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In re - Magic:
Something that's been frustrating me a lot about genre novels lately, especially fantasy ones, is that it seems to me magic ought to change more than it does about gender balance in pre-industrial societies. So in a fantasy world where most of the people don't have magic, ok, we still could have some kind of feudal patriarchy set up. But I've read a fair number of books where just about every second character has magical power, and yet their culture seems to be some kind of fuzzy European Medieval Lite world. To my way of thinking, if a significant number of women have magical power, shouldn't that change the dynamics of force?
I guess I feel that if magic works, it ought to change things about the way society works. And if it doesn't, I want to know why. Do you need to get into a special school or be introduced into a special mystery in order to learn magic? Then of course a group of men might have kept women out of those schools or cut them off from those mysteries - equivalent to not allowing women into law school perhaps. But then I want to know what the women did with the magic they had but couldn't train - are there scary and powerful herb witches all over? Do the women practice their magic, competing against each other while the men ignore them (like in Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, without the rather sexist bit about how the guy could improve the spells by applying male analytical expertise instead of relying on superstition like women did)? Does your magical strength depend on your physical strength, so that even though both men and women can do magic, men with slightly-larger-on-average size have an advantage in magic as well as in physical violence?
In re - Sex and Violence:
I've been re-reading both Sarah Monette's Melusine and The Virtu and Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher comic series this week, and thinking about victimization and objectification in stories - how often are women the subjects of sexual desire, objectifying men, vs. how often are they the objects of sexual desire, being objectified by men. How likely within the world of the story is it that men will be the victims of sexual violence or coercion, vs. how likely is it within the world of the story that women will be the victims of sexual violence or coercion. Are men the victims of women or of men exclusively, or somewhat equally of both? What about women? Are they victimized by other women, by other men, or both? The answers to these questions often determine a lot of my subconscious response to stories. [edited to add: I should make it clear that both the work of Ms. Monette and of Messieurs Ennis and Dillon strikes me as being unusually good at presenting balance in these areas - they're very far from being the kind of off-balance story I'm complaining about in the next paragraph]
I don't trust stories where only men do the sexual objectifying and the victimizing. Sometimes these stories allow both men and women to be the victims, but it is always men doing the victimizing. I see the same patterns creep into my own writing sometimes, because it's easier - easier to write about the monster in the closet as a man, about the cowering victim as a woman. Easier to write about women who become strong or frightening in response to trauma, trying to prove themselves "in a man's world". I think real life and real history are more complicated than we let ourselves remember.
Magic, Sex, and Violence all together - paranormal romance and women written horror
It seems to me as if these thoughts come together somehow when you look at paranormal romance/horror stories. The most popular authors I read in these genres write stories where important male characters have been victims of physical and sexual violence; where powerful abusers are often female and may abuse either gender (and where the folks who protect others from that abuse can be either male or female); and where the power structures in communities change in ways that are more complicated than in a lot of other stories I see. These aren't feminist utopias or dystopias, not radical re-writes of history. The worlds of these stories are still worlds where the odds of getting raped or brutalized are statistically higher if you're female - but they're worlds where the damage done to men shows up more, and where more women stand as protectors not just to other women but also to other men. Personally, I've known an awful lot of men in my life who were victims of emotional, sexual, and yes, also physical abuse. But the world of pop literature too often makes it seem as if it is always the women who are the victims, the men who are the victimizers.
Ok, I haven't come up with anything definitive or clear or new here, and I've been thinking/writing/rewriting/erasing for an hour and a half. I'm just going to call this a record of the thoughts I've been working on this week and let it go for now. The whole thing seems pretty rough and unclear to me - not systemic or well structured. But it's notes to go on, I guess. Somewhere in there is buried a really intense argument I want to have with myself, if I could just figure out what it is.
Something that's been frustrating me a lot about genre novels lately, especially fantasy ones, is that it seems to me magic ought to change more than it does about gender balance in pre-industrial societies. So in a fantasy world where most of the people don't have magic, ok, we still could have some kind of feudal patriarchy set up. But I've read a fair number of books where just about every second character has magical power, and yet their culture seems to be some kind of fuzzy European Medieval Lite world. To my way of thinking, if a significant number of women have magical power, shouldn't that change the dynamics of force?
I guess I feel that if magic works, it ought to change things about the way society works. And if it doesn't, I want to know why. Do you need to get into a special school or be introduced into a special mystery in order to learn magic? Then of course a group of men might have kept women out of those schools or cut them off from those mysteries - equivalent to not allowing women into law school perhaps. But then I want to know what the women did with the magic they had but couldn't train - are there scary and powerful herb witches all over? Do the women practice their magic, competing against each other while the men ignore them (like in Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife, without the rather sexist bit about how the guy could improve the spells by applying male analytical expertise instead of relying on superstition like women did)? Does your magical strength depend on your physical strength, so that even though both men and women can do magic, men with slightly-larger-on-average size have an advantage in magic as well as in physical violence?
In re - Sex and Violence:
I've been re-reading both Sarah Monette's Melusine and The Virtu and Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher comic series this week, and thinking about victimization and objectification in stories - how often are women the subjects of sexual desire, objectifying men, vs. how often are they the objects of sexual desire, being objectified by men. How likely within the world of the story is it that men will be the victims of sexual violence or coercion, vs. how likely is it within the world of the story that women will be the victims of sexual violence or coercion. Are men the victims of women or of men exclusively, or somewhat equally of both? What about women? Are they victimized by other women, by other men, or both? The answers to these questions often determine a lot of my subconscious response to stories. [edited to add: I should make it clear that both the work of Ms. Monette and of Messieurs Ennis and Dillon strikes me as being unusually good at presenting balance in these areas - they're very far from being the kind of off-balance story I'm complaining about in the next paragraph]
I don't trust stories where only men do the sexual objectifying and the victimizing. Sometimes these stories allow both men and women to be the victims, but it is always men doing the victimizing. I see the same patterns creep into my own writing sometimes, because it's easier - easier to write about the monster in the closet as a man, about the cowering victim as a woman. Easier to write about women who become strong or frightening in response to trauma, trying to prove themselves "in a man's world". I think real life and real history are more complicated than we let ourselves remember.
Magic, Sex, and Violence all together - paranormal romance and women written horror
It seems to me as if these thoughts come together somehow when you look at paranormal romance/horror stories. The most popular authors I read in these genres write stories where important male characters have been victims of physical and sexual violence; where powerful abusers are often female and may abuse either gender (and where the folks who protect others from that abuse can be either male or female); and where the power structures in communities change in ways that are more complicated than in a lot of other stories I see. These aren't feminist utopias or dystopias, not radical re-writes of history. The worlds of these stories are still worlds where the odds of getting raped or brutalized are statistically higher if you're female - but they're worlds where the damage done to men shows up more, and where more women stand as protectors not just to other women but also to other men. Personally, I've known an awful lot of men in my life who were victims of emotional, sexual, and yes, also physical abuse. But the world of pop literature too often makes it seem as if it is always the women who are the victims, the men who are the victimizers.
Ok, I haven't come up with anything definitive or clear or new here, and I've been thinking/writing/rewriting/erasing for an hour and a half. I'm just going to call this a record of the thoughts I've been working on this week and let it go for now. The whole thing seems pretty rough and unclear to me - not systemic or well structured. But it's notes to go on, I guess. Somewhere in there is buried a really intense argument I want to have with myself, if I could just figure out what it is.
