nothing less. This is not a hint of dissatisfaction or a fishing for praise, pity, or gratitude, and I am going to request that people not turn this post into a session of the above. The contributions of members and associates of the SWG that have allowed us to accomplish what we have, despite being a small and very niche community, have been and continue to be gratitude enough.

References

1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature, edited by Mary K. DeShazer, 621-637. New York: Longman, 2001.