Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Female character stereotypes


I've just read a most amazing article called ‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative by Kameron Hurley!!!! Primarily about the stereotypes female characters have become and why we need to challenge them!! Go read it!! Absolutely fascinating and such great points!! I just wanted to share the article and some of the comments I posted on it and use this as an impetus to finally get back to writing here on my oh-so-lonely blog that I've neglected for faaaarrr toooooo long!! I'm sorry bloggie. haha! :P ... Ok so here are my miscellaneous generated by the essay and comments! :)

- omg where to start! seeing in your bio about learning to box (i’m “pretending” to learn too! haha! ie. i only spar etc “recreationally”) … it brings to mind this awesome book and one of the above comments about women need to be seen as abusers sometimes reminded me too coz the book made a good point that we need to see them that way for the sake of their victims… the book is called Kill The Body The Head Will Fall by Rene Denfeld (see my post) and she discusses female agression partly through boxing which she was doing at the time. and she makes some amazing AMAZING points along the lines of the discussion above!

- other mini-topic… i lent an old Mercedes Lackey book to a younger friend who was a bit put off by the sword ‘Need’ that only helped women etc… and i realized as i was talking to her about it, in the 80s was kinda the early stages of female fantasy writers and female warrior heroines and i would say coz of the stereotypes mentioned above female warriors often had to have become that coz of rape or some other horror coz we couldnt have them just wanting to fight right!?

- LOVE the joss whedon Equality Now speech mentioned above!! such a succint point of whats wrong!

- also all of this reminds of the Bechdel Test! a good ‘test’ of whether something (usually movies) has good female characters!

- i’m also a ‘self aware misogynist’ ! haha good term! but i think we cant help but be having grown up in our society? coz i like your point about ‘female soldiers’ vs. just soldier for women… coz guess what i call myself?! Lady Knight! instead of just knight. sigh.

- and a friend was making a *fantasy* movie… and all the soldiers were men except an ‘elite’ group of scantily clad female warriors. its fantasy you can do whatever! make women soldiers! and from what i’m grateful to learn above, even in reality there was a good many women soldiers! good to know!

- i really dont think Game of Thrones is a good example of strong female characters. not many of them are seen in a totally positive light and very few warriors. I’m loving Steven Erikson’s books in comparison coz female fighters are the norm, every army and group has some. Versus Martin who’s only female characters that carry a sword are a little girl and a woman who was only introduced in the 3rd book and had a noose around her neck in the 4th book. (i’m refusing to read the 5th) (see my post comparing them ;)