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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)

This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.

The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character

In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).

Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":

Hannah is the best structural engineer at the firm, and the character pays for it. She's lonely, or her marriage failed, or there's a paragraph somewhere in chapter 3 where she wonders what she gave up for her career. Her competence arrives with an invoice billed to her personal life. Now, go find the man in your book who's simply good at his job, and find me the part of the story that details how much he pays for it. Most often, there isn't one. Tony is good at what he does and the book lets that be simple and straightforward.
[...]
Once the book has established that her skill costs her something, the skill stops being a pleasure and turns into a wound and readers stop enjoying her being good at things and start worrying for her, which contradicts why anybody wanted a competent FMC leading the book to begin with.

"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.

Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?

Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.

To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.

The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:

Insufferable Hedging: "Sorry, I just, I think maybe we should wait?" "Sorry", "just", "I think", "maybe", and a question mark sitting on a sentence that isn't a question. That's five softeners in nine words. This is a slightly less common issue I see in manuscripts, but it's worth discussing here. This is also nuanced because some real women do speak this way and inspire these characters in our books. That's ok. But make sure it's really an integral part of the character you're writing and that you're not overdoing it.

I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)

Every 'Want' Has Another Person's Name In It: This one is an audit at the book level. List every named woman in your manuscript. For each one, write a single sentence saying what she wants [you think "what a person wants" can be reduced to a single sentence?? - ed.]. Then look at how many of those sentences have another character's name in them. Here's what it usually looks like. Kate wants Adam to forgive her. Taylor wants to protect her sister. Nicole wants her mother to finally admit something. And then the men. Jake wants the promotion. Tony wants to get out of town. Riley wants to save the world. Every one of those is a real want or goal, and none of them are bad desires, but it's a pattern only visible when the list is sitting in front of you. What this does over the whole book is leave the reader feeling like the men are driving the plot and the women are responding to or serving the cast as a whole.

None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.

At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).

Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.

This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.

Does the FMC want anything when the MMC isn't in the room? If the answer is "nothing at all", then she exists to fall in love, and readers feel that flatness in the character.

Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.

Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.

What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.

I'm becoming concerned that our culture is losing basic media literacy. It used to be common knowledge that good characters need to have flaws, not just be perfect all the time. So Achilles had his heel as a literal weakness, but he was also full of moral flaws. If he had just been a good soldier who followed orders without pride, the story of the Iliad would have been boring.

Flawless main characters are such an obvious problem that the original "Mary Sue" short story was just making fun of all the crappy fan fiction where people used characters like that. Usually as self-inserts. It's mind-boggling to me that we've reached a point where professional literary critics not only defend that sort of thing, but they actually criticize anyone who dares write in some flaws for their female characters!

It was bad enough when Star Wars did it. But I thought, "fine, whatever, they're not looking for deep literary characters there, they just want someone to look cool on a green screen and sell toys." But now it seems there's a disturbing number of media following this trend.

All I could think reading this:

Hannah is the best structural engineer at the firm, and the character pays for it. She's lonely, or her marriage failed, or there's a paragraph somewhere in chapter 3 where she wonders what she gave up for her career. Her competence arrives with an invoice billed to her personal life. Now, go find the man in your book who's simply good at his job, and find me the part of the story that details how much he pays for it. Most often, there isn't one. Tony is good at what he does and the book lets that be simple and straightforward. [...] Once the book has established that her skill costs her something, the skill stops being a pleasure and turns into a wound and readers stop enjoying her being good at things and start worrying for her, which contradicts why anybody wanted a competent FMC leading the book to begin with.

Was "does anyone think House is incompetent?". Does it take away from the fun of the show because he has flaws?

I've been rewatching that show recently and "best X in the business but pays for it" is a perfect description of him. The tortured male genius isn't new. I don't stop thinking House is competent because House has a limp or a drug addiction or is, frankly, a cunt. If anything these weaknesses are what make him tolerable as a character. You can't both be an all-knowing genius and get away with being a cunt unless you have an excuse.

Gregory House is obviously a bag of flaws. We start out seeing that he's an asshole. He's also crippled, but that's the least of his flaws. We quickly learn he's also a drug addict. Ethics rules aren't so much guidelines as a checklist of things to violate. He deliberately pretends to be a racist to get one of his subordinate's goat, and deliberately pretends to be more sexist than he is to do the same to his boss, a subordinate, patients, relatives, etc. He's lazy about seeing 'boring' patients (who he insults all the time) and doing his paperwork. He's utterly reckless -- it's typical of him to nearly kill a patient in the process of diagnosing them. How does he keep his job? He's the best in the world... and, as he obnoxiously asserts constantly and is eventually proven right, his boss is attracted to him.

Little of this, however, is actually the cost of his skills. Except maybe the recklessness and ethics violations. You could have a show about a less-flawed House, but it wouldn't be as good.

Little of this, however, is actually the cost of his skills. Except maybe the recklessness and ethics violations. You could have a show about a less-flawed House, but it wouldn't be as good.

But to me the interesting question is where are the female versions of this type of character? I can't think of any off the top of my head, and I suspect a big part of the issue is that people (including feminists) think that Women are Wonderful and would be very uncomfortable with a female protagonist who is so deeply flawed. I suspect that even giving the woman a limp (when there are male colleagues around who walk perfectly fine) would bother feminists quite a bit. The upshot of this is that it would be difficult to prevent a female House from being a Mary Sue type who is extremely annoying outside of the narrative. (Of course the actual House is annoying within the narrative but it's entertaining for viewers.)

where are the female versions of this type of character?

I haven't watched all of it, but Bones comes to mind: it ran contemporaneously, and the title character is an autistic-coded female pathologist forensic anthropologist who often rubs the other characters the wrong way. I don't think she was a Mary Sue type, but had to be paired with a cop archetype for the actual "dealing with violent criminals" parts.

I haven't watched all of it, but Bones comes to mind: it ran contemporaneously, and the title character is an autistic-coded female pathologist who often rubs the other characters the wrong way.

So you would say her main flaws are that she is autistic (or at least somewhat autistic) and that she is a difficult person?

From what I remember of the first few seasons, yes. But it has been a while.

Jessica Fletcher? OK, maybe it's only me who'd want to punch her at least three times an episode.

Black Widow from the Avengers. Any number of "La Femme Nikita" type characters would work. They all do tend to be portrayed more sympathetically than House, though House is an extreme among male characters. So it probably can be done, but it's harder to do.

Jessica Fletcher? OK, maybe it's only me who'd want to punch her at least three times an episode.

I never watched Murder She Wrote, not even once. However out of curiosity I just watched a couple clips on YouTube, and I would say that based on this limited sample, she is more annoying to viewers than she is narratively annoying. By contrast, Dr. House is narratively annoying but entertaining to viewers.

Black Widow from the Avengers.

I watched a couple clips of her as well, and I'm not seeing it there either.

To be sure, I am going by very limited samples . . maybe link to a couple clips?

does anyone think House is incompetent?

Isn't it a semi-recurring theme in the show that he can't get (some) people to take him seriously? The audience isn't shown him that way, though, from what I remember. The conflict is often "mad genius vs. The System".

It's the opposite. The conflict is that everyone knows House is a genius and he gets special privileges because of it, including getting to be an asshole to people.

His direct boss is shockingly tolerant of his bs on the grounds that he's irreplaceable, other people are not.

I've been rewatching that show recently and "best X in the business but pays for it" is a perfect description of him. The tortured male genius isn't new. I don't stop thinking House is competent because House has a limp or a drug addiction or is, frankly, a cunt. If anything these weaknesses are what make him tolerable as a character. You can't both be an all-knowing genius and get away with being a cunt unless you have an excuse.

It's an interesting thought experiment: What would happen if somebody made a television show or movie with an equivalent female character. An extremely capable professional but a very difficult person with a drug addiction and a limp. I don't think people would go for it, even feminists. Because women are supposed to be Wonderful.

I think that if the networks tried to make a gender-swapped version of House, it would be difficult to resist the temptation to (1) soften her difficult personality and make her more sympathetic; and (2) take away the drug addiction since it's a red flag of poor character. In short, it would be difficult not to make her something of a Mary Sue.

There's no need to detail how much a man pays for it in his personal life: the societal standard is that men are deficient in their personal lives so it is assumed by default even without being spelled out. It is only detailed for Hannah because it is exceptional in her case.

There's no need to detail how much a man pays for it in his personal life: the societal standard is that men are deficient in their personal lives so it is assumed by default even without being spelled out.

Yeah, I think this is part of what's going on. In television, movies, etc. when men suffer it's not really noticed. Not the way it's noticed if women suffer. People (including feminists) have blinders to men "paying the price." So to feminists, it seems like only women "pay the price."

It reminds me of the criticisms of early James Bond movies. People (including feminists) were outraged that the movies depicted women getting killed. Even though far more men got killed than women.

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