On the topic of bandwagons and why one shouldn't jump on them
In the last year, I've had the unique experience of being both a feminist — striving for female equality and the advancement of women's issues with my writing — and a knuckle-dragging, cliche-spewing torchbearer for Cracker Von Patriarch, working to undermine decades of cultural evolution. It's been interesting, to say the least. And here's the reason why.
Women like my writing. By and large, most of the people that I encounter (especially online) who follow my work are women. I, for one, think that's great. In fact, it's the best ever. In my genres and media formats of choice, women tend to get left behind, written off as the occasional exception to the rule that Girls Don't Like Horror. And Girls Don't Like Comic Books. And basically that Girls Don't Like Fun Stuff. So when I get an email or a comment from some college educated young woman in Illinois, or a funny and well-read girl in Oregon, or just a charming lady in England, all telling me that my stories are scary and haunting and stick with them long after they've put down the book or shut off the laptop, I'm thrilled. It makes me want to work that much harder to get stuff in print and book stores, to get it into the hands of people that like to read the stuff that I want to see in the world.
People started throwing around the words "feminist writer," and after a while I thought, "Oh, okay. I guess that makes me a feminist writer now." I also heard "gay writer" a lot, in different connotations and for different reasons, but that's another matter entirely. I wasn't sure if the label fit, but I nodded and smiled politely anyway.
Somewhere along the way, a peculiar thing happened. I started getting these emails and comments from men too, of all ages and walks of life, all of whom began to shake me by the shoulders and say to others, "Oh, she's a feminist. She's writing horror for women." (In defense of some of these guys, a lot of the comments were made in the spirit of "Yay, horror that women can enjoy!" or "Yay, fair and balanced portrayals of women!" Others were basically "Yeah, she's a feminist, but we can forgive her for it." There's a huge difference between the two, obviously.) Although I appreciated the sentiment, I found it confusing. All of a sudden I felt like I was suddenly let into the member's only clubhouse under false pretenses. I wasn't writing horror for anyone in particular, certainly not women or gay people specifically (although I enjoy their readership, don't get me wrong). I have always written stories for The Void as I tend to call it, that lack of content I see in the world. It's all that stuff I want to enjoy for myself, and so I make it instead. If that means I see a lack of strong female characters, or gay characters, or characters who fall in love with octopuses or have black holes in their chests, then I'm going to write about them. Because, well, that's the kind of stuff I want to see out there in the world.
I didn't want people to read me because I had a label, or to write me off for the same reasons. Was I writing in some kind of secret language only known to a select few? Were my stories so niche that only a small readership could enjoy them? Did some people really look at my writing and say "Wow, yeah, this is totally written for women"? I didn't know. The whole thing was just confounding to me.
Fast-forward to a few months later, as I'm making my way through some of the feminist news sites and personal blogs that I follow, run by women that I tend to think of as level-headed pundits for internet feminism. Only then did I realize, while reading scathing opinion pieces and reviews of horror films, comic books, and other forms of Boy's Only entertainment, how much these groups demonized the very stuff I was writing. All horror is misogynist and trite, bent on showing the sexual objectification and victimization of women. And, okay, yes, that does happen a lot in horror. All media has problematic content, and those run predominately by men tend to be skewed when it comes to depictions of female characters. (This is very true of American horror film tradition, but less so of European films. As an aside, The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror is an interesting read on this topic.)
I accept that. Yeah, I love my slasher movies and exploitation films as much as the next guy, but I know that the old cliches of scantily-clad women running from masked killers and sexually subservient victims need to go. I'm not thrilled to see the same old crap be recycled by writers and filmmakers, making women out to be weak victims or — shock and awe! — sexually aggressive murderers who use their bodies to lure men to their deaths. So I try to generate my own content to combat that. That's what writers are supposed to do, I think: Create for the void, and do it in such a way that doesn't suck. (Because faux-feminist horror films really kind of suck.) The problem was, most of these bloggers or columnists that I encountered weren't talking about generating content, or trying to provide solutions for these issues. They just slapped a fat X across everything that they deemed as broken without trying to fix it. Because, if you wrote horror, or enjoyed horror, or had anything to do with horror, you were part of the problem. And it really rubbed me the wrong way.
It was then, after taking a step back (and a deep breath or two), that I realized what it was that I was trying to say. In my writing, I'm interested in character dynamics. I'm interested in quiet stories about the real, the unreal, and everything else that hides in between. I want my characters to stand on their own merits, male and female, and not to fall into the pit of boring and offensive stereotypes. I want to write good stories, not after-school specials or opinion pieces, and get the readers to suspend disbelief for just a few minutes in their day. Because, above all else, the most problematic content in any medium is the poorly written variety. The stuff that's full of cliches and bad ideas, pumped out by lazy writers who want to make a buck off the tried-and-true formulas of by-gone days. And the best way to combat that, I think, is to get up and make something good for yourself.
So maybe that makes me a feminist writer, or a gay writer. I think it just makes me a writer. Take that however you like it.
