la_marquise (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
la_marquise) wrote2014-06-16 03:39 pm
la_marquise) wrote2014-06-16 03:39 pm
Living as a woman in a science fiction future.
When I was 8, I wanted more than anything to be a member of the crew of the starship Enterprise. I wanted so much to share in their adventures, going to new worlds, meeting aliens, having adventures. And that future I watched on tv every week was filled with women. I was 8: I didn't really think about the coding of their costumes or the roles they were sometimes asked to play. I noticed that they were women who spoke and acted and were listened to. They were not Doctor Who girls, running and screaming and waiting for the doctor to tell them what to do. They were planetary councillors, doctors, scientists, ambassadors. They fought, they talked back. Sometimes they rescued people or took key roles in foiling plots. They had their own guns. And, unlike the active girls in books I read at that age, they didn't have to behave or dress like boys to do this. They got to have long hair and dresses. They got to be feminine.
I was a feminine girl. I'm a feminine woman. I was never a tomboy. But in my childhood books, nearly all the active girls, the approved-of girls were. Girls like me were weak, wet, useless. Until Star Trek. I wanted that future, I wanted those lives, because those lives were exciting and adventurous and fun. It was tedious that sometimes these women seemed to have to kiss Captain Kirk in order to get on with what they were doing, but I reckoned I could duck that bit. I wanted most of all to be Lieutenant Uhura, especially in season 1. On the show, she got left behind more than I liked, but in my games she had adventures too, while Kirk was busy, and everyone was happy. The Star Trek future was big and wide and there was plenty of space for girls like me.
I was a bookish child, and having discovered sf on tv, I went looking for it in the library. The books I found -- Andre Norton, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and so on -- were fun, but there wasn't an awful lot of space for me. That was... It felt odd, because Star Trek had told me there was room for adventurous women in the future. But I kept reading, and, at around 15, I found Samuel R Delany's Babel 17. I had wanted to be Uhura, because she got to help Kirk and Spock in their adventures. I *really* wanted to be Rydra Wong. The book was all about her: every character, every situation, every concept revolved around her and her talents and skills and actions. Rydra Wong saved the world because she was who she was. She wasn't in the right place at the right time, she wasn't an assistant or a prop to be rescued. She didn't take time to stop and nurture her crew or sympathise with her man. She was the centre of her own story. Until I met her, I hadn't realised how unusual that was. Women and girls in the books I read were forever interrupted by their gender. They had to be good and do their chores, they had to stop what they were doing to help others, they had to put food on the table and teach children and clean up even in the middle of their adventures. They were never just heroes. They always had to take time out to live up to their social, female role. The only alternative was to behave like a man and expect another woman to look after you, too. The life of a female hero was full of giving up, being good, surrendering, giving way, giving in. Even in their own stories, their lives were already compartmentalised and full of duties that involved always putting others' interests and needs ahead of their own.
Nobody in Narnia expected Peter to take time to check that everyone was fed. When Susan did -- and it was a sensible thing to do -- she was told off for fussing. Boys' books were full of exploration and adventure. Girls' books were all about looking after others, helping and learning your place, unless you were a tomboy,
I never liked those tomboy girls. I thought they were mean and selfish and that, if I met them, they'd probably turn out to be bullies, too. They usually bullied the non-tomboy girls they shared books with.
Uhura was different. So was Rydra. So, when I met them, were Anne McCaffrey's female heroes. Lessa had her own dragon and went her own way -- and was proved right, over and over. Sara saved her love interest, saved herself, and solved an intergalactic mystery, all while dealing with being marooned on an alien planet. Helva was her own space ship, saving lives and solving problems over and over. They were all at the very centre of their own lives and no-one expected them to step aside.
I wanted that future so much and science fiction told me I would have it.
Science fiction lied. As I got older, not only did I see the insidious cracks in the futures I loved (the clothes, the endless kissing of Kirk, the problematic nature of some of McCaffrey's ideas) I also saw how rare these women were. For every Rydra, there were 40 interchangeable space babes, screaming, being patronised, being handed out as prizes. Female space captains, once marooned, needed to have photogenic lesbian sex with their colleagues for the enjoyment of the male gaze -- women need sex and they need it with someone else, they cannot be fulfilled alone. Their male counterparts were above such needs. (Thank you, John Varley.) Female scientists were plains and marginalised and developed inappropriate crushes which made them a hazard to themselves and others (thank you, Asimov). Women's main fulfilment having babies, even if they also enjoyed astrophysics on the side (thank you, Heinlein). Many books did away with women completely, except perhaps as a two-line secretary or left-behind wife.
And women were nearly always young -- men could be any age -- and nearly always pretty. Star Trek had offered me women of varied ages in various roles. Star Wars existed in a galaxy that seemingly held only one woman who could talk or act -- and she was captured and made to wear a leather bikini. No-one made Han Solo dress in a g-string while captive. Society told me, as I went on into my 20s and 30s, that things were better now, that women had equal rights. But the futures I was shown by the genre I loved seemed narrower and narrower. Book after book had no space for me, except as a handmaid, a nursemaid, a servant, a person who remained a perpetual walk-on in their own life. In Dune the Bene Gesserit manipulated worlds, changed lives, and came in all ages and sizes and colours. But all that energy was focused on achieving the perfect male saviour, and once he existed, the women in that world -- in the sequels -- went back to being love-interests, mothers or bad girls who needed controlling. Babylon 5 offered a future rich in philosophies and cultures, with fully-rounded alien characters, and men of all ages and sizes and colours and degrees of attractiveness. But for any woman over about 30, any woman of colour, any plain woman, any woman who was not super-model-thin, any woman who didn't want a life that revolved around a man, that future offered only erasure. The inconvenient women, the women who wanted to be at the centre of their own lives had been written out of existence. There's no room in the future for Rydra Wong. The Battlestar Galactica reboot looked better, was better in some ways. Women could hold power without also being 25 and pretty, drink, swear, sleep around, fly fighter ships, be negative and cruel and manipulative and complicated -- just like the men. But they had to be white, pretty much, they had to fall in love with men (the one lesbian turned out to be Evil). They might have special destinies, but they had to take time-out to endure rape, to find True Love. They couldn't have a story that did not involve them caring for a man.
No woman could have a share in the future unless she placed a man at the centre of her life. No woman could have a future for herself. Over and over, that was what the books, the shows, the films told me. The future is shiny and exciting and male. There is no space for me, except as an adjunct, a prop, a decoration. There is no life4 for me except as someone male's servant. At some point in the 90s, I began, slowly but surely, to drift away from science fiction. I'd been promised a future full of agency. Instead, I'd been told to keep my place, be pretty and focus on men. Oh, there are still books out there that delight me, new Rydra Wongs, but they are few and far between and they are getting rarer. For every Torin Kerr (from Tanya Huff's fine Valor series)< there are 20 Joe P Sciencedudes. Rydra is a fully-rounded person with a life outside her book and her companions. She's not a 'kickass heroine', battling vampires or space slugs to hide the pain of abuse, and only really finding fulfilment when she meets the right man. She's not a photogenic star captain written by a man, having tomboy adventures in a skin-tight suit. She's herself.
And now I live in the future. On all sides, I see women beleaguered: storms over sexism in sfwa, harassment at cons, book shops that privilege the work of men, reviews skewed towards male writers, images that tell me that I must be young, thin, white, pretty, or else I must just not exist at all, just like in Babylon 5. I see gifted women writers ignored, dropped by publishers, trolled and derided. And over and over what I see praised and promoted in my genre are stories about men, futures for men, lives that revolve around men. I see a future that's a vacuum for women.
I don't like it. I don't want to be erased. I want Rydra Wong and Torin Kerr and Uhura with her own command. I want to be allowed to breathe.
I was a feminine girl. I'm a feminine woman. I was never a tomboy. But in my childhood books, nearly all the active girls, the approved-of girls were. Girls like me were weak, wet, useless. Until Star Trek. I wanted that future, I wanted those lives, because those lives were exciting and adventurous and fun. It was tedious that sometimes these women seemed to have to kiss Captain Kirk in order to get on with what they were doing, but I reckoned I could duck that bit. I wanted most of all to be Lieutenant Uhura, especially in season 1. On the show, she got left behind more than I liked, but in my games she had adventures too, while Kirk was busy, and everyone was happy. The Star Trek future was big and wide and there was plenty of space for girls like me.
I was a bookish child, and having discovered sf on tv, I went looking for it in the library. The books I found -- Andre Norton, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and so on -- were fun, but there wasn't an awful lot of space for me. That was... It felt odd, because Star Trek had told me there was room for adventurous women in the future. But I kept reading, and, at around 15, I found Samuel R Delany's Babel 17. I had wanted to be Uhura, because she got to help Kirk and Spock in their adventures. I *really* wanted to be Rydra Wong. The book was all about her: every character, every situation, every concept revolved around her and her talents and skills and actions. Rydra Wong saved the world because she was who she was. She wasn't in the right place at the right time, she wasn't an assistant or a prop to be rescued. She didn't take time to stop and nurture her crew or sympathise with her man. She was the centre of her own story. Until I met her, I hadn't realised how unusual that was. Women and girls in the books I read were forever interrupted by their gender. They had to be good and do their chores, they had to stop what they were doing to help others, they had to put food on the table and teach children and clean up even in the middle of their adventures. They were never just heroes. They always had to take time out to live up to their social, female role. The only alternative was to behave like a man and expect another woman to look after you, too. The life of a female hero was full of giving up, being good, surrendering, giving way, giving in. Even in their own stories, their lives were already compartmentalised and full of duties that involved always putting others' interests and needs ahead of their own.
Nobody in Narnia expected Peter to take time to check that everyone was fed. When Susan did -- and it was a sensible thing to do -- she was told off for fussing. Boys' books were full of exploration and adventure. Girls' books were all about looking after others, helping and learning your place, unless you were a tomboy,
I never liked those tomboy girls. I thought they were mean and selfish and that, if I met them, they'd probably turn out to be bullies, too. They usually bullied the non-tomboy girls they shared books with.
Uhura was different. So was Rydra. So, when I met them, were Anne McCaffrey's female heroes. Lessa had her own dragon and went her own way -- and was proved right, over and over. Sara saved her love interest, saved herself, and solved an intergalactic mystery, all while dealing with being marooned on an alien planet. Helva was her own space ship, saving lives and solving problems over and over. They were all at the very centre of their own lives and no-one expected them to step aside.
I wanted that future so much and science fiction told me I would have it.
Science fiction lied. As I got older, not only did I see the insidious cracks in the futures I loved (the clothes, the endless kissing of Kirk, the problematic nature of some of McCaffrey's ideas) I also saw how rare these women were. For every Rydra, there were 40 interchangeable space babes, screaming, being patronised, being handed out as prizes. Female space captains, once marooned, needed to have photogenic lesbian sex with their colleagues for the enjoyment of the male gaze -- women need sex and they need it with someone else, they cannot be fulfilled alone. Their male counterparts were above such needs. (Thank you, John Varley.) Female scientists were plains and marginalised and developed inappropriate crushes which made them a hazard to themselves and others (thank you, Asimov). Women's main fulfilment having babies, even if they also enjoyed astrophysics on the side (thank you, Heinlein). Many books did away with women completely, except perhaps as a two-line secretary or left-behind wife.
And women were nearly always young -- men could be any age -- and nearly always pretty. Star Trek had offered me women of varied ages in various roles. Star Wars existed in a galaxy that seemingly held only one woman who could talk or act -- and she was captured and made to wear a leather bikini. No-one made Han Solo dress in a g-string while captive. Society told me, as I went on into my 20s and 30s, that things were better now, that women had equal rights. But the futures I was shown by the genre I loved seemed narrower and narrower. Book after book had no space for me, except as a handmaid, a nursemaid, a servant, a person who remained a perpetual walk-on in their own life. In Dune the Bene Gesserit manipulated worlds, changed lives, and came in all ages and sizes and colours. But all that energy was focused on achieving the perfect male saviour, and once he existed, the women in that world -- in the sequels -- went back to being love-interests, mothers or bad girls who needed controlling. Babylon 5 offered a future rich in philosophies and cultures, with fully-rounded alien characters, and men of all ages and sizes and colours and degrees of attractiveness. But for any woman over about 30, any woman of colour, any plain woman, any woman who was not super-model-thin, any woman who didn't want a life that revolved around a man, that future offered only erasure. The inconvenient women, the women who wanted to be at the centre of their own lives had been written out of existence. There's no room in the future for Rydra Wong. The Battlestar Galactica reboot looked better, was better in some ways. Women could hold power without also being 25 and pretty, drink, swear, sleep around, fly fighter ships, be negative and cruel and manipulative and complicated -- just like the men. But they had to be white, pretty much, they had to fall in love with men (the one lesbian turned out to be Evil). They might have special destinies, but they had to take time-out to endure rape, to find True Love. They couldn't have a story that did not involve them caring for a man.
No woman could have a share in the future unless she placed a man at the centre of her life. No woman could have a future for herself. Over and over, that was what the books, the shows, the films told me. The future is shiny and exciting and male. There is no space for me, except as an adjunct, a prop, a decoration. There is no life4 for me except as someone male's servant. At some point in the 90s, I began, slowly but surely, to drift away from science fiction. I'd been promised a future full of agency. Instead, I'd been told to keep my place, be pretty and focus on men. Oh, there are still books out there that delight me, new Rydra Wongs, but they are few and far between and they are getting rarer. For every Torin Kerr (from Tanya Huff's fine Valor series)< there are 20 Joe P Sciencedudes. Rydra is a fully-rounded person with a life outside her book and her companions. She's not a 'kickass heroine', battling vampires or space slugs to hide the pain of abuse, and only really finding fulfilment when she meets the right man. She's not a photogenic star captain written by a man, having tomboy adventures in a skin-tight suit. She's herself.
And now I live in the future. On all sides, I see women beleaguered: storms over sexism in sfwa, harassment at cons, book shops that privilege the work of men, reviews skewed towards male writers, images that tell me that I must be young, thin, white, pretty, or else I must just not exist at all, just like in Babylon 5. I see gifted women writers ignored, dropped by publishers, trolled and derided. And over and over what I see praised and promoted in my genre are stories about men, futures for men, lives that revolve around men. I see a future that's a vacuum for women.
I don't like it. I don't want to be erased. I want Rydra Wong and Torin Kerr and Uhura with her own command. I want to be allowed to breathe.
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I think it is getting narrower rather than wider; we have discussed this before. Does fantasy serve women better? Pratchett's witches are role models for a generation of pagan women. But urban fantasy relies too much on the feisty female, as I've said before, too. Robin McKinley? Yes. Diana Wynne Jones? Definitely.
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I'm no sure about fantasy: it used to be wider and there are still more books in which are front and centre == but it carries all the social baggage which is wearing in itself. And there are too many damsels.
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yep
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(Anonymous) 2014-06-16 03:20 pm (UTC)(link)It features that rare animal, an OLD woman, who has a mind of her own, is bloody-minded and is allowed to be a granny than a love interest and still be the main character.
Old women are so few and far between, and the older I get, the more I am aware of it.
Also Lady Cecilia in another of Moon's books. Older woman, has her own independence and her own opinions, happy to learn new tricks in old age. No need for a love interest.
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It features that rare animal, an OLD woman, who has a mind of her own, is bloody-minded and is allowed to be a granny than a love interest and still be the main character.
Old women are so few and far between, and the older I get, the more I am aware of it.
Also Lady Cecilia in another of Moon's books. Older woman, has her own independence and her own opinions, happy to learn new tricks in old age. No need for a love interest.
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Particularly since I myself, though pretty aggressive, can not in fact fight like a ninja...
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great blogpost
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Rebecca Adlington has tomboy credentials in spades but is still receiving twitter abuse because she is "ugly" .
Or you can be a real life princess as feminine and girly as a Tory MP's dream and still get slated in the tabloids for wearing ordinary clothing while standing near a helicopter.
Since whatever we do is wrong, I reckon we might as well just please ourselves and give the haters something to hate.
Why don't we start a new literary Award -for writers defining themselves as women and writers of science fiction /fantasy - I suggest calling it Hypatia for obvious reasons?
And while we're at it, let's have all women judges and all women voters .
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Like you, when little, I thought I would live to be a person in her own right who wasn't judged by what she did for others or what roles she nicely filled that were left there by people who actually did things of importance. But don't despair. We are a lot further forward than we were a hundred years ago. Each of us might only manage a bit of a forward step individually but we'll get there in the end.
Meanwhile I think you have a story to write about Uhura, or someone like her, with her own command. If it ought to be, then you have to make it be - nobody will see it like you do, so they can't do it. Make that oxygen!
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My grandmother was in the first generation of women allowed to qualify as doctors (and she did).
My mother was always bitter because a boy got one of the very limited number of university grants available in her county. Now, there are probably more women than men at university.
We have the vote and no one questions our right to it.
We're reasonably close to equal pay. A generation or two ago it was taken for granted that women got paid less for the identical job.
My money remains my own in spite of my being married.
There are still things to be done, but I would rather be a woman in this generation than any before it.
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I thought Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer, aka Killashandra Ree was pretty feisty!
Morgaine, from the pen of C J Cherryh. Armour, sword; check. Has not yet, to my knowledge, done the marriage and babies thing.
Xena. However a big tick for 'Fights like a ninja'.
Aeyrn Sun, Chiana, Zhaan and the living ship Moya in 'Farscape'
River Tam [damaged waif fu], Kaylee [Greasy engineer who loves engines and sex], Zoe [stoic gun toting warrior woman], Inara [High caste Companion] from 'Firefly'.
Marvels Adventures of Shield : Skye [hacker extraordinaire], Melinda May [oriental stoic kick ass woman], Jemma Simmons [Science specialist].
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And Amelia Peabody--she does get married and have a child, but her marriage never gets into the way of doing what she does best (kicking ass and solving crimes).
This is why I like Nordic shows at the moment--both Borgen and Real Humans have kickass women MCs (several of them too, it's not like they're anything exceptional).
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Crazy as it may sound, I see those as a reason for optimism.
15-20 years ago, those things were happening - but they got swept under the carpet, damn quick. "Nope, not a problem here, we're better than that, let's talk about something else". Gone in five minutes, if it lasted that long.
The fact that it's not staying under the carpet any more is progress. The fact that people are standing up, in numbers, and saying "this is happening, and it's wrong" is progress.
Slow, painful, progress, but...
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We need to keep fighting. I'm tired of women who have benefitted from the changes simpering about "but I'm not a feminist. I like men." Feminists like real men, too. It's the old boys we can't stand. :-)
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(Anonymous) - 2014-07-04 04:39 (UTC) - Expandno subject
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I do think progress is being made. Slower than I would like, but still...things have improved. Just looking at my last class of middle school students, they're a quantum jump in awareness from even the previous year's students.
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Also, if it helps, hundreds of millions of women in many Asian countries are very much better off in every way than their female ancestors, even if it's still not as good as it could be. Reality is far better than science fiction for many, many women.
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Feminists plus sex are column inches. Feminists without sex are not.
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"Rambling, offensive – and unbeatable: beam me up, old-school sci-fi
Now that science fiction is respectable, it's lost almost all of the conceptual craziness and dubious sexual politics that made it both fanboy bait and of genuine interest"
written by novelist Sandra Newman for the Guardian's Books Blog (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jun/17/old-school-sci-fi-sandra-newman).
Sigh.
Love, C.
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Put Bujold's Cordelia Naismith on your list of commendable female hero's.
Also James H Schmitz - he was one of the first who did good, well balanced women. I have always adored Nile Etland (in Demon Breed) ... supremely capable and professional - and no romance!
He was way ahead of the pack.
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I think what blew my mind was Ursula Le Guin's book 'The Left hand of Darkness'. For me, it was such an enlightening look at the complexity of gender.
I don't want to bang on too much but I think for me being fat was/is a way of opting out of a certain kind of attention. I think maybe that growing up in the 1970s was actually quite bad for women because the new sexual freedom was freedom for men (on the whole) - I know that has been said before far more concisely and intelligently, but as someone who was a teenager in the 70s, I do look back and think 'Argh'.
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(Anonymous) 2014-06-22 03:30 am (UTC)(link)You don't want to be erased Lol Whiney Crap.
Tell your 51+% females to buy damn SF books. If you just get 15% of them to do it, in ten years 90% of all SF will be dominated by women.
If you are not going to do that in the most free society in the world and best for women. Then STFU!!!
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I'm astonished that you are using such Americanised language, though: you're a member of 'the most free society in the world'? That would probably be Sweden.
Sorry, hon, I'm not an American and I don't subscribe to your US-exceptionalism right wing libertarian menz rightz nonsense. Your country will be 'the most free' when all its members learn that free speech applies to everyone, not just right wing boy trolls, gun-owners, agitators for the death penalty, bullies who think they have the right to dictate to others, men who think of women as property, racists and cowardly tea-party types who hide behind anonymity to yell at strangers.
Andre Norton
Re: Andre Norton
Re: Andre Norton
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Re: Andre Norton
SF versus Mystery
(Anonymous) 2014-06-23 02:05 am (UTC)(link)Re: SF versus Mystery
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I had to think a lot about this post, because it makes me realise how not-at-all-conscious I was about the issue when I was growing up, and how my subconscious seems to have 'fixed' things. Or rather, how much trouble I've been getting in all of my life by 'not acting like a girl'. I loved Uhura. I especially loved Emma Peel. Emma Peel was the only TV woman I can think of that I wanted to BE. (the only others that came close were Barbara Bain's character in "Mission: Impossible" and Agent 99). But for some reason, it never really occurred to me that there were no people like me -- maybe because I really didn't want to be me in the first place?
But also, the men in my family, especially on my dad's side, were pretty consistent in getting across the idea that being a girl did not excuse me from knowing how to do the things they considered important life skills -- things that were, at the time, generally considered male territory. Add that to living with a single mother who had none of those sorts of skills (I taught her to check the oil in her car when I was about 13), and what was a lack of people like me became the ideal spot for Mary Sue me. So when I read or watched anything, and Mary Sue'd my way in, I was always female, but I was a combination of Bond girl and Bond; I was a woman who combined the best things of Spock, McCoy, and Kirk; I was Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth (and never Vanessa Redgrave's Mary), transplanted into a dangerous scenario.
But looking at all that through the lens of this post and its comments, I can see how my assumption that there was a gap that needed filling, rather than getting the hint that I wasn't wanted, has often made my personal and professional life more difficult than it might have been. Probably also explains why so many people have claimed that I talk like a man, or assume from my blog that I'm a man.
Not so much.
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