While many a feminist still admires them, I have heard the Martial Maids dismissed because they are depicted as outliers, that is, extraordinary because a woman is performing feats of arms which would be ordinary if done by a man. I do not know if this is a mainstream criticism or not, but it strikes me as telling.
The call for strong female characters is like the call for more environmental purity and cleanliness. In the 1950s, (ironically, the same period, thanks to the growth of mass media, when women were being treated in a less dignified way than their mothers), there was pollution in the air and in the streams that formed a danger to public health. Some reasonable laws were made to curb the problem, and the problem was solved except in areas of the country administered by Democrats, and then unreasonable laws were made, and then slightly insane laws, and now we live under totally nutastic barking-mad at the moon bat-guano crazy laws, which have declared human exhalation and cow farts to be pollutants.
It was reasonable at first. The demand was satisfied. There are now plenty of female characters in books and films these days, many of them quite well written.
And then the demands became unreasonable, then became slightly insane, and are rapidly becoming barking mad. Why is this?
Because the demands are not honestly made. They are made for the sake of making a demand, not made for the sake of satisfying a demand.
Any female character can be accused of being weak. ANY ONE. The trick is to have your female characters be good characters, having central roles in the plot, and reasonable character arcs, and as many vices and virtues as the logic of drama and your inner burning vision demand.
Ignore whether she is strong or weak. It is like worrying about whether your male character is winsome, devoted and loves babies. He needs a reasonable amount of devotion to be a hero, but it cannot be his main point, because in real life girls look for strength in men first, leadership, trustworthiness, that sort of thing. Even shallow women look for outward signs of competence and strength, like fancy cars and smoothness of wit.
Likewise, strength in female characters is not what makes them dramatic and memorable, but fidelity and compassion do.
What makes Scarlett O'Hara one of the most easily recognized heroines of all time, despite the obvious selfishness and shallowness of the character? It is her fidelity, no, not to a man, (she weds idly and yearns for Ashley), but to Tara, the land. Her faith in the land allows her to survive the War and the Reconstruction.
Scarlett, despite being selfish and shallow, shines with these other virtues. Commitment. Fidelity. Faithfulness. Maintaining hope when hope is gone. Having the strength to carry on.
That is something women do better than men. We males tend to break when our brittle pride is shattered. Women handle disappointment and defeat better. (Consider what a disappointment most men are, I am sure there is a logic to that, too.)
So ignore the demands for strong female characters. You cannot satisfy them.
You can satisfy your readers, though, by making your heroine interesting. Nay, make her fascinating.
Make your heroine as fascinating as Miyazaki’s Nausicaä, or Homer’s; or Dante’s Beatrice, or as fascinating as Deborah, Clytemnestra, Helen, Penelope, Camilla, Britomart, Bradamante, and you will have readers for centuries to come, or millennia, still discussing her; or make her as interesting as Katniss or Hermione or Scarlett O’Hara, and you will be a bestseller and have your books made into movies.
A closing note on hate mail. I said I would return to this point.
Why in the world would anyone in his right mind pen a poisonous letter on this topic? I am not trying to Save Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters. The idea is ridiculous, so ridiculous that I honestly thought nobody, not even a humorless Political Correction Officer would take it seriously. The title is meant as an obvious joke.
It is as if I were to say we should stop having Basque Characters, or Albigensians, or Left-handed Wesleyans. No matter what I or anyone said about the type of characters I or anyone preferred, if the demand were honest, no one would give a tinker’s damn about it one way or another.
No one would give a tinker’s damn because readers who wanted character of a certain type would seek out writers who wrote characters of that type, and readers who wanted something else would seek out writers writing something else.
But the demand is not honest. It is not even close. The demand is that female characters of which some tone-deaf artistically and spiritually dead sexual neurotics disapprove be swept off the bookshelves and into the memory hole. The demand is political, that is, it is a call for a uniform change in the power relations of the society. The demand is that society change its tastes, change its values, and do so collectively, as a unit, permitting no dissent.
The demand is not on we writers, my dear readers, but on you readers.
The demand made by these subhuman genetically defective control freaks is that YOU the readers, stop liking the books and stories you like, books with females realistic or unrealistic as you prefer, and start liking the books and stories which these genetically defective control freaks demand you should like, in the name of the glorious cause of whatever the glorious cause is this week.
The demand is that you be ashamed of liking popular books and stories, that you be ashamed of nature, ashamed of romance, ashamed of love stories, ashamed of superhero stories, and so on, ad nauseam.
You see, you and I and every sane human is willing to live and let live, and if you want to read trashy bodice rippers and I want to read about space princesses while our neighbor wants to read stories about he-men wrestling ponds of flesh-eating weasels, to each his own. If I write the story I want to write, and even put the odd space princess in it, either the story on its own artistic merits or entertainment value, if any, finds a fit audience or not, as the sovereign will of the readership demands, without imposing on or being imposed upon by others who write and read stories of another kind.
You must understand that you, O my masters, are the sovereigns here. What the readers read is what the writers write and the booksellers sell.
The rebels and the subversives of the Glorious Cause of Political Correctness are not about overthrowing the sovereign power of the state, or not just about that. It is also about overthrowing the sovereign power of the culture, O my masters.
They want to overthrow YOU.
They have only one weapon, which is the unearned moral superiority they pretend to have, and the unearned guilt which they throw onto you.
The serpent cannot force the apple down Eve’s fair throat. All he can do is make her feel ashamed for being so naive as to obey the commands of right reason. The snake tells her she is stupid for thinking that right reason was right.
Likewise, here, the harpies shriek that you are stupid for wanting to read a story where Rhett carries a struggling Scarlett up to the nuptial bedroom, rather than Scarlett carrying Rhett.
Unearned moral superiority for them. Unearned guilt for you. That is their only weapon. Merely pointing it out, naming it by its right name, is enough to disarm it.
Science fiction does not need to be saved from strong female characters. It needs to be saved from Political Correctness, which makes a demand that all stories be uniform, and all serve the Glorious Cause, and become propaganda told for the purpose of social engineering, not stories told to glorify the beauties and horrors of life.
It is, in fact, a demand that stories not be stories at all.
It is a demand that we wreck our culture, ruin our lives, and damn our souls. Stories are just the smallest part of it, and science fiction stories are smaller than that. Stories save souls, and give strength to sanity, for tales, even the simplest, even the shallowest, can refresh our faith in truth, in beauty, and in virtue. In stories, the muses bring us wine from heaven.
Political Correctness serves politics, that is, the power struggle between factions seeking to govern our laws and customs. Art serves truth. Do you wonder at the venom of t
he struggle? Political Correction Officers attempt to mock and destroy even the concept of truth. Political Correctness is the foe of all truth, all beauty, all virtue. Their ambition is immense, nay, awe-inspiring: They want to drown the universe in excrement.
The sole weapon of the Political Correction Officers is to make the innocent feel guilty by making a reasonable demand followed by an unreasonable demand, a demand you can never satisfy.
We must save the world, and, more importantly, science fiction from that.
From the Pen of Tom Simon:
The whole point of Political Correctness is that it’s impossible to be politically correct: someone always has a free pass to attack you for something. Just as the whole point of Sustainability is that nothing is ever really sustainable, so someone can always attack you for insufficient dedication to Mother Gaia. Modern Leftism is not about doing what is right; it is about believing that everybody else is wrong, and always having a stick handy to beat anyone you want to beat.
Restless Heart of Darkness
I had an insight recently, one of those Archimedes-sloshes-the-bath moments where a great mass of otherwise disorganized observations and rules of thumb suddenly fell into a pattern as neat as a periodic table. It is no doubt something many thinkers have seen and discussed erenow, but this was the first time I saw it, and to me it was as new as a young man’s first infatuation, as new as spring.
The insight occurred during three discussions with fellow writers for whom I have enormous respect, but whose ideas I condemn as misleading, deceptive, even poisonous. (If you wonder how one can respect a man whose ideas you loathe, imagine being a mother whose child grows up to be a drug addict, or a sexual pervert, or demon-possessed. The greater her love for the child, the deeper her hatred of the addiction, perversion, or possession enslaving him.)
At the risk of giving away the surprise ending, (which, honestly, I suppose is not a surprise to anyone but me), I realized why it is that the current mainstream modern thought, despite its illogical and pointless nature, is so persistent, nay, so desperate.
I realized why these Moderns never admit they are wrong no matter how obvious the error, nor can they compromise, nor hold a rational discussion, nor a polite one, nor can they restrain themselves. They can neither win nor surrender.
I realized why their hearts were so restless. It is obvious once one sees it.
No doubt I should explain first why this was such a puzzle to me.
The Nameless Darkness
There is a certain darkness slowly absorbing ever more of the intellectual life of the West which seeks, for various reasons, to remove the common morality of mankind from our souls, to deaden normal and natural emotions and passions, to break up the family, to abolish honest and human sentiments, patriotism and gratitude among them, to abolish a belief in objective truth, to abolish love of beauty, to abolish all passion for virtue, to kill God, and, in sum, to abolish everything that makes us truly human.
By mainstream modern thought, I mean that unnamed general tendency which, in politics, is totalitarian; in economics, socialist; in morals, libertine, decadent and perverted. In art, this nameless drift of modern thought adores ugliness and distortion; and favors aborticide and euthanasia and holds human choice to be absolutely sacrosanct, but not human life; in epistemology, the drift of modern thought is mystical.
Modern thought oddly claims to be scientific and to rely on the certainty of empiricism, but in fact takes everything on authority, and on anonymous authority at that.
Anonymous means no modern man would dream of discovering the qualifications of the members of the U.N. panel on climate change, nor has modern man any impulse to question the findings of bribed bureaucrats or political appointees drawing conclusions about the relative dangers of DDT. The modern man is ironically proud of skepticism, but has no ability to question the authority of experts utterly nameless, utterly faceless, utterly immune from question or contradiction. The Middle Ages, taking on faith some dogma decided at the Council of Ephesus, would know the name of the defenders of the faith, and the heretics had their names affixed to their beliefs; and the dogmas were all carefully written down, not merely a drift of opinion.
In ontology, the modern drift is subjectivist; in language, moderns are nominalists and magicians, believing words have the power to mold thought and perhaps change reality; in metaphysics, moderns are materialists.
Obviously these various principles contradict each other, (one cannot be a materialist and a nominalist, for example), but modern thought takes no account one way or the other about logic.
Obviously again, no one person could consistently believe these various principles, or live up to, (or down to), the vices these principles demand. Ergo the partisans of this nameless modern drift are hypocrites because their worldview makes hypocrisy inevitable; they accuse others of being hypocrites since accusation is their sole weapon and sole defense.
Being without a sense of the objective nature of reality, they are without a belief in objective morals. Being without a belief in objective morals, they lack honor, and, lacking honor, they lack courage, lack decency, lack courtesy.
Hence, their one, sole and only means of discussing their principles in debate is to accuse whomever dares question them of any and every thing they think evil: they call normal people stupid and evil and heartless, bigoted and racist and fascist and thisist and thatist.
The content of the accusation does not matter, only the relief of being able to accuse, and accuse, and accuse.
Their only consistent principle—a principle never admitted, of course, but obvious in their every manifesto—is the Unreality Principle, which holds that it is better and braver to believe in make-believe than in genuine reality. The more unreal the belief, the less based on fact, the more open the self-contradiction, the greater the power of will and nobility of spirit needed to believe it, and hence the greatest applause from the modern mind is reserved to those of their number that believe the most unreal and unrealistic things. And yet, with typical unselfaware modern irony, they call themselves the reality-based community.
In sum, their philosophy consists of the single principle that no philosophy is valid. Their ethics consist of a single precept that making ethical judgments is ‘judgmental’ that is, ethically wrong. Their economic theory, socialism, consists of an arrogant denial that the laws of economics apply to economic phenomena. Their theory of psychology says that men do not have free will, because cause and effect is absolute; their theory of metaphysics is that subatomic particles do have free will, because cause and effect is statistical, approximate, uncertain, incomplete, and illusory. And on and on. All their thought is one self-refuting statement after another.
Philosophically, theologically and morally, the modern mindset is an end-state. Once a man has utterly rejected reason, he cannot reason himself to another conclusion. Once he has rejected morality, he has no sense of honor to compel him to live up to a philosophy more demanding than narrow selfishness.
Again, once he has rejected the authority of tradition, so that his one precept is to ignore all precepts of his teachers, he has no motive and no way to pass along to the next generation this selfsame precept, for he then is himself a teacher teaching them to ignore all teachers. And so on.
It must eventually destroy itself. It will contracept and abort its children out of existence, if nothing else.
Naming The Nameless
This movement goes by many names, all of them misleading. Any name that ceases to mislead is dropped, and another misleading name adopted, so no name is permanent. Liberal they call themselves, albeit they diminish liberty, and Progressive they call themselves, but they retard or reverse progress. Political Correctness is the least misleading of the names, and hence the one least likely to be used or admitted. They call themselves Freethinkers, but they think like slaves.
Technically, they are a variant of a heresy called Gnosticism, that is, a deviation or corruption of Christian
thought which holds that superior secret knowledge, not faith, is sufficient for salvation. They retain enough of Christian thought, such as compassion for the poor, or a belief in equality in the eyes of God, to appeal to the hearts of the gullible (for even the most gullible is not moved by merely an appeal to self-centeredness) but they reject the sovereignty of God, or even the existence of God, and most reject the significance of any spiritual dimension to reality, or reject the existence of the spirit. The parallels to Gnosticism are many, but the most obvious is the principle of rebellion against every aspect of the world-system. To the ancient Gnostic, this meant rebellion against the Demiurge or world-creator; to the modern Gnostic it means rebellion against the establishment, the social order, the civilization, all rules and all customs. There is some promise of a Pleroma in ancient Gnosticism to justify the destruction of the current world; likewise, there is some vague hint of a promise of a utopia, or at least an improvement, to justify the destruction brought by protests, riots, convulsions and radical transformations of all long-standing law and custom.
What they actually are is blind souls lost in a fog of hazy ideas and soggy sentimentality and howlingly angry self-righteousness with no logic and no fixed purpose, but one fixed enemy that they likewise never name. His name is Christ.
For the purpose of this essay, I will interchangeably call them ‘Progressives’ or ‘Abolishers of Man’.
The Four Worlds
The so-called progress of the Progressives at first seems in the direction of greater liberty. In truth, it is the progress of corruption, and does not follow any particular order or pattern.
There are four stages of corruption, each one an over-reaction to the stage before, but no one man passes from one to the next to the next in a simple or predictable order. The ship of each man’s soul sails whereso his restless thought blows; but we can define the ports where restless thoughts find harbor.
Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth Page 36