All men benefit from women’s reinforced fear of being hurt for saying no.
read it again and again
Understand that this applies even to non-sexual situations. Women are more likely to be asked for favors from coworkers. Regular “can you file this for me” / “can you cover my shift” / “can you finish up this paperwork” workplace favors. Men are less likely to return those favors. Women are more likely to be seen as “difficult to work with” if they refuse to do favors when requested. Being viewed as ungenerous has negative social and professional consequences.
So yes, even gay men benefit. All men benefit from women’s reinforced fear of being hurt, not just physically, but also socially and professionally, for saying no to anything at all.
But unless that’s actually the most efficient use of people’s time, everyone also suffers from it.
I’d guess that, on the whole, the net impact is negative even for the people who “benefit” from it. Yeah, they’re getting a larger share of the pie, but it’s a much smaller pie.
Not necessarily. Everyone’s total effort/efficiency does not all go into the same pie. Sticking with the ‘workplace favors’ example, it could easily be the woman’s family/leisure that suffers from her spending extra spoons at work, rather than the total productivity of that company. If the male and female co-workers don’t interact socially outside work, he loses nothing, because the ‘company success’ pie is the same, and the ‘woman’s home life happiness’ is the one shrinking, while ‘man’s home life and happiness’ is either the same or larger. Which might be to the detriment of other men who are in the women’s life outside work, but her co-worker still benefits.
I’m not talking company-scale, I’m talking species-scale.
The problem here isn’t just “who gets the time”. It’s that inefficient resource allocation is another way of saying “resources wasted”. And the cumulative effect of wasting so much of so many people’s time and effort is enormous.
Like, if we’d stopped doing that in the 1800s, I suspect cancer would be long past-tense by now.
So, he still loses a lot. Because it’s not just that one woman that’s being inefficient; we’re making bad choices about the productivity of at least half of our species.
I…kind of suspected you meant it that way. But the men from the 1800s are dead now whether we today have a cure for cancer or not. I guess my point is that high-cost short-term gains have a bigger impact on their individual lives – certainly a bigger observable impact – and the original post is taking about small scale individual actions. Both perspectives are worth thinking about, but I think the short term, where the effects haven’t propagated yet around the whole society through averages and back to the original guy, is what the post is actually trying to make people aware of. And I suspect that most of men who actually care about long-term future wellbeing of society also care about profiting from the women they know everyday, which is a much easier thing to see/verify. It’s also much easier to feel like they can individually make a change that matters in their own workplace than ‘the general culture and industry of the next generation or two.’ I feel like smaller-scale and personal concerns are more likely to prompt change that a much wider view, even if the wider view involves their self-interest. Then again, I’m not sure I have a single cisdude following me, so maybe it doesn’t matter what I say at all.
Prisoner’s Dilemma strikes again: You’re personally better off if you betray everyone else, probably, but we’re all better off if no one does.
“But women earn more degrees” and still get paid less, so eat my whole ass
Something I see a lot of people missing in the reblogs: KIDS KIDS KIDS THIS IS LIKE 92% ABOUT KIDS
Yeah, there’s other factors too, but “women don’t ask for raises” and “pink-collar jobs aren’t valued” are smaller factors than the simple fact that caring for your own children is mandatory for women and optional for men.
Here’s the life story of, I’m going to say, about half the women I’ve ever worked with:
– Had children. Possibly voluntarily, possibly through lack of contraception education and/or funds.
– Broke off relations with the father. Frequently this was for a reason that was not a choice on her part, like he abused her or went to prison or just plain disappeared.
– Kept the kids. Even if it was an amicable split, she likely has weekday custody and is the one who takes charge of the vast majority of their needs.
– Dad may or may not pay child support, but even if he does, the average child support is $2550/year and the average cost of raising a child in a low-income family is $8610/year.
– The mother can’t afford paid childcare, but she has some friends/family members who can will agree to watch her kids, but they can’t commit to a consistent schedule, which means she can only work limited hours and has to take a lot of unplanned time off.
– This drastically limits both which jobs she can take and how much she can earn from those jobs, and completely locks her into poverty until the youngest child is old enough to be home alone. But by then she’ll have an unimpressive resume of assorted part-time gigs, plus likely health problems from 15 years of eating junk and barely sleeping, so it’s not a fabulous career launch point.
There’s lots of factors in why women get paid less than men, but lack of childcare is hugely, gigantically more important than stuff like “women don’t speak up enough in meetings,” or even stuff like “female neurosurgeons make less than male neurosurgeons.”
Has anyone else noticed that in the largely female horror/monster artist community on DA and tumblr (myself included) tends to focus a LOT on teeth, mouths, and violence as a consumptive act (there’s a lot of cannibal characters is what I’m sayin’) and that seems as a bit of a weird counter to mainstream horror and monster art where violence is nearly always penetrative? It’s usually knives, chainsaws and blades, heck even the Alien had a phallic mouth used to bore into faces.
Is this even a thing happening consciously?
No? Never mind then.
I… am trying to figure out approximately how much this post has irrevocably changed my life.
okay so we actually talked a lot about horror in my philosophy class this past week?
and like one of the things about typical horror movies is that they’re very much about violence towards women? like i don’t want to say that all horror movies are about violence towards women but i also don’t want to talk for a thousand years on the nuances of that trope so long story short if you watch a lot of horror movies there’s a lot of penetration imagery and blending the boundaries of sex and violence. and even the entire “final girl” trope that has become a basic structure of horror is basically asking for all of this imagery of penetration and violation etc. and all of it happens because the victims in horror movies are often women because he stereotype is that women are vulnerable. i’m probably explaining this really badly it’s all waaaaaaaay more nuanced than this but it all kind of ties together in a really fascinating way.so when you look at it that way, it makes sense that a lot of monsters created by/for men (i.e., mainstream monsters) are going to be penetrative. as for monsters created by women being consumptive… that’s a very interesting trend and there’s probably a reason for it but i havent thought about it enough to pick one out
I wonder how much of that, then, is tied up with women’s consumption being a subversive act? Women being encouraged to not consume or take up space, so that then greedy, unapologetic consumption and largeness and loudness and appetite becomes monstrous, which could be problematic. But when driven by the people who are told not to consume, it become atavistic and wish-fulfilling and an outlet for impulses and desires, which the best horror always does.
All girls continue to be taught when they are young, if not by their parents then by the culture around them, that they must earn the right to be loved — that “femaleness” is not good enough. This is a female’s first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking and values. She must earn love. She is not entitled. She must be good enough to be loved. And good is always defined by someone else, someone on the outside.
bell hooks in Communion: Female Search for Love (via daniellemertina)
there’s something magical about ugly women. women who broke the ruleset constantly imposed on us all, and instead of apologising for it, cracked a smile and carried on and blew people away anyway. women who looked in the mirror and saw something less than what the world told them to be, and did what they fucking well wanted to anyway
Cleopatra wasn’t beautiful. from what i gather, stories about her beauty were made up mostly to discredit her, but all evidence points to her being plain as day, but with the brains and the sheer unbridled force of an epic personality to pull of what she did, to be remembered like she is
Janis Joplin and Nina Simone and a dozen other female singers are still constantly mocked, even in their hallowed place in the halls of music history, for being ‘ugly’. do you think they gave a shit? it doesn’t mean your soul feels any less alive when you hear their music, when their voices hit your ears and the sound gets in your blood and makes you feel like you’re on fire
Carrie Fisher hated the way she looked. she loathed her lack of ‘classic’ beauty, picked herself apart constantly. she hated that she aged, she hated that she gained weight, but she decided in the end she didn’t care. and she was one of the most brilliant, hilarious, charming, and beloved women in recent history because the person she was underneath all the other incarnations of her stood larger than life
there’s a million other incredible women – scientists, activists, artists, poets, etc and on who completely blew apart the expectations of what women are supposed to be and do and want, in just about every era of our history. do you think more than a handful of them were truly beautiful in the way the world today quantifies it?
ugly used to make me feel angry and alone, and then i started listing names. now it makes me feel powerful.
and yet, “everybody’s beautiful” is what i see stamped everywhere right now. maybe, if you so badly need them to be. but if you do maybe that’s something you have to think about a bit more. how about “nobody has to be beautiful”
Yesterday we met up with a bunch of family friends and at one point my dad asked me to move a plastic table. “Can you come up here and help me move the table,” he said, “since it’s light anyway?” I was a bit taken aback by the last comment since, well, I could just go and do it and if it was too heavy I’d notice by myself. But I just say “sure” and decide not to comment on that.
So I come up to my dad, lift the large but actually incredibly light plastic table (it was something I could evidently easily lift with one arm, for reference); I realize there’s a bunch of chairs in the way so I tell my dad, who’s on the other side of the table and might not see it. I put down the table and start moving the chairs. All the while he’s started insisting he can call someone else to move the table and I keep saying “really, we just gotta move these chairs that are right here in the way”. He insists and I repeat that, and so on.
Now, most of the time when my dad is being unintentionally sexist I let him know, but this time all I could think of was that I really didn’t have time for bullshit about lifting some feather-light plastic table and I didn’t wanna stress myself out on vacation so I just insisted more forcefully on doing what I was doing.
Anyway, after I’ve moved all the chairs out of the way, I pick the table back on, my dad on the other side of it, and I start moving. Immediately another one of the guys runs up to me and starts offering to do this instead, to which again I say “no thanks”, adding “this is really light really” for good measure because I’ve been here many times before and I know that unless I reassure him the object in front of me is so innocuous evenI, a woman, can take it!, he’s not gonna listen. He insists, I say no again, he comes up behind me anyway no matter how much I protest that I’m fine and picks up the motherfucking table (which is still being lifted by my dad and I as we move) on my side and starts walking with us while I refuse to let go. By the time we’ve reached some stairs, another two men have appeared behind me and are also insisting I leave the task to them. Eventually they corner me on the stairs and since the stairs are tiny and I don’t want them to fucking cause an incident because they’re basically bodily pushing me aside, I let go. (Funnily enough I end up in a corner and have to yell to let me pass because they’ve become too focused on talking amon themselves and moving the table through the door in front of them to realize they’re about to shove the legs of the table on my face).
I cannot tell you how livid I was.
When I told my sister, she told me about this one new guy who wouldn’t hit her no matter how much she insisted it was fine during krav maga practice. She comes from years of various combat arts. He later realized she’s trained and acted surprised despite the fact that she’d told him several times to just do the exercise as he was supposed to.
I told her the two guys at therapy will literally refuse to go through the door if I’m holding it open for them unless I act distracted while I do it (not look at them, make it look like I just casually forgot I’m still holding the door open). They’ll either bodily push me out of the way so they can hold the door open for me instead, or stay still and insist I go until I do it. I’ve had time to experiment.
My sister said the men at her therapy group do the same.
This isn’t courtesy. You’re not helping someone who asked, or offering help and then listening to the answer. You’re not saving women as a group. You’re not making up for other men’s sexism (or your own). You’re being sexist. You’re being condescending, not listening to the woman in front of you, aggressively trying to keep yourself in a position where you can be the sole offerer of things and the woman can only be in the role of receiving your “kindness” and exchange gratefulness for it, and making it all about your coming to the rescue – even though no-one asked you to in the first place. And if you’re so uncomfortable with any breach of the script that you can’t even walk through a door if a woman is holding it open for you, then there’s a problem, and it’s yours, and working on it is on you, not on me. Same goes when you treat a woman like she can’t perform menial tasks.
This, so much. When I was younger (and not chronically ill) I used to volunteer on the weekends with this group that did things like winter-proofing houses for people who couldn’t afford it, fixing their cars, collecting used furniture and appliances to give to people who needed it, etc. And one Saturday I was assigned–along with a guy about my age, height, build, and level of athletic ability–the task of cleaning and organizing the warehouse where we stored the furniture and appliances.
It involved a lot of physical labor, including moving objects of various sizes and weights. And it wasn’t necessarily easy or menial in any way, but it was well within my capabilities and it was, after all, literally what I was there for.
But I spent 75% of my energy that morning repeatedly telling the dude to stop trying to keep me from picking up anything heavier than a hand blender. It took me a solid four ours of insisting, cajoling, reassuring, and finally just outright snapping at the guy to get him to lay off and just let me do the job I’d come there to do.
Then, when I finally had him resigned (very reluctantly) to only helping me move large, extremely heavy furniture that legitimately required two people to move–which he started out trying to move alone because he was so insistent on “being a gentleman”–his damn stepbrother showed up and started up with the same shit (in addition to giving the dude crap for “letting me” carry all this heavy stuff myself).
Well, by that point I’d run out of patience, and I told him in no uncertain terms that I was here to do work, not stand around and look pretty while the big, strong men did all the work for me, and if he wasn’t going to help where it was actually needed to kindly get out of my way and stop being a distraction. I then proceeded to take the feather-light stack of plastic fucking lawn chairs he thought I was too delicate to carry back from him and continue with my work.
That day of work got me labeled “too independent” by all the guys in the volunteer group. Even my grandmother, a fierce Annie Oakley of a single parent with no qualms about speaking her mind and making her own way, told me I should have just let the boys “help” me because they were trying to be “nice.” No amount of explaining that they weren’t helping, they were being a hindrance, seemed to get through to anyone.
Nothing they did that day to try and “help” me was helpful. The other guy actually ended up injuring himself trying to keep me from helping him move heavy things. And every moment he spent trying to take things out of my hands and carry them for me was a moment he could have just picked up something else and moved it, or cleaned something, or otherwise helped actually make progress on the job we were doing.
So my dudes. Listen. I am not “too independent” to accept your help or whatever bullshit, if and when I need it. We all need help sometimes, regardless of gender. But if I say I don’t need your help and you keep insisting, you’re going to get my mean side really quickly.
Ooh, ooh.
So back in my girl mode days when I worked at McDs, I was heavily feminine presenting. Like, went to work always with nails done, hair done, full face of make-up… the works.
And a lot of the other girls there wouldn’t lift anything heavier than one 10-lb box of sauces… and not even that if they could help it. Like, they’d get a cart and block everything to stock one type of sauce.
So one day, about three weeks in, I get told to stock sauce. And there’s a LOT that needs stocked.
But the cart is in use.
Oh well. I load up all the sauces I need – a good 70 or so lbs; more than half my body weight at the time – and carry them in my hands to the front.
Or. I try to.
Twice I got stopped by male coworkers getting in my way trying to help me by taking my carefully balanced boxes off my stack. I almost had to shout at them to get out of my way and let me get to the front.
Eventually I trained them to just let me haul the heavy shit and not get right in my fucking path.
Then we got a new guy. Who did not take, “No.” or “Move.” for an answer. And just yanked the top four boxes of sauce off my stack one day.
They fell. And of course the boxes busted open and sauce packets went everywhere.
And whose fault do you think this was?
Well, obviously the guy’s, but he tried saying that, see, I couldn’t carry all that, I should have let him help.
Literally the only thing that shut him up was the male manager saying, “Dude, shut up. She does that all the time; she had it until you got in her way.”
Needless to say it is almost a decade later and I am still livid.
It’s almost as if men as a group thought they know how much our bodies can take better than we do and thought they get to decide how much our bodies should take and how we should use them
When I was moving the big stuff back in after my renovation (fridge, couch, washing machine, …), together with my dad, my neighbor literally pushed me out of the way to do it together with my dad. He was an immigrant, which is mostly only relevant because he didn’t speak the language quite yet and I couldn’t argue with him (although really “no” is sort of a universal thing), but I was SO pissed.
You know what happens when you carry heavy stuff? You grow some muscles. You learn how to grab on to things, how to balance the weight. You know what happens when men don’t let you do that, and insist they do it themselves? THEY get stronger, and you end up a little flower with no ability to carry anything anywhere.
Men are stronger than me without trying, they always will be, and I have no issue asking for help when I need it. But jfc let me do what I AM able to do.
when i was still presenting more femininely/thought i was a girl and as a literal kid, my DAD would routinely have to tell dudes to back off because I was stronger than him and to just let me carry things
like my dad would catch shit from grown men for letting his daughter carry shit for him and men were outraged that he’d say a girl was stronger than him…and then i’d prove to be stronger than them too and it PISSED THEM OFF TO HELL but god was it so satisfying
with chronic illnesses i am no longer fucking jacked, but still pretty solidly strong and in places that i grew up or i’m treated like a woman, men still try to stop me from lifting heavy things. it’s especially laughable when it’s older men because i’m still stronger than them! like just let me lift things. i won’t do more than i’m able, i know where my limits are pretty damn well and if i’m like “shit nope can’t lift this all by my lonesome” (which happens sometimes) i call for help because i am a goddamn adult and don’t need to risk my physical health for some status bullshit
i’m gonna give y’all a bit of strategic advice.
you’re making it be about you – your strength, your capability, your bodily autonomy – which makes perfect sense because it factually IS about you, and to the extent it’s about them, from your POV, it’s about their sexism. but they’ve had a lifetime of smug entitlement, combined with lectures from parents about ‘how to treat ladies’, that’s proof against changing.
you have to hit them where they live, make it be about their weakness.
“stop showing off.”
“who are you trying to impress?”
“you’re just getting in the way.”
“are we gonna stand on the sidewalk all day, mister chivalry, or are you going through the damn door?”
“yeah, you lift that flimsy plastic table, i’ll just stand here and swoon at your muscles.”
“WOW RUDE.”
“you’re a lil bit grabby, ain’cha?”
“every time i turn around you’re in my face, what’s your problem?”
and when they tell you they’re “just trying to be nice/good/polite/helpful,” you tell them, “try something different.”
go on the attack. you’ll never convince these guys to lay off when you’re justifying your own abilities rather than criticizing their rude behavior, out loud, to their faces.
obviously there will still be the occasional walnut who can’t be reasoned with. but a lot of these dorks are just following a script they had drummed into them by well-meaning parents, and have to be knocked off track by a good verbal swat.
This is such an interesting dissection of a very common trope in writing female characters that I never really thought about before, but it’s so prevalent and so obvious and so fucking disgusting.
it’s called infantilization and i hate it but “born sexy yesterday” is such a good way to put it
Yeah, though I think there’s another thing going on here too that the vid mentions but could focus more on, which is the male fantasy of “making” a woman precisely as they wish her to be, including her ideas about what is acceptable treatment and romantic/sexual behavior.
One of the HUGE inaccuracies in this, which is to say one of the major fantasies it embodies, is that because these women are naive on a particular topic, they have no self-image or dignity/self-possession, nor instinct/intuition on the particular topic, or on how the world ought to work. Take Celeste(Kim Bassinger’s character) in that My Stepmother is an Alien scene. Who gives a damn whether you know about sandwiches or not, what frigging interstellar traveler is going to let some schmuck yell at her, browbeat her without explanation or even basic interpersonal respect, into doing anything? Why would a professional, an individual accomplished enough to be sent by her planet’s government to investigate a potential attack on their world, someone responsible and respected enough to be entrusted with reality-warping technology who has traveled across the cosmos to confront a potentially hostile alien world and put an end to any threat she finds there, acquiesce to that treatment? Why would she find being insulted and ordered around and treated like she can’t be trusted to make her own decisions acceptable? In reality she wouldn’t, and therein lies the fantasy.
In the movie, because she doesn’t know about Earth and Food she has no concept of the sort of treatment she, as a person, deserves. That’s fundamental to the fantasy in this trope: these women never know how they ought to be treated, because they don’t know some specific thing they apparently have no concept at all of the treatment they deserve, and because of that these men get away with bullying, manipulation, and taking advantage without being caught, and without having to feel guilty for their behavior since there is no chance to get caught(which, of course, also presents their behavior as normal: if only men didn’t have to worry about censure, it says, they’d all treat women this way, which is the sort of mendacious bullshit creeps tend to tell themselves).
But it doesn’t stop there of course; not only do they not get caught out and called on their dickery, which is presented by the movie as “proof” that the woman doesn’t mind it, their dickery is celebrated and admired as “helping” the woman learn her place in the world and become a full and “real” person. That last bit of the dynamic is particularly notable in Tron(where the guy literally brings Quorra into the real world and a flesh-and-blood body) and The Fifth Element(where the movie ends on Leelo and Dallas having sex, after the climax where Dallas teaches Leelo “the Fifth Element” of “Love” and saves the Earth, through kissing her, without her consent, while she’s having an emotional breakdown. A particularly strident stating of the trope’s core thesis).
I’ve always had this tendency to apologize for everything—even things that aren’t my fault, things that actually hurt me or were wrongs against me.
It’s become automatic, a compulsion I am constantly fighting. Even more disturbingly, I’ve discovered in conversations with my female friends that I’m not alone in feeling this impulse to be pleasant, to apologize needlessly, to resist showing anger.
After all, if you’re a woman and you demonstrate anger, you’re a bitch, a harpy, a shrew. You’re told to smile more because you will look prettier; you’re told to calm down even when whatever anger or otherwise “unseemly” emotion you’re experiencing is perfectly justified.
If you don’t, no one will like you, and certainly no one will love you.
I’m not sure when this apologetic tendency of mine emerged. Maybe it began during childhood; maybe the influence of social gender expectations had already begun to affect me on a subconscious level. But if I had to guess, I would assume it emerged later, when I became aware through advertisements, media, and various unquantifiable social pressures of what a girl should be—how to act, how to dress, what to say, what emotions are okay and what emotions are not.
Essentially, I became aware of what I should do, as a girl, to be liked, and of how desperate I should be to achieve that state.
Being liked would be the pinnacle of my personal achievement. I could accomplish things, sure—make good grades, go to a good school, have a stellar career. But would I be liked during all of this? That was the important thing.
It angers me that I still struggle with this. It angers me that even though I’m an intelligent, accomplished adult woman, I still experience automatic pangs of inadequacy and shame when I perceive myself to have somehow disappointed these unfair expectations. I can’t always seem to get my emotions under control, and yet I must—because sometimes those emotions are angry or unpleasant or, God forbid, unattractive, and therefore will inconvenience someone or make someone uncomfortable.
Maybe that’s why, in my fiction—both the stories I read and the stories I write—I’ve always gravitated toward what some might call “unlikable” heroines.
It’s difficult to define “unlikability”; the term itself is nebulous. If you asked ten different people to define unlikability, you would probably receive ten different answers. In fact, I hesitated to write this piece simply because art is not a thing that should be quantified, or shoved into “likable” and “unlikable” components.
But then there are those pangs of mine, that urge to apologize for not being the right kind of woman. Insidious expectations lurk out there for our girls—both real and fictional—to be demure and pleasant, to wilt instead of rally, to smile and apologize and hide their anger so they don’t upset the social construct—even when such anger would be expected, excused, even applauded, in their male counterparts.
So for my purposes here, I’ll define a “likable heroine” as one who is unobjectionable. She doesn’t provoke us or challenge our expectations. She is flawed, but not offensively. She doesn’t make us question whether or not we should like her, or what it says about us that we do.
Let me be clear: There is nothing wrong with these “likable” heroines. I can think of plenty such literary heroines whom I adore:
Fire in Kristin Cashore’s Fire. Karou in Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series. Jo March in Little Women. Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The Penderwick sisters in Jeanne Birdsall’s delightful Penderwicks series. Arya (at least, in the early books) in A Song of Ice and Fire. Sarah from A Little Princess. Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time. Matilda in Roald Dahl’s classic book of the same name.
These heroines are easy to love and root for. They have our loyalty on the first page, and that never wavers. We expect to like them, for them to be pleasant, and they are. Even their occasional unpleasantness, as in the case of temperamental Jo March, is endearing.
What, then, about the “unlikable” heroines?
These are the “difficult” characters. They demand our love but they won’t make it easy. The unlikable heroine provokes us. She is murky and muddled. We don’t always understand her. She may not flaunt her flaws but she won’t deny them. She experiences moral dilemmas, and most of the time recognizes when she has done something wrong, but in the meantime she will let herself be angry, and it isn’t endearing, cute, or fleeting. It is mighty and it is terrifying. It puts her at odds with her surroundings, and it isn’t always easy for readers to swallow.
She isn’t always courageous. She may not be conventionally strong; her strength may be difficult to see. She doesn’t always stand up for herself, or for what is right. She is not always nice. She is a hellion, a harpy, a bitch, a shrew, a whiner, a crybaby, a coward. She lies even to herself.
In other words, she fails to walk the fine line we have drawn for our heroines, the narrow parameters in which a heroine must exist to achieve that elusive “likability”:
Nice, but not too nice.
Badass, but not too badass, because that’s threatening.
Strong, but ultimately pliable.
(And, I would add, these parameters seldom exist for heroes, who enjoy the limitless freedoms of full personhood, flaws and all, for which they are seldom deemed “unlikable” but rather lauded.)
Who is this “unlikable” heroine?
She is Amy March from Little Women. She is Briony from Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Katsa from Kristin Cashore’s Graceling. Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse. Sansa from A Song of Ice and Fire. Mary from The Secret Garden. She is Philip Pullman’s Lyra, and C. S. Lewis’s Susan, and Rowling’s first-year Hermione Granger. She is Katniss Everdeen. She is Scarlett O’Hara.
These characters fascinate me. They are arrogant and violent, reckless and selfish. They are liars and they are resentful and they are brash. They are shallow, not always kind. They may be aggressive, or not aggressive enough; the parameters in which a female character can acceptably display strength are broadening, but still dishearteningly narrow. I admire how the above characters embrace such “unbecoming” traits (traits, I must point out, that would not be noteworthy in a man; they would simply be accepted as part of who he is, no questions asked).
These characters learn from their mistakes, and they grow and change, but at the end of the day, they can look at themselves in the mirror and proclaim, “Here I am. This is me. You may not always like me—I may not always like me—but I will not be someone else because you say I should be. I will not lose myself to your expectations. I will not become someone else just to be liked.”
When I wrote my first novel, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, I knew some readers would have a hard time stomaching the character of Victoria. She is selfish, arrogant, judgmental, rigid, and sometimes cruel. Even at the end of the novel, by which point she has evolved tremendously, she isn’t particularly likable, if we go with the above definition.
I had similar concerns about the heroine of my second novel, The Year of Shadows. Olivia Stellatella is a moody twelve-year-old who isolates herself from her peers at school, from her father, from everything that could hurt her. Her circumstances at the beginning of the novel are inarguably terrible: Her mother abandoned their family several months prior, with no explanation. Her father conducts the city orchestra, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. He neglects his daughter in favor of saving his livelihood. He sells their house and moves them into the symphony hall’s storage rooms, where Olivia sleeps on a cot and lives out of a suitcase. She calls him The Maestro, refusing to call him Dad. She hates him. She blames him for her mother leaving.
Olivia is angry and confused. She is sarcastic, disrespectful, and she tells her father exactly what she thinks of him. She lashes out at everyone, even the people who want to help her. Sometimes her anger blinds her, and she must learn how to recognize that.
I knew Olivia’s anger would be hard for some readers to understand, or that they would understand but still not like her.
This frightened me.
As a new author, the prospect of writing these heroines—these selfish, angry, difficult heroines—was a daunting one. What if no one liked them? What if, by extension, no one liked me?
But I’ve allowed the desire to be liked thwart me too many times. The fact that I nearly let my fear discourage me from telling the stories of these two “unlikable” girls showed me just how important it was to tell their stories.
I know my friends and I aren’t the only women who feel that constant urge to apologize, to demur, to rein in anger and mutate it into something more socially acceptable.
I know there are girls out there who, like me at age twelve—like Olivia, like Victoria—are angry or arrogant or confused, and don’t know how to handle it. They see likable girls everywhere—on the television, in movies, in books—and they accordingly paste on strained smiles and feel ashamed of their unladylike grumpiness and ambition, their unseemly aggression.
I want these girls to read about Victoria and Olivia—and Scarlett, Amy, Lyra, Briony—and realize there is more to being a girl than being liked. There is more to womanhood than smiling and apologizing and hiding those darker emotions.
I want them to sift through the vast sea of likable heroines in their libraries and find more heroines who are not always happy, not always pleasant, not always good. Heroines who make terrible decisions. Heroines who are hungry and ambitious, petty and vengeful, cowardly and callous and selfish and gullible and unabashedly sensual and hateful and cunning. Heroines who don’t always act particularly heroic, and don’t feel the need to, and still accept themselves at the end of the day regardless.
Maybe the more we write about heroines like this, the less susceptible our girl readers will be to the culture of apology that surrounds them.
Maybe they will grow up to be stronger than we are, more confident than we are. Maybe they will grow up in a world brimming with increasingly complex ideas about what it means to be a heroine, a woman, a person.
Maybe they will be “unlikable” and never even think of apologizing for it.
my favourite thing ever in the history of this universe is the misogyny speech. i love it. i love it so much.
for those who don’t know what the misogyny speech is: australia’s PM julia gillard was our first female prime minister and was bullied relentlessly throughout her career by sexist politicians saying that as a woman she was unfit to lead. and then. then. one day, julia gillard snapped.
the resulting three-minute speech, known simply as the ‘misogyny speech’ in australia, was possibly the most epic smackdown seen in australian political history, surpassed only by “i wanna do you slowly”. it was incredible. students memorised it and marched through the streets yelling it. a national australian choir arranged it as a five-harmony piece. even hillary clinton went out of her way to meet julia gillard and tell her how fucking awesome the misogyny speech was.
i, personally, have the misogyny speech memorised. because i live in tony abbott’s electorate, and my dream of dreams is to see him at the shops one day and follow him while yelling it.
the misogyny speech: as australian as vegemite.
may the op one day fulfil their dream of dreams
it’s long but honestly every second is worth it the whole speech is incredibly inspirational
“that’s a direct quote by the leader of the opposition so I suggest those groaning take it up with him” Julia Gillard was taking no more shit what an inspiration
I like that he starts the speech off wryly smiling. That doesn’t last long.
i think the thing that bothers me about the “fake geek girl” myth is the fact that fake geek men actually do fucking exist.
there’s an artist who sells at a lot of events across the country who sells superhero art but doesn’t read comics or watch cartoons. he watches the movies sometimes, but actively thinks comics and cartoons are stupid and that the people who like them (and the people who make them!) are stupid.
i tabled next to an artist once who sold exclusively batman art, who does not like batman at all. he doesn’t like any comics really, he thinks this stuff is too nerdy for him, he just does it because he knows batman sells.
i asked a couple comic vendors if they carry comics from oni press and they had never heard of it.
i’ll comment on a guy wearing a mass effect shirt and he’ll look at me like i have two heads. he doesn’t play mass effect. he just bought it because it was at gamestop. happens a lot with the fallout vault boy shirts too, and occasionally that rick and morty shirt with the diagram of the portal gun
if we agree that these guys are all right, then i don’t want to hear a damn word about “fake geek girls”.
just moving along like everyone else 