crankySometimes I have bitchy days. Sometimes I've been woken up repeatedly during the night to arbitrate disagreements between the cats, or it was too hot to sleep, or I have lots of deadlines I need to take care of, or I just have a really painful zit in my ear. Whatever. I am a person, I have a right to the ball, and that ball includes the occasional bitchy day. Sometimes, I am not a happy little bundle of sunshine and zombie puppies, ready to spread my pathogenic joy across the world.
On those days, I tend to stay mostly in my room (or the nearest available equivalent), working industriously on whatever pisses me off the least, and interacting only with people whose response to my being snappy is "Yes, yes, dear, aren't you cute when you try to bite me, here, have a rawhide chew." I don't answer email unless I have to, because it's never nice to take somebody's face off just for asking when the next book is coming out (An Artificial Night, 9/10; Late Eclipses, 3/11; Deadline, 5/11, by the way). At that point, if you pursue me into my hole, well...
The reason I bring this up is that I've seen a tendency to write off female characters who aren't always sweetness, light, and the joy at the end of the sunshine tunnel. Jean Gray may destroy planets, but she does it while baking cookies, while Emma Frost saves the world and sneers. Jean is thus clearly the better heroine, more deserving of love and compassion and all that other wacky stuff. Wolverine, on the other hand, is an unremitting bastard, and that makes him cool. That makes him edgy. Because he's bad, see? He's bad.
I once had a proofreader return a scene from one of the Toby books with the note that Toby was being a real unbearable bitch. I wrote back, and suggested that for every instance of "October Daye," they substitute the male protagonist of their choice (they went with Harry Dresden) before looking at the scene again. The complaint was summarily withdrawn. To which I can only say, seriously, what the hell? Why is it tough and cool and all that other stuff from a male protagonist, but incredibly bitchy and hateful and awful from a female protagonist? Why do we all have to be Pollyanna, all the time?
Now, I am a natural Marilyn Munster, which means that ninety percent of the time, I'm happy and bubbly and ready to slather you in plague-carrying bats. But that doesn't mean that the Wednesday Addams girls are somehow less valid, or less deserving of their own stories. And it doesn't mean I'm not allowed to have a grumpy day once in a while. I'm just not allowed to use my grumpy day as an excuse for immuno-depressant smallpox.
Hmmph.
June 7 2010, 21:11:55 UTC 7 years ago
But as to the main point of your post---word. Seriously. The double standard is alive and well in this regard and in a lot of other allied ways as well. Somehow, a hero that is less than perfect is interestingly flawed, while a heroine that is less than perfect deserves to be savaged, and if she is perfect, well, she can be savaged for that too. I think it comes from the fact that for much of our history, women weren't really supposed to have agency, and so there's this idea in our collective hindbrain that female characters should...I can't find the right word, but in its absence I'll say "apologize" for having agency. Or perhaps "earn" the right to have agency by also filling their conventional female role to perfection.
I.e. this is the same problem that leads to the "supermom" syndrome, the idea that it is fine to be a noble-prize winning physicist or microbiologist or ceo, just as long as your house is pefectly clean and you're a cookie-baking Mom at the same time.
June 14 2010, 18:03:08 UTC 7 years ago
I love you for being made of win and not being perfect.