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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":
"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.
As a small public service here are a few excellent shows with extremely flawed female lead characters: Nighty Night, Enlightened, Six Feet Under, Pluribus, Killing Eve, Fleabag. Many more, but these spring to mind.
The more crowd pleasing you go the less flawed they get, so you get The Diplomat on Netflix where the main character is basically a bit disorganised and supposedly not good at manners and fashion. Or Homeland where our character is paranoid but her mental illness feels kind of separate to her (she is fundamentally good but has to deal with her own mania and paranoia).
But dig deeper and there is plenty of entertainment out there that features flawed women by creators with a deeper understanding of character than the person in the above video, and they aren't actually offensive to feminists or feminism at all as far as I can tell.
I don’t recall who it was in science fiction, but it might have been Phillip Jose Farmer; someone who had been criticized for their inability to write female characters. I’ve found it more speaks to the taste of the reader, and it reveals more about their own prejudice and preference for how they want their characters shaped. There’s nothing I can think of in terms of a writer who just writes objectively bad characters when demarcated by gender; but me not being TM’s biggest fiction reader, I wouldn’t be the one to know. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
There have been many.
Isaac Asimov did kind of write women as basically alien creatures who exist only as sexual distractions for men (Susan Calvin being a notable exception), but, he was an uber-nerd who got started writing in the 1930s. Women probably were distracting alien creatures to him. And to be honest, I always thought Asimov just sucked at characterization in general. His characters are mostly hooks to hang a plot on.
Heinlein, of course, wrote uber-competent characters of both sexes, but his women were usually sexual libertines, and coincidentally, hot, young, nubile, and inexplicably attracted to potato-shaped older men who might happen to resemble a middle-aged SF author.
Those two archetypes, in various forms, are what you find in most early SF, and that's what grinds most feminist readers' gears: women are, in one form or another, basically male fantasies and sex objects. But most of those early SF writers were writing women in the roles that actually existed for women at the time. Some created women who could be smart and brave and actually do things, many just put women in the "wife/sister/girlfriend" role.
(Edgar Rice Burroughs' women were almost exclusively damsels in distress and/or objects of veneration. Robert E. Howard actually wrote female warriors like Belit and Red Nails. H.P. Lovecraft was probably more scared of women than he was of brown people and Shoggoths.)
Modern feminist critique mostly strikes me as bad faith (they will go through a book, analyzing an assortment of characters, and conclude that an author is misogynistic because his female characters have too much romantic attention put on them, or don't have enough to do, or have to be rescued by a man, or fulfill a "gendered role" or whatever). In some cases the observations are actually correct (yes, all the women are romantic interests and are not the action heroes the men are), but that is not necessarily a bad (or unrealistic) thing unless, well, you're a feminist reader who demands all stories give "equal representation" no matter how it distorts the story. But I can see how it would be kind of annoying to read book after book where men are the interesting characters and heroes who do things while women are just their love interests; better authors, even ones who aren't trying to be "feminist," can still make the female characters interesting. Less good authors just make them decoration. But you are not wrong that bad female characterization is usually reflective of an author who's just bad at characterization in general. (A lot of early, and contemporary(!), authors write great ideas, great plots, but cardboard characters.)
Ironically, one popular author often praised highly for his female characters is Brandon Sanderson. It's true his female characters are usually interesting, smart, brave bad-asses who still remain feminine. (Don't forget, Sando is still a Mormon and that always shows around the edges.) But his female characters are also all the same character. He basically can only write one. (Okay, maybe two or three.)
So anyway, yes, the woman in the OP is fairly typical of feminist critics: it's not that any of the women are unrealistic or "bad" characters. It's that they aren't checking her boxes and measuring up against men in the way she thinks they should. I don't know how often women actually note "perky tits" on themselves or other women, but the meme on the Internet is "breasting boobily," which is basically about male authors who spend too much time emphasizing a woman's appearance (and especially her breasts) in every scene, having her examine herself in a mirror (so the author can describe her perky tits), etc. This sometimes happens, and sometimes you do get the impression the author is infatuated with his own character, but now it's like a lot of writing memes, where it's a pattern you sometimes see but the mere existence of it in a scene is not, contrary to lots of bad writing advice, "bad writing."
(I mean, if you start the book with your character waking up from a dream, or the first thing the female character does is check herself out in the mirror, I probably am going to roll my eyes hard.)
Maybe the real cosmic horror was the women and brown people we met along the way.
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I don't know if it was that he was scared, or somewhere on the asexual spectrum.
It is pretty revealing that his most "interesting" female character was actually a body-swapped male sorcerer.
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It doesn’t seem to be on YouTube anymore, but to the point about Asimov, several years ago there was a very old archived video of him being interviewed, in a discussion with Marilyn vos Savant (allegedly the world’s smartest woman). Throughout the whole exchange you could tell he was just sitting there, loving it the whole time in laid back, relaxed fashion. Asimov was known pretty well to be something of a chauvinist whose mannerisms most assuredly wouldn’t jive pretty well with the views of women in 2026. Even so though, it doesn’t mean his views were inaccurate; essentially what you touched on. I roll my eyes at the imperative that says women are being demeaned and unappreciated if they aren’t out there essentially acting like men. Someone has to fulfill that role anyway, and it’s not natural to who men are.
If you look at a lot of women now, a lot of them are just miserable, wretched and desperate. I’m not one of those people who thinks women are purely something fashioned by men’s own living. Women just are what they are, and there’s something that makes them unalterable and fixed; and something that can’t be fashioned. You can make them miserable or sick; but you can’t change them. Women the world over are all mostly the same; they’re only a little more happy or healthy, or a little more miserable and ill. And that depends according to whether their men understand how to treat them or not. They aren’t like men in the very fundamental sense that they don’t really have any destiny to work out for themselves or some sense of "true womanhood," that’s yet to be found while we just leave her alone.
Take a mole and force it live on a concrete floor; or throw a frog into a sand dune; or confine a cat to a space only just large enough to allow it to move its tail, and you’ll be a complete success in one respect: you’ll have succeeded so thoroughly in distorting their primary instincts, that you’ll have made them pissed off and desperate and miserable (and probably sickly as well). To me the way the Sci-Fi writers of old took to writing them made a lot of sense.
This may be the interview.
I'm not sure I agree with many of your opinions here, particularly that all women are apparently mostly the same. I've heard feminist women make the same charges against men and I agree with them about as much as I agree with you. Anyway I'm compulsive when people can't find things so hopefully I've found your video.
Yes, that’s the one! Thank you.
Agree to disagree on the rest, I suppose. I’d be more curious to hear about your own experience and evidence otherwise. If people generally were more differentiated and individualized then they were similar and herd-like, you’d never be able to aggregate experiences to draw any reasonable inferences between them. If you want to zero in on very small idiosyncratic behaviors, that’s undoubtedly where you’ll find the most amount of variation between people, but they’re more similar in more ways than they are different than others.
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Asimov was known for a very spare, plot driven writing style which literary types absolutely hate. But as many have pointed out, he did characterization just fine...,as long as you count robots as characters. His most character driven story is probably the novelette "The Bicentennial Man", but even the short stories had memorable characters like Nestor-10.
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The reasonable commentary I've seen is that the point of a mirror scene is so the POV character can describe to the audience what they look like (although, as I've read, a real person looking at themselves in the mirror usually notices what's changed, what they don't like, that their hair's a mess at the moment...). Presumably many authors think that when describing a female main character, cup size is a mandatory inclusion.
Right, the reason for a mirror scene is obvious. It's just become such a cliche at this point, it's like "It was a dark and stormy night."
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The MC in The Diplomat is not disorganized or bad at fashion or manners. She is in fact explicitly hyper competent, to the point she's being considered for the vice presidency based on merit. That's the point of the show. The conflict in her character is that she's not where she wants to be, doing things she doesn't want to do, tied to a marriage she wants to end but can't, and surrounded by people who lie to her. I personally quite like her characterization.
Calling that show crowd-pleasing does not match my experience. My normie wife could not make it through a single episode. Whereas I like it because I'm a nerd for international relations and US Gov stuff. On the other hand I think a show likes Fleabag is much more of a crowd pleaser, with all its little winking naughtiness and fourth wall breaking, it's very modern vibes, no wonder it gets so much acclaim. And yet I got bored and couldn't finish the first episode, partly because I found the MC insufferable.
I really hate the way The Diplomat is written. I don’t really know how to describe it, but if I did I’d have to call it something like ‘midwit core’. It feels like Scandal, which imagined itself as a political thriller but which was actually about the super hot protagonist secretly being the most powerful person in the world and hypercompetent and hot and every gorgeous guy wanted her for her brains AND beauty. Okay, yeah I remember Wattpad too. Scandal would also randomly drop in obscure references to domestic or international politics in one liners to make the show seem smarter than it was.
There is just the sense in The Diplomat, too, that the writer is so smug for occasionally throwing in a line of obscure Wikipedia or Whitehall or Foreign Policy or intelligence circle / tradecraft stuff or Britishisms she doesn’t really understand and thinking that this has lent this ridiculous thriller a certain realism. For example, the writer’s grasp of the British class system, Westminster intrigue, the makeup of the Conservative and Labour parties, what the right and the left want, is so warped, it’s like the foreign correspondent for the New York Times in London spent six hours editing the script. It’s not about ‘realism’ - the average American political thriller that features the UK is entirely unobjectionable even in its ridiculousness because it doesn’t pretend to understand domestic politics. The Diplomat will throw in references to niche recent historical events (not like Brexit), specific newspapers or conferences, an Oxford college, a minor public school, a members club, a medium sized financial institution, later US politics too, but in a way that like an LLM would when it’s being overly niche in an unrealistic way, with no background, with no deep cultural understanding of anything (“give me a random deep cut reference that only someone in the New England upper middle class would understand. Make no mistakes”). I note that the creator and writer worked on later seasons of the West Wing, when it got much worse for this, because even when Sorkin is at his worst (which is often) his dialogue, while unrealistic and ultra-liberal, has a certain weight on background that The Diplomat just lacks.
I also find the show’s politics particularly grating. It’s not that it’s like a final vestige of Hillary Clinton era ‘neoliberalism’ or whatever we’re calling it now. I literally liked The Newsroom, I’m clearly not politically picky with my television. I think it’s that this is a prestige drama that sees itself very firmly as imparting a Very Specific Message That is Very Important, when actually it’s a poorly plotted (loosely) “political” thriller where the villains are perennially either venal Biden staffer types who just want power or some loose constellation of bumbling evil ‘far right’. The irony is that I think the main villain is actually an attempt by the writers to cast a Hillary Clinton type as bad, her paranoia damning the world if our heroic and very similar Powerful Woman doesn’t stop her, retroactively excusing 2016 in an “it wasn’t the ideas or the type of person, just the wrong person” kind of a way.
Keri Russell is good. She was always good and the problems with this show are 99% a bad script. Her husband’s character is probably the best in the show.
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I've only watched the first season of the Diplomat, but there is loads of stuff of her hating to dress up for functions, mentioning she needs the toilet or her chair squeaking at undiplomatic moments, and such. It struck me as a character flaw that was not really a flaw, because she is played by Keri Russell and basically looks perfect and is perfectly charming throughout and even when stumbling over her words. Like you I actually quite liked her character and the show, and only meant my crowd-pleasing comment to apply to that aspect of her characterisation, in contrast to a show where the heroine's flaws make her genuinely offputting to a big slice of the audience.
Re Fleabag, I think her flaws in ep1 are genuinely offputting (they did put you off, and me, in that I watched the pilot and didn't return to it for a couple of years) and in that sense the show is not a people pleaser. It may be in others, sure, though I think the winking naughtiness turns out later to be well-rooted in character (and actually in character pain).
Yeah that makes sense. But I would argue that just because she doesn't have an interest in fashion/niceties/etc doesn't mean she can't or doesn't pull it off. Quite the contrary, the plot is often about why these political niceties actually matter in politics, and her having to compromise her no-nonsense vibe to succeed.
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Fleabag is a very good example. I find that many men seem to kind of hate Fleabag (the character, if not the show) though. Which is not to say that the character is meant to be particularly likeable, obviously she mistreats people around her all the time, but she is fundamentally sympathetic in the sense that she is acting out and has a terrible relationship with women because of the early death of her mother, she is earnest in her own way, she isn’t a caricature of a horrible person. I wonder if it’s because Fleabag is kind of the story of one of those evil BPD cheating whores some men online like to complain about, except told from her perspective instead of just his.
It's kind of the MO for prestigey shows to have a reverse save-the-cat moment or several early on to make you dislike the main character, then get you to sympathise with them regardless as you get to know them over the course of the series. For this reason it may not be a bad thing for a creator if their audience dislikes the character at first – certainly I didn't much like Fleabag (the character) in the pilot ep, though I came to like her more. Any online man who's apt to hate her initially is therefore actually positioned to have an especially powerful viewing experience – though only if they actually persevere with the show.
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