Wanna Have Me Fix Your Love Life? Come To Columbus In Two Weeks!
DISCLAIMER: I do not actually promise to fix your love life. But if you’re poly and havin’ issues, I can probably give you some tools to help fix things.
I’ll be presenting down in Columbus at the kink event Winter Wickedness, where I’ll be giving two presentations on polyamory:
* Fucking Lots Of People Without Fucking Over Your Partner: How To Open Up Your Relationship
* Jealousy Is Not A Crime: Troubleshooting Broken Polyamory
It all happens on Saturday, February 7th, and the event has a ton of other neat classes if you’re at all into kink – in particular, one suspects @IPCookieMonster will have some damned smart things to say. Tickets are still available, so if you’re curious, get in there now!
Why Not Roll A Die To Determine The Sex Of The Character In Your Story?
Last night, I caught myself defaulting to male again.
Which is to say, I was writing a novel, and my protagonist was wandering through a cargo bay. A dockworker told him to scurry off.
The dockworker was male. Because my default characters are always male. It’s an unthinking bias I’ve picked up over the years from various cartoons and movies – stories where you have a bunch of guys and one woman, whose role in the group is often “Just be a woman.” The guys are these strong personality types – the hot-head, the wounded soldier, the brain – and then you have Smurfette.
So what you come to internalize over time is that “guy” is the default mode of “human.” And when you create a character at random, what pops out unless you specifically fight this urge is Yet Another Dude. This is something that the creator of BoJack Horseman goes into in a lot more depth in a rather infamous Tumblr post.
I caught this one, and switched the dockworker to a woman. Another victory against a nasty template – because if you aren’t careful about populating your world with female characters, you wind up creating yet another Smurfette world where every incidental character your protagonists encounter is male, creating a world with an implied alternate biology where hey, females are born only 3% of the time! They must be! We certainly don’t see ’em elsewhere.
But I had people saying, “That’s cool! I should roll dice to determine what the gender of my characters is.” Which is something I’d thought about doing, early on in my career – just randomly assigning genders via the nerdiest fucking methodology possible.
If you wanna see how weird gender is, assign your genders randomly.
Because while you can do it – I tried for a while – the thing that’ll leap out at you in critiques is how the exact same personality gets viewed in different ways, merely based on whether they’re sporting a pair of breasts or not.
Remember, you’re not just creating “a character,” as in rolling up their stats. Good writers give their characters strong personality traits, and don’t just stop when you’ve discovered what’s lurking between their legs. So you don’t just roll up a woman – you decide “Hey, I want a hard-drinking, alienated ex-soldier who passive-aggressively seeks intimacy” and then roll your dice and go “BING! Woman.”
And if she is a woman, she will often get entirely different reactions. What’d be seen as proof of competency from a dude – snapping off corrections – comes off as bitchy from a woman. (Imagine a female House insulting everyone in the emergency room as she yanks the scalpel out of their hands. She’s not gonna be nearly as lovable.) If a woman wants romance, she’s often seen as needier. People will have a harder time buying into the idea that a woman character defaults to violence.
You’ll also be saddened from critiquers – often female ones – who will point out that yes, your ass-kicking female character has been tied up and carried off by the bad guys and not been sexually assaulted. Maybe you have, quite consciously, decided to create a world where you’re just not dealing with that shit, in much the same way that somehow James Bond – who has enemies who want to humiliate him – never seem to rape his ass in all of this kinky bondage. And it’s a valid choice, to have your world just skip over the realities of sexual assault, in much the same way that gun-toting detective narratives often skip over the realities of the PTSD that would come from gunning down strangers.
Yet you’ll get pushback. Because for a lot of these readers, often and particularly female ones, the world doesn’t feel real to them unless you’re addressing the fears that they often deal with.
It goes both ways, of course. A woman who’d be a nice, supportive housewife will often read as a useless wimp when rolled up as male. An emotionally needy guy will often be seen as a douche, even if his worries about his partner’s infidelities are completely warranted. A depressive introvert with social anxiety? Beloved as female, often written off as a male. Gender roles cut both ways.
Which is not to say that you can’t make it work. You can. But you’ll be shocked when you take someone who you saw as sympathetic, and discover that they’re viewed as worthless, simply because of what gender you happened to assign them.
Hell, I have some fears on that level. I have my book Flex coming out soon, and one of the main characters is a videogame-obsessed, sexually voracious, overweight woman. She gets all the best lines, of course, because she’s also funny as hell and insightful. But she is, essentially, a gender-swapped detective archetype – loving kinky sex, reluctant to commit to anyone, prone to violence and passionate in all her desires – and I’m a little terrified of how people are going to interpret her.
And maybe Valentine will be as loved as I want her to be. Note how I have seeded this essay with the word “often,” because fiction is a magical art and sometimes characters work for people out of the box. I’m not saying that all angry women will be seen as irrational – I’m saying that in my experience an angry female character is more likely to be seen as irrational, and if you write enough characters you’ll start to go “Oh, yeah, if I don’t want to have people hating her I’m going to need to justify her anger more here.”
The point is, if you assign gender randomly, you’ll start to see how crazy our fucking society is. You’ll have someone who you need to be sympathetic for purposes of the narrative, and just because they’re the “wrong” gender you’ll have to work three times as hard to make them likeable. You’ll see the biases exposed right there in your fiction.
And you’ll to experience directly what many claim is the female experience: you gotta work three times as hard to be as good as a man. I don’t know, I’m not a woman.
But I do know that writing gender-blind isn’t as easy as rolling dice. Merely changing the gender can change the whole tone of a story. And monitoring how that tone shifts can provide a vital, vital education.
Meet A Weasel In Seattle! And Cleveland!
So if you hadn’t noticed somehow, I have a book coming out – and as such, am running around like an idiot signing it for people. Which means I’ll read from the book! I’ll shake hands! I’ll go out for drinks afterwards, because I like both people and alcohol!
And I’ll be in Seattle on Friday, March 20th!
Friday, March 20th: University Book Store, in Seattle
4326 University Way NE Seattle WA 981105
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Every time I’ve ever been to Seattle was on a rushed business trip, so I’m hoping to get here early and kick around for a bit. But please! Spread the word! And come about if you feel like saying “howdy”!
Also, Cleveland residents will note that my official book release party is a go for Friday, March 6th, at 7 p.m. Please show up! I’m scared and lonely! There will be cake and beautiful fingernails and I will critique your choice of donuts!
Friday, March 6th: Loganberry Books, in Cleveland
13015 Larchmere Blvd., Shaker Heights, Ohio 44120
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
And in case you’re going “Aw, man, I wanted to hang out Ferrett!” and you live in New York or Boston, remember these dates:
Friday, March 13th: WORD Bookstore Brooklyn
126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 14th: Annie’s Book Stop Of Worcester
65 James Street, Worcester MA 01603
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Weird Thoughts: Crossing The Street Equivalents?
I feel bad about my dog’s leash, but she’d be dead in minutes if I let her loose. She doesn’t know about looking both ways, you see. If some other dog catches her eye, she’ll make a beeline for that dog on the other side of the road, even if traffic’s coming.
Thing is, at one point I was as dumb as my dog. I had the benefit of language and training, so my parents taught me to “look both ways before you cross the street,” and so I managed to learn about a grave and constant danger that could kill me.
And I wondered: native Americans didn’t have cars. But they must have had some equivalent of the “look both ways” lesson – some fatal ignorance that got poor kids killed unless they learned it. One suspects it’s the “don’t wander off into the woods” lesson, given all the Grimm’s fairytales about kids ending poorly after loping off… but that’s not quite an equivalent, given that it’s something we still have to teach kids today, albeit in a modified form. (“Don’t wander off into the store” remains a classic source of parental panic.)
I suspect a direct equivalent to the “look both ways” lesson is one that I, a fairly intelligent man in another civilization, would not have internalized. Just as a tribal dude from deep jungles brought to America wouldn’t have any particular instincts to “look both ways before crossing this path.” (Maybe he’d suss it out, if he was lucky enough to be in an area with enough traffic, but given that he doesn’t routinely deal with speeding hunks of death lurching at him from nowhere, he certainly wouldn’t default to it.)
So what is this outdoors-specific lesson that I probably would not know? Well, I don’t know.
Maybe you do?
So Who'd Come See Me In Oregon?
So I’m planning my book tour, and trying to get a Portland/Eugene stop – but I have no idea how many people I know in Oregon. So if you’d be in either area, and would come see me do a reading in the March 20th-31st range, do me a favor and leave a comment here so I know? (Also tell me which area, or potentially both in the unlikely event you’re willing to drive that far.)
This is a super-quick turnaround time, so if you know of someone who would attend, tap ’em on the shoulder for me? Thanks, you lovely Oregon people.
(Not-so-subtle hint: Don’t worry, Seattle, I gotcha covered.)