Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (39 page)

The masculine approach is the way to get your squad mates to do their duty, be it a battle or a barn-raising, despite any laziness, fear or pain, and run toward the trumpets and clamor of battle rather than away. The masculine approach is not concerned with sentiments or nuances of emotion, because if the battle is lost or the barn not raised by harvest time, the sentiment do not matter.

The feminine approach, since females are biologically more suited to bearing and nursing children than males, and since the female is given the infinitely important task of domesticating the male barbarian of her husband as well as taming and training the children, must be more concerned with the doer than the deed; this is because the woman must train the children to volunteer to do the right thing, so that as adults, when she is gone, they do the right thing. It is character-oriented. This is the more useful approach in peacetime and in cooperative rather than competitive situations. It is not concerned with duty, but with inner motives.

Does anyone seriously, honestly think that a goals-oriented approach is always superior to the personality-oriented approach? Does anyone seriously think that we can treat squadmates like children or children like squadmates?

By the way, gentlemen, this is why women talk more than men and talk about more trivial things. The act of talking is attempting to form a bond and open a channel of communication, which the woman can use to deduce information vital to her approach about your personality and moods and your character. She is trying to see behind the mask all too many of us wear as a matter of convenience. She is trying to cure us of our hidden pain.

By the way, ladies, this is why we guys don’t talk about important things and never open up and share our feelings. We don’t have any, not what you call feelings. We have tactics and goals. Anything outside the goal is a distraction. We do not care about how we ‘feel.’ Feelings pass. Pain is endured, not cured.

And, by the way men, the old canard about men being logical and women being emotional is and always was meant as a joke. If a woman points out a matter that is outside the immediate goal on which the one-track male mind is focused, he will call it irrelevant. That is because women are generally better at thinking in multiple parallel tasks at once, and are less goal-oriented and more personality-oriented. However, during the high-stress type of tasks to which men, especially young men, tend to gravitate, having a one-track mind is a benefit: it is a mind stripped down for action.

However, the way to deal with this canard is not to pretend it does not exist, or to tell men that women are logical after all. They are, but they are not logical in the same way. Women tend to think strategically and men to think tactically. A strategic thinker also thinks of arranging the peace terms after the battle is won or lost.

So much for an example of a strong female character done well: strong female characters done badly are almost numberless. Consider Xena Warrior Princess, or more to the point, Red Sonja, the she-barbarian who invented the chainmail bikini.

Anyone examining the cleavage of Red Sonja can clearly see why boys like Red Sonja, especially lonely boys. I do not see that any honest feminist would think that this is an example of a strong female character as opposed to a buxom female character.

Agreed, Red Sonja does not need rescuing, and she is not going to scream like Fay Wray. But she is a Playboy Bunny, just one who wears a sneer and carries a honking big sword.

Compare this to, say, the toothsome Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow in the
Avengers
movie or Milla Jovovich as Alice in
Resident Evil
, or Kate Beckinsale as Selene in
Underworld
. Ladies, If you think these leather-clad ninja-bunnies with guns represent strength rather than exploitation, then you have been rooked, cheated, bilked, and tricked. These are not more realistic and stronger images of women being set out before the public eye than the images from 1950s space adventure fiction magazines. They are merely newer. Such images are eye candy, if not fetish fuel.

My conclusion is that there is not an iota of real difference between the way women in the past were treated in SF stories and women now.

The fake difference is that some women are masculinized in order to satisfy a fundamentally illogical doctrine of Political Correctness.

In the next part, I will attempt to explain why Science Fiction needs to be saved from this scourge of absurdity.

3. Women Good at being Men

Let us address the basic question:

Why cannot both men and women be free, and leaders, and strong? Why cannot as many members of either sex as wish perform tasks requiring boldness of action, and clarity of thought and physical courage?

This is a typical way such questions are usually phrased, but note the assumptions on which it is based. It assumes that to be feminine is to be inferior to a man rather than to be complementary to a man.

It assumes the feminine role is the unfree role. If the word free means free from male companionship and leadership, it is sufficient to answer that this is a barren freedom.

As for leadership, women cannot be kings for the same reason men cannot be queens. Women in leadership roles do not lead in the same fashion as men do. They still lead, (as we have seen in leaders from Queen Boadicea to Queen Elizabeth or Margaret Thatcher), but the tone and approach is different.

As for strength, physical courage is something boys are good at and proud of and naturally inclined to do. Even those effete intellectual men such as myself who do not cook outdoors and bow hunt grizzly bears nor know how to fix a car engine still nonetheless approach life through a metaphor of conflict, war, duels, and tournaments. The reason why I behave honorably in a philosophical discussion is that I think of it as a duel to the death, but where the Code of Honor are the rules of logic from which gentlemen do not deviate.

As for boldness, the virtue of courage is the same in both sexes, it is merely that males tends to take the foe by the throat with their teeth, and females to befriend the foe. To call one better than the other is like saying lances are better than shields. Lances are better for the right hand in the same way boldness in attack is characteristic of manliness. Shields are better for the left hand in the same way boldness in defense, usually called fortitude, is characteristic of femininity.

As for clarity of thought, the virtue of prudence is the same in both sexes, it is merely that it is masculine to be narrow-minded and concentrate on the work, women to see a wider view and concentrate on the workers, which is usually called wisdom. Women are as clear-thinking as men, but they are generally better at multitasking and juggling priorities rather than being obsessively single-minded.

The question above perhaps assumes social units do not exist, and that the decision is individual rather than communal. Women who are narrow-minded rather than wise, or who attack problems with boldness rather than with fortitude, are playing to something they are generally not good at, and women often don’t really enjoy it when they win using those tactics: maybe some women like being domineering, but all too often they are called bitchy rather than called strongwilled. For better or worse, it is simply more feminine to talk someone into volunteering to do something than to browbeat and overawe and scare him into doing it, which is the male technique.

Last time my boss yelled at me it scared the bejezus out of me, and I straightened up and flew right after that, but I did not take it personally, and would not take it personally, because there was honor involved but no emotion involved. Contrariwise, female bosses I have had took everything personally and dished out everything personally, and there was no honor involved. One of them fired me once without ever telling me what, if anything, I had done wrong. She did not want the confrontation, I assume, because the confrontation would have been, (in her mind), personal. The other time a female boss fired me, she felt sorry for me, which made it worse. I would have greatly preferred the matter be handled in an impersonal and professional fashion. I did not want her to have concern for my feelings. Had we been in a social or domestic situation where feminine nature is queen, her sympathy would have been useful and welcome.

(Just for the record, I have been fired more often by men than by women, so please do not take these examples as anything but examples. I draw from them not because they are typical or atypical, but just because I have them in my experience, as it were, convenient to hand.)

My conclusion from those and other examples is that women, by and large, do not have a neutral emotional setting like men do. Perhaps societies less friendly and more hierarchical, like the British or the Japanese, can produce a woman who can be cool and neutral while retaining both her dignity and the dignity of her underlings. I don’t know.

This raises the next question:

Granting for the sake of argument that they are real, at what point do these differences in male and female roles justify a disbelief of the depiction of women in masculine roles? I mean, stories are make-believe anyway, so why not have a female Saint George, a female Achilles, a female Ishmael the harpoonist?

Even in the most male-dominated periods of history, we still had women saints like Joan of Arc or the Virgin Mary, queens like Semiramis, and military maidens like Camilla and Britomart were portrayed in literature and epic. The tradition of warrior women is as old as legends of Amazons. No one here is suggesting absolute disbelief in stories about warrior women.

But the general answer as to when masculine female characters become unbelievable depends on how the problem of females in male roles is handled in the story. It depends on where the dividing line falls.

Let us note in passing that even to discuss this question rouses the ire of the Politically Correct, for it is an article of faith with them that there IS no problem, and ergo there IS no dividing line. Making a female into a believable Achilles figure is not a problem, because, (so says the article of faith), to believe that women are not now and have not always been super warriors is a sign of bigotry and ungoodthink. To them, it is akin to a Southern Planter discussing how to make a character who is a Negro slave, yet who somehow is wise and brave seem realistic in literature, and how to overcome the natural and obvious fact that no such slaves, or few, exist. Let us note this in passing, and return to this question below.

As to where the line between suspension of disbelief and absolute disbelief should fall, that question is a matter of personal judgment. I cannot speak for other men.

For myself, the line falls at physical combat. When Hawkeye is punching and kicking Black Widow in the otherwise excellent
Avengers
movie, my suspenders of disbelief, (as I call them), both snapped, and suddenly it looked like muscular 5’10″ Jeremy Renner kicking the snot out of wispy 5’3″ Scarlett Johansson. It is like a fight between a thirteen year-old boy and a thirty year-old man. (I am sure fights between adults and children can take place, but they are not even-steven fights and should not be portrayed as such).

If Supergirl is from Planet Krypton, fine, she can punch goons through solid brick walls, no problem. Ditto for Starfire of the Teen Titans. If Buffy the Vampire Slayer is possessed by all the strength of the ghosts of all the Slayers back to the First Slayer, fine, she has superduper strength and it is magic. Fine. That is all fine with me.

But when the heroine is Hit Girl or Batgirl or some leggy blonde selected for her cup size rather than fighting ability, such portrayals of wispy little she-adventuresses able to tackle boatloads of thugs built like linebackers not only as absurdly unrealistic, they have the sinister tendency to make it socially acceptable for boys to hit girls.

Such portrayals do not make the women good role models. If anything, they are misleading role models, because all those leather-clad vampire huntresses are built like Barbie dolls. Remember how feminists complain that such dolls give little girls an unrealistic body image? Well, the pursuit of strong female characters has captured the worst of both worlds. Now all the comic book images of superspies and superbabes and superheroines are both built like Barbie and have the fighting skill of Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan.

Read the first chapter of my book
Orphans Of Chaos
. The scene where Amelia Windrose, who is tall for a girl, and athletic, and, before puberty, was able to out-run her brothers in track and field events, encounters a day when she finds out that the boys now have muscles powered by testosterone, which she simply does not have and simply cannot match. Her younger brother can now out race and outwrestle her, and as she is pinned down under the strength of his hands, she realizes with a shock that she will not be able to train hard enough to beat him again, not now, not next year, not ever. Her muscles will stay at the same level as that of a thirteen year-old boy from now until forever.

Before you condemn me as a misogynist, let me say that it is reality that is misogynist, not me. That scene is the only thing in the book I did not make up. It was based on real life.

Not one, but two girls of my close acquaintance both had this happen to them.

They had been convinced, and everyone had told them, and all the movies and television shows had shown them, that girls could fight boys and be victorious. One girl was shocked when a male friend of hers, just horsing around, pinned her down with one hand. She had always thought she’d be able to fend off an attacker. Not without an equalizer, she wouldn’t. The other friend was equally shocked when the boy she was with was walking down the beach with her, and he picked her up, (I do not know whether bride style or Tarzan style), and ran full speed down the beach with her. She realized with a shock that she could not have picked him up no matter what, not even in an emergency, not even if he was helping. These were not even linebackers built like Conan or men on the leading edge of physical strength for men, they were ordinary boys of ordinary strength.