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Notes -
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":
"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:
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...)
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.
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.
To me, this sounds like an attempted variation on the Bechdel test, or the stuffed into the fridge complaint: essentially, that the female characters only exist in terms of how they relate to male characters. When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad. But if the goal of every female character in your book involves a male character in some way (but not vice versa), it suggests that maybe your female characters aren't as fleshed-out and three-dimensional as they could be.
But then, she's still complaining when the female characters' goals involve other female characters. So I don't really know what she's looking for tbh.
I hate any and all discussion of the bechdel test from feminists, I think it's all in bad faith. But if I think about the bechdel test myself and try to separate the concept from the pop feminist application if the concept, I think it really is interesting and intriguing. I really don't understand why there are so few movies that pass the bechdel test, and I feel like something may be wrong about the formulation of the question, but I can't put my finger on it.
I would say that the bechdel test should also include the converse (a movie only fails the test if 1. there's no two women who have a conversation about something other than a man and 2. There's also two men who have a conversation about something other then a woman). But even so, I don't think that actually ends up changing much in terms of which movies pass. For whatever reason, there really do seem to be a lot of movies that feature men talking about things other than women, but don't feature woman talking about anything other then a man. I really really don't know why that is, and it kind of bugs me that I can't justify it. Is it simply that there's fewer female characters in movies? Is it something to do with the nature of femininity in our culture, that we don't expect it's interesting to see women talk about things together? I think it should be possible to have a blameless analysis of that question... but not with a feminist. So I'm interested in people's thoughts here.
Also, one thing that bothers me so much is that movies from 2014 onward started explicitly putting scenes on to try to pass that test, like the The Force Awakens scene with Mas Canata and Rey. It feels forced as a scene, but made feminists happy.
I wonder to what extent the Bechdel test has an inherent difficulty due to psychological differences between men and women. That is, if men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people, then male-male conversations are more likely to be about things, while female-female conversations are more likely to be about people.
Ie, suppose we have a story with a main cast of four: 2 men and 2 women. And we have 6 conflicts during the story. If during each conflict one pairing of our characters steps up to solve it together (there are 6 combinatorial pairings, one for each conflict), first of all, only one pairing is female-female, one is male-male, and the other four are some combination of male-female. And if each conflict is on some spectrum of "thing-oriented" to "people-oriented", then it makes the most logical sense for the male-male pair to handle the most object oriented conflict, which involves talking about the thing that isn't people. And if one conflict is mostly people oriented then it makes the most sense for the female-female pair to handle it, which involves talking about lots of people (half of whom are male). If the women solve a meaningful problem where the group is not getting along, that involves talking about men. If the women solve a problem of how to convince the population of a village to band together and fight off the threat, half of the village are men. Now granted, people can have conversations outside of direct plot solving, but those conversations are still likely to be people oriented because, statistically, women are more likely to care about people, think about people, and talk about people. And half of the people they could talk about are men, so especially conversations about multiple people are likely to include at least one man in the topic of conversation.
This doesn't apply if you have a more masculine character who doesn't think about or talk about people or feelings as much. Which can happen naturally if done well. But not if you artificially just write a male character and then gender swap them or try to shoehorn in a bunch of stupid alpha male asshole energy into a woman and call her a girlboss.
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