Guest Post: The Lone Woman, or Gender Imbalance in the Action-Adventure Genre

Today, I have a guest post from Rabia Gale, who is also one of my WANA buddies.  She’s done a lot of posts on how women are depicted in fantasy novels on her blog and has a novella out called Rainbird.  Here’s her bio:

Rabia Gale breaks fairy tales and fuses fantasy and science fiction. She loves to write about flawed heroes who never give up, transformation and redemption, and things from outer space. She grew up in Karachi, Pakistan and now lives in Northern Virginia. Check out her fantasy novella, Rainbird , or visit her online at
http://www.rabiagale.com

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A few months ago, while watching an episode of Warehouse 13, something about the show began to bug me. It wasn’t until a scene with most of the characters on-screen that I realized what had set my story senses tingling.

There were too many women in the cast. Two female field agents, one female geek, one female psychic. Add the formidable Mrs. Frederic to the women’s side, and the two men were outnumbered.

Warehouse 12 did something right, for it exposed how I’m conditioned to expect far fewer women than men in my action-adventure. If the gender imbalance had gone the other way—as is often the case—I wouldn’t have been bothered at all.

I grew up in the 80s, so I’m no stranger to the Token Woman phenomenon in many of the cartoon shows I watched. From Cheetara in ThunderCats (no, I’m not counting the prepubescent Wily Kit) to the princess (what was her name again?) in Voltron (the planet version) to Arcee in Transformers: The Movie, these characters were mostly sidekicks and/or love interests. For young girls like me, desperate to find a character to identify with, they were often the only way to live vicariously in the worlds and adventures that captivated us.

As I grew older, female characters went from supporting characters to protagonists. However, the lone woman trope still persisted. It had morphed into the Special Snowflake Woman. She was the one female who dared to do a man’s job, usually by becoming a warrior or ruling the kingdom in her own name. This Special Snowflake Woman was different from ordinary women—often because she hated embroidery, dancing, or the vapid chatter of her female companions—and inducted into the company of men. Males were her teachers, friends, and companions.

What this trope did was  to set our heroines—and by extension the female reader—apart from other women. This trope—especially in fantasy—denigrates the majority of women, painting them as weak, stupid, and boring. It reinforces a male ideal of strength, and ignores the complexities of female relationships.

When we write so few women into our stories, we miss out on the opportunities for the tough, middle-aged female veterans to mentor young, starry-eyed swordswomen, for a queen and her daughter to argue over policy, for the tomboy to befriend and value the dainty girl who loves to embroider. We miss the opportunity to take a group of very different women and send them to pull off a heist, tramp through the wilderness, defend the village, or outwit the Dark Lady (*grin*).

You know, just like the men do.

 

How I Stopped Buying So Many Books

I’ve always loved to read.  When I was growing up, I’d go to the library and get an armload of books and polish them off in a week.  When I was old enough to buy my own books, I went to the bookstore at least once a week and spend way too much money.  But there was nothing like finding a great book, and better still, a book that I wanted to reread again and again.  I’d eagerly pop down to the bookstore as soon as I heard that one of the series authors I liked to read and buy the hardback version because I couldn’t wait.

That start to change about 10 years ago, and significantly changed in the last few years.  Now go into a bookstore once a month, and sometimes I don’t buy anything at all.

It was because I noticed a trend — the overall quality of books was declining. Not just one author, but all the series authors.  As I writer, I think this was a combination of an aging series and pressures to produce a book a year, regardless of how good it is.

So I stopped buying hardbacks.  It wasn’t worth spending $27 for a hardback and getting a story that just didn’t work.  Instead, I waited for the paperback to come out.  At $5 a book, it wasn’t a deal-breaker to get a book that didn’t quite work.

Until the price went up to $7, and a new trend: The books all felt like the same thing.  I wasn’t getting anything different or exciting.  As writers, we hear that we have to write a story that’s different but not so different that it’s a risk in order for agents and publishers to consider it.  There’s not a lot of room in that to be different, and the result is the books don’t take risks that ignite the excitement of readers like me.

So now I’m a lot more picky, even for a paperback.  I don’t care for romantic subplots.  At $5, I’d get the book anyway if it looked good.  At $7, it’s a pass. If I see multiple instances of profanity in the first few pages, it’s a pass.  If it’s in first person, it’s probably a pass.

Enter ePublishing.  John Locke sells a million books for .99.  Suddenly all the writers are flocking to eBooks and selling their stories for the same amount.  As a reader, I usually pass on the .99 and free books.  These are often not ready for publication and feel more like the writer is hoping to cash in on John Locke’s success with a cheap price.  I like the $3.99 price range because I can experiment without feeling like I’m going to waste my money.

Price will influence me to not buy a book.  However, it will not influence me to buy a book.  I want better books.  I want to recapture the magic of finding buried treasure in book.

Have the changes in the book industry influenced what you buy?

 

eReaders–Good or Bad

I just got a Sony eReader over the weekend.  The Kindle wasn’t even on my radar because of price, as well as the limitation of being able to only use Kindle books.  I’ve been using at lunch time during the week, but I haven’t made up my mind whether I liked it or not.  The one thing I know is that it doesn’t replace books.  There is something very different about reading a screen–it tends to make me scan more than read–versus a page in a book.  But I also like the portability of it–it fits in my coat pocket and isn’t very heavy.

But like anything else, it has its good points and its bad points.

The Good:

I can easily see eReaders becoming very useful in a couple areas, though the technology would need to come a lot further before that happened.  One is school textbooks.  An eReader would be so much better than lugging around heavy textbooks.  Same thing for some technical manuals.  When I was in the Army, we had these giant technical manuals that were sometimes a foot thick (those came in three volumes).  An incredible amount of detail, but a cumbersome book to deal with.  An eReader would be ideal for taking a copy of the manual out to the truck to do the work.  Just display the one page you’re working from–no books falling off or pages flipping closed.

Also great: I found a publisher for a genre I haven’t read before (and not available at the library).  They have a few free short stories up on the site, so I can check on the genre to see if I want to read more.  It’s a nice way to get introduced to new things.

The Bad:

Price is still a big issue.  I was shopping around for books and found an eBook release of a best-selling author’s book.  It was priced like a hardback, though there wasn’t any paper, ink–just a computer file.

The technology looks outdated.  Seriously, we have cell phones in full color, and my eBook reader is in black and white.  Even the next step up (touch screen) was in black and white.

Some people are predicting that the eBook will make books go away, though I disagree.  I think it’s another form of a book that people will use but that they will go back to the paper copy anyway.  Didn’t they say the same thing when TV came out?  The book’s still here.  Actually, I think the people who are saying books will go away are not big readers.  For a big reader, it’s just another way to find more books!

Do you have an eBook reader?  What do you think of it?