Mother, daughter, temptress, victim

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

A writer, essayist, poet and professor at the University of Puget Sound, where I earned my English degree, gave an insightful lecture on representation and the nature of good writing. She was a Black woman speaking to an entirely white class, so she explored the anxieties and stereotypes writers fall into when portraying characters of other cultures, races and ethnicities.

“Great writers,” she said, “can capture the essence of characters who are the complete opposite of themselves, because great writers all have one thing in common: empathy. All it takes to write meaningful characters is the willingness to learn and the understanding that your subject — or rather, the real people who will identify with your subject — are human beings.”

It only takes a few episodes of Game of Thrones to learn that, often, male writers forget that women are human beings. Typically, these writers confuse strong female representation with representation of strong females — but women can’t be reduced to breasts, backflips and bench pressing. A character who can throw a punch is nothing without a personality.

Alexandra Dewitt is a character in the DC Comics Universe, who, in Green Lantern Vol. 3 No. 54, was strangled by Major Force and stuffed into a refrigerator. Courtesy image.

Game of Thrones included plenty of female fighters alongside 50 rape scenes. All of the main female characters were sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault at one point or another, and yet these statistics are actually an improvement from the A Song of Ice and Fire novel series by George R.R. Martin, which contains 214 rape scenes to date — all supposedly included in the name of historical accuray in a fantasy series.

Apparently, in Martin’s mind, every woman born between 400 to 1400 C.E. was a victim of rape.

No one’s arguing that sexual violence against women doesn’t exist; its portrayal does have its place in fiction. However, if, like in Game of Thrones, the abuse is fetishized and serves only to shock audiences rather than meaningfully contribute to the female character’s story arc, it becomes nothing more than trauma porn.

Though not all violence against women is inherently sexual, the graphic fates of female characters span all genres and target audiences. Famously, comic book writer Gail Simon compiled a 1999 list of dead or brutalized characters, dubbed “Women in Refrigerators.” The title refers to Ron Marz’s Green Lantern Vol. 3 No. 54, in which the titular hero discovers his girlfriend has been strangled and shoved into a fridge. Audiences later adopted the term “fridging” to refer to female characters who were abused, raped, murdered or otherwise stripped of their power (in both a literal and fantasy sense) to further the development of the male characters around them.

Think of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, May Parker, Gwen Stacy, Meredith Quill, Gamora, Ayesha, Frigga, Ying Li and more were all killed for the benefit of a man. Now compare that list to all the male characters who died and came back to life, often with new powers.

I was 14 and sobbing in the theater when I first watched Gwen Stacy plummet to her death in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 — a vicious ending that taught Peter Parker the dangers of life as a superhero. Gwen Stacy was as close as I got to the representation I craved as a kid. She was highly intelligent, witty, awkward and she even helped save New York multiple times.

When Gwen follows Spider-Man to her death, she tells him: “Nobody makes my decisions for me. All right? Nobody. This is my choice, OK? My choice. This is mine.” 

The fact that writers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner damned Gwen with those words made a mockery of her character. Whatever agency audiences thought she had — whatever power she claimed over the narrative — was thrown back in her face, and she was left with a snapped spine and a rushed funeral scene.

Watching that, as a middle-school girl, was like having all my hope for the future ground into the dirt. The helpless, sexy Mary Jane in Spider-Man lives on while a woman who actually resembles reality leaks blood and brain matter from her nose.

As someone who studied creative writing in college, I’ve had multiple men tell me it’s virtually impossible to write women without using stereotypes or making them tools for the male protagonist’s development. I’ve never heard a woman say that about writing men.

It’s not entirely their fault — film, TV and novels primarily center on men and portray a variety of character types. It’s far easier to write something that you see everyday.

It’s made more difficult by the fact that men, in my experience, find traditionally “masculine” character traits undesirable or irritating in women.

For example, most of the men I spoke to about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny hated the character Helena Shaw, while all the women I met loved her. Shaw is a rogue with typical “bad boy” attributes: she drinks, fights, rides a motorcycle, ogles men, and overcomes her selfishness and greed as she bonds with the characters around her. Swap her gender, and Helena is essentially Han Solo, Captain Jack Sparrow or Star Lord.

It isn’t fair to say that good representation is as easy as writing a male character and changing his name to Tina, but it’s certainly a step up from the battered, fetishized women that populate today’s media. Bad writers who lack empathy for their subjects, or at least refuse to learn about people unlike themselves, have become — or perhaps have always been — so common that pop culture mistakes their fetishes for talent.

Generation Alpha — those born beginning in 2010 and who are now at their most impressionable — should not have to grow up normalizing Disney’s penchant for dead mothers or Marvel’s need to reduce women to sexual objects, reproductive organs or corpses. If you’re incapable of empathizing with and writing about half of the world’s population, save your mother, sister, daughter, aunt or neighbor the trauma — choose a different profession.