Ousting Our Isms

by Christina Lay

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Recently, a friend of mine who is clearing out her house invited me to come over and help myself to some books. Since we share a love of fantasy and science fiction, I appeared on her doorstep, Bugs Bunny style, before she even disconnected the call.  A box of free books? Hell, yeah.

My friend escorted me to a room full of books and left me to it. Most of them were old paperbacks from the era of tiny fonts, tacky covers and vaguely brownish paper, but we all know we can’t judge a book by its publisher’s bad formatting choices, right?

I filled my box with these musty treasures, mostly titles I’d never heard of, but I did find a couple fantasy series from the nineties that had been mentioned fondly in my presence more than once, so I took all that I could find of those.  When I informed my friend, she gave me a sideways look and gently informed me that one of the authors was not exactly “woke”. I shrugged and said that it’s hard to find older fantasy and SF written by men that is.  It didn’t bother me much back in the day, unless an author was really off the rails misogynistic, and I suspected it wouldn’t bother me now.

Things have changed. I have to admit that thirty years ago, most of the sexism in the books would have slipped by me, because it was so normal. So par for the course. And also because I was more than a little sexist myself.

Wait. What?

I’ll get to that part in a minute, but first let me describe the “normal” sexism in the beloved series I just dove into.  Given the genre and the era, it’s really not that terrible. The sexism comes from default language and perspectives that are tiresomely run-of-the-mill.  Basically, anyone who is a person of interest is assumed to be male unless otherwise indicated.  If you are male, in a male dominated world, you probably would never notice this.  However, as a woman, you start to notice when society seems to be made up of strictly men: police, political leaders, bosses, authority figures, anyone with a job—basically anybody with any power or standing other than “wife of” or “girlfriend of”, are all automatically “he”, whether a named character or not.  People are not “people”, they are “men”.  Yes, you can argue that “men” can refer to all humankind, but it doesn’t. Not really. It is left over from a time when men did stuff and women were an afterthought. Just try substituting “women” for the allegedly all-inclusive “men” and see how it feels.

The women in the world of this series are few and far between. There is the hot but tough woman cop (in love with the hero), the intrepid hot reporter (in love with the hero), the hot lady werewolf (in love with the big bad werewolf dude), and of course the occasional victim (also hot, but dead, most likely due to her being in love with the hero or villian).  Women exist in order for the hero to save or tragically not save. The hero (no doubt channeling the author) has to constantly point out that he is old-fashioned chivalrous, a gent who likes to open doors and pick up the check, but of course the tough women of action don’t appreciate this (even though they’re all in love with him). Poor guy.

Mostly, I’d rate this book irritating rather than infuriating. It’s clearly a male-centric fantasy, so what did I expect? I unfortunately have a thing for books about loner wizards, and I’d hate to have to discard the first 50 years of urban fantasy because of things like this.

I was grumbling to myself over the “everyone in the world is a man unless they’re of sexual interest to some guy” issue when an unpleasant thought occurred to me.

I scurried over to one of my many works-in-progress and yes, there it was: the use of “men” in place of “people”.  I meant everyone, but I’d managed to exclude half the human race with that one word. It was a quick fix, but it bugged me that it had slipped in.  Sure, I’m writing in a medieval setting where things are pretty much male-dominated, but that’s no excuse.  It’s one thing to make a choice about the society we’re creating in our stories, and another to unconsciously use sexist language, especially when it’s to the exclusion of my own sex.

This is where the insidious “ism” sneaks in. That little “men” brought it all back. I grew up sexist against my own sex.  Of course I would have vehemently denied it, but the truth was, I had swallowed the “people of action are men” view of the world hook, line and sinker.  The books I absorbed and the movies I watched all enforced this. Relentlessly.  I was the little girl who never wanted to be the princess while playing games of make-believe. I was Robin Hood, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes. If my sister wanted to wait around in a tower for me to rescue her, fine. I was out Getting Shit Done. Girls sat around and crocheted, or something else dull and silly.

Sure, I liked dressing up and playing with Barbies, but I knew that when it came to adventure, it was Ken and Brad who were mixing things up.

As I got older and decided I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t exactly notice that ninety percent of the writers I admired were men, but I internalized it.  As I look back, I can rattle off a stream of male writers I enjoyed in my youth, and only one woman, Ursula K. LeGuin.  Yes, I knew that women could and did write plenty of great fiction, but…

My reckoning came in college.  I took a class called Education in Capitalist Society (liberal arts, anyone?). In it, we were presented with a study in which groups of people were asked to grade an essay.  These control groups were given the exact same essay, except in one group the author was identified as female, and in the other, male.

Without exception, the male-authored version received higher scores, whether or not the grader was male or female themselves.

In this study, I recognized myself.  To say it was profound to realize I had an unconscious bias against my own sex is quite the understatement. That’s powerful knowledge, and disturbing. It led to a whole reevaluation of my own writing choices and attitudes. Up to that point, my heroes had always been male, the voice I chose to write in, male.  If anyone had come up to me and said, “Men are better writers than women” I would have slapped them upside the head, and yet, deep down, I believed it.

I’d like to say that awareness miraculously cured me of this dread malady, but I’m still dealing with the repercussions of something I accepted without thought and internalized when I was a child.  Sadly, I don’t have control over the images, stories and attitudes that formed my inner landscape. I do however have control over my language. I’m a writer, and words are my medium.  Back when I wrote poetry, I learned that every single word matters. So my little slip of the keystroke, writing men instead of people, matters.

All of us who write are human, with our own sets of explicit and implicit biases.  The next time you find yourself leaning on a stereotype, using outdated language, or otherwise manifesting a lazy “ism”, instead of justifying or minimizing, I would challenge you take a good hard look at why that image or language has crept into your writing.

Yes, we writers reflect society, but let us never forget that we also help to shape it.