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(Question about my hacker (hacking??) novel.)
Just an FYI, I am a woman.
Edward is a cyber spy and works with an organization named Vox Populi to curate and release all data online, especially the stuff that shady people don't want others to see. Edward copies and releases data that a very dangerous group of people don't want in the public eye, and these people find his place of residence and kidnap his sister, Lily, with whom he lives. With the help of his friend and sorta maybe love interest Thomas, he has to save her and dig deeper into the mess he's caused, to know the bigger picture of why these people don't want their info out in public.
I know the whole "action movie hero man saves helpless girl" trope is used often, and I'm not trying to make Lily helpless or Edward morally untouchable. But is the use of this trope bad and/or sexist? Does it reinforce the idea that women need men to save them? If so, how do I avoid this?
(14)More posts by @Sue2132873
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Sexism is by definition, "prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination on the basis of sex."
So, yes, technically the use of the Damsel in Distress trope when played straight can fall under sex-based stereotyping. At the same time, Tropes Aren't Bad and it's only because this is a trope that is Older Than Dirt that it gets put into such a critical light, because it has had more opportunity to accrue more examples of men saving women as opposed to women saving men or even same-sex salvation. But one trope a sexist story does not make. Take that trope and think of all the different ways you can play with it. Does Lily play the part of the helpless girl? Is she kidnapped because they wrongly believe SHE was the white-hat who foiled them? Perhaps she pretended to be the hacker so that she could protect her brother knowing he would find her. Or she isn't actually kidnapped at all, but went with them willingly because she agrees with their ideology, and it was her idea to convince her brother that she's in trouble to trick him into being coerced into working for them, or at least that was her plan before they decided to actively use her to make Edward behave regardless of her cooperation. You can even make it so Edward doesn't want or need to save Lily because she's also a talented spy, but he hid part of an important cipher to an encrypted program he designed in a necklace he gave to her for her birthday and he doesn't want to risk the bad guys getting their hands on it, so it's less about saving Lily who is capable of taking care of herself and more about giving her some backup so that she doesn't lose the necklace to them.
Just because a trope can be seen as sexist, the work it is used in should not be seen in that way unless the purpose is to show and enforce prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination on the basis of sex.
Please forgive the abundance of TVTropes links. I find Wiki Walks are great for aiding in research on these kinds of dilemmas.
Misogynistic or sexist is a soft judgement - there is no clear yes/no criterium. So the answer can't be "yes" or "no", it is more likely that on a spectrum between extreme misogyny and extreme equality of sexes, your work will be somewhere inbetween.
Different people and cultures rate these things very differently. My wife, for example, is a very strong woman who doesn't take shit from anyone, but she loves it when a man holds the door or helps her carry things. In her eyes, these are small priviledges of being a woman. In the eyes of a more feminist person, these things might be patriarchially oppressive behaviour.
There is nothing wrong with a strong male character and a female character in need of rescue. The best test I know for sexist bias is to reverse the roles in your head and check if you would consider that somehow wrong. If the sexes are interchangeable, then you aren't being sexist because your characters need to be one sex or the other and you simply happened to pick them the way you did.
It also helps if secondary characters break up the stereotype. If all the men in your story are strong hero-types and all the women are rescue-me-princesses, you probably have a gender bias issue. If your world is reasonably mixed and believable balanced, and just the main characters happen to be in this particular configuration, you probably don't.
The trope itself isn't sexist, but there are ways of doing things that can make a given instance sexist. You should be fine if:
The female rescuee isn't shown to be totally helpless or incompetent (mistakes are fine, infact mistakes can be good, but it should be outweighed by, or at least balanced out by, things they do right). This should be addressed in the capture scenario too.
The rescuer isn't saying or doing misogynistic things during or before the rescue scenario
Romance/sex is involved in your story but isn't introduced here or made to seem like it is a reward or sole motivator for the rescue. Or if there is no romance/sex aspect at all.
Obviously adapt this to your story and the plot points you have already decided on.
It's not sexism, sure. It's a story where one person saves another person. Change roles - let the girl save the boy, and nothing will change. Bad people are stealing the main character's relative, if Edward had a brother, bad people would steal boy, right?
Talking about the main idea of the plot - right you are, the topic seems to be canonic. But. It usually depends on authors skills and other plot features like unexpected situations, dialog etc. You are to make the story being not boring and add something innovative - and no one will say the plot is already used and the story is a duplicate. That's my opinion.
The scenario is not misogynistic. People need saving--sometimes those people are women. It also doesn't matter whether she "fights back" against her captors. The most realistic scenario of an everyday person being kidnapped by trained professionals is that they're going to sit there and do nothing. They're outnumbered, outmatched, and probably restrained--what are they going to do? What you want to avoid is not misogyny, but bad writing. That is, writing that makes the audience not care what happens.
See, a lot of claimed "misogyny" in media is just bad writing, but the character is a woman. Consider the damsel in distress trope we're talking about here. If a woman is introduced who has no purpose but to be rescued, the question I'm asking isn't "Why does the author hate women?" but "Why do I care what happens to her?" Well, I might care indirectly because the protagonist cares and I (hopefully) care about him, and perhaps in an abstract sense of not wanting bad things to happen to people. But it's going to be a lot more effective if I also care about the woman herself. And that's why it's important to flesh out her character--not anything about her sex. After all, an agender person who has no character other than being rescued by the transman protagonist would be just as uninteresting, albeit considerably less common.
(At this point someone will jump in saying that female characters are more commonly poorly-written than male characters. That's probably true, but also irrelevant. This is your work--what other people do is on them.)
Now don't get me wrong, you can totally go beyond bad writing to do this trope in a misogynistic manner. Probably the most common is a sort of subtle victim-blaming in how the scenario is presented. "Of course she got kidnapped--she's a woman. A man would never be so weak and foolish as to allow himself to be kidnapped, but women, well, they just can't help it." But you don't seem like the kind of person who would write like this, so I wouldn't worry about it much.
I don't find this scenario misogynistic, but it might be a missed opportunity. Recently, in my own work, I've questioned why my heroes are often white and male, even though I'm a writer of color. I do have reasons (I'd like to cast a new point of view on members of the majority culture, and build a mainstream audience, and I don't like feeling "required" to write characters that resemble me demographically) but at a certain point I have to question why I would choose to tread such a well-trodden path. It's an especially acute question, given that strong protagonists of color are dramatically under-represented in my chosen genres.
You might find yourself writing a much more original story --one there might be unmet demand for --if Lily were the cyber-spy, and Edward were the one who got kidnapped.
It sounds like something in this basic concept isn't sitting right with you at a certain level. Maybe you should ask yourself the question I've started to ask myself: If this was a book someone else had written, would I be excited to read it? And would I see myself in its pages?
Although your question skipped a lot of detail, what is there suggests how misogynism could enter through the cracks.
Let's look at your summary, and not unreasonably, assume that what you focus on in it, reflects how you've come to this storyline and where your emphasis and attention is - what matters to you. The point being, what doesn't matter to an author, what they don't love as much or put as much insight into - those often become the stereotypes, filled in by default, because it's quick and easy and their mind wasn't on it anyway.
What we learn about Edward: He's a spy. He works for an organisation. The organisation is fleshed out enough to have a name and goals. What he does for them. He has a sister. Her name. Where she lives. He has an ally in the rescue. He has a maybe love interest. The maybe love interest's name.
What we learn about Lily: Absolutely nothing. (She is a woman living with her brother, at most)
You're in danger of stereotypes - and many stereotypes in this narrative are sexist - simply because it doesn't seem that Lily has any intrinsic interest as a person to you. She's a foil, a trigger for the actions of someone else far more important. She can be filled in by simplified routine outline because Lily isn't a character, she's an object - she serves a role, she isn't presented as being of deep interest as a person.
How to avoid mysogynism? Do the opposite. Flesh her out as a person, as if she is the real hero or centre of focus - which is a good way to ensure you write all characters well. Love each of them. Care about each. Understand each.
Think hard about her, as you would about Edward. Is she as proactive as her brother? Does she just passively listen and think with feminine adoration "how clever he is!" (I hope not!) Does she agree or not, has she picked up things from him or not, what has led her to live with him, what is her inner life like? These and many more. Think about her life, her strong views, her goals and perspectives, where she's been and where she's going, and all that binds it together and makes Lily really interesting, enough that you could write a story about her, not him.
In Harry Potter, as much attention is given to the personalities of the hero's opponents, as to the hero himself - more in the case of some like Snape. Side characters are fleshed out in depth - the caring Molly who unexoectedly leaps to her daughters defense shouting "You bitch!", even the father of the antagonist, his wife, her sister. All lovingly dwelt on before fingers hit keys - and it shows. Ditto most good novels. Do right by Lily, and give her, her own life that's led to this point, not just an object or foil with a light touch of veneer, try to write her story, in this, not just the hero's, and she'll do right by you as a solid balanced character too.
Coming from a different perspective, IMHO, a better story is how a man and a women save each other. A strong man and completely helpless woman is boring and unrealistic. The other direction, think if the Simpsons is great for comedy, but would also be boring in a drama or action flick.
A cheesy way to do this is for the man to face several opponents, and beat all but one. As that villain is closing in to deal the death blow to our hero, the heroine musters enough courage/know how/strength to deal a death blow to that villain and save our hero. Yay!
What weakness does your hero have that the female lead can save him from? What weakness does your female have that our hero can save her from?
To me that is what makes an interesting story in real life and in fiction.
In general, if you can swap out a woman for a precious object and the story remains mostly unchanged, you should attempt a rewrite. The most important thing here is to give the character her own agency, try to avoid the trap of the "strong female character" where she has no significant flaws, and make damn sure she isn't just used to create "manpain".
S. L. Huang explains "manpain" very well in this blog post.
There's a fan term called “manpain†that fascinates me. It refers to the phenomenon of a media property that excessively and self-centeredly focuses on a male character's angst after tragic events happen to the people around him.
I would also advise that you make sure there's a good reason the kidnappers take his sister instead of him, instead of the usual ransom/sexist/"we're gonna hurt him by hurting his sister!" (again, manpain) reasoning. Perhaps a mix-up, or--since this is the digital world and the kidnappers may not necessarily know the real-life identity of their target--the kidnappers thought Lily was the infamous "hax0rb4be".
Good luck!
I would say that no, it is not misogynistic, and particularly in your case it's realistic.
The majority of people working in the tech industry are male; for example, women only represent 33% of the workforce in silicon valley, so it makes total sense that your character whose background is IT-oriented is male.
People in the spying industry get threats all the time (or, at least, the ones portrayed in pop culture do) so it's not a far reach to suggest that one's sibling get kidnapped. It can be the start of a good plot.
Edward's sibling that gets abducted has a roughly 50% chance of being a sister or brother, choosing his sibling to be a sister is just a choice you made, it shouldn't need to be defended. It's not like you're going against the odds to get a woman in that role.
Most people who get kidnapped are quite helpless when they are being held captive, regardless of gender. Therefore it's not particularly degrading to women to portray a female hostage as such. It's to be expected.
Furthermore, most people who have a family member in danger will do all they can to help them. It's reasonable that Edward goes off to help his sister.
So I would say that hacker guy whose sister gets abducted goes on a mission to save her isn't misogynistic, it's realistic.
Pointing out the obvious here but don't make her helpless by using stereotypes involving women (e.g. don't say "she was easily abducted because she didn't want to fight back out of fear of messing up her hair").
I agree with everyone, it depends.
There are very few original stories on this earth. No one is expecting a totally original story.
We only have 2 real genders. So you can have M saves F, M saves M, F saves M, F saves F. 4 combinations. Even if you include all the new genders, say, 17x17 is just 289 combinations, a pitifully small number in the face of the thousands of stories being created every single day.
Totally helpless damsel in distress is not misogynistic, but it is really old fashion, a bit unrealistic, and quite boring.
Take the Terminator, it started out as classic hero saving a damsel in distress story with Kyle Reese traveling back in time to save Sarah Connor. But within the 2 hours run time of the movie, that helpless damsel, an ordinary waitress, grew into a pillar of strength, and the mother of humanity's last hope.
Mostly this would depend on how well its done, and how much sense it makes. Typically in writing if you can answer the question of "Why?" then you have a case to include that element or whatever it is that was in question and that certainly applies here.
Don't make Lily seem like someone who doesn't need saving in whatever situation she finds herself in and make Edward seem like someone whose incapable of saving someone in the given situation. As long as you can provide an answer as to why Lily needs Edward to save her, you shouldn't have any problem at all.
The tricky part of making sure you can do that is to make sure you dont over do it. For example theres no need to make Lily some crybaby who cant lift her shoes and her feet off the ground at the same time, but she shouldnt hold all the necessary cards to get herself out of the situation without Edward.
If you worry that the trope is too sexist try looking for other stories that the trope is also in. Just to pull one out of the air here: in Mario Princess Peach is taken by Bowser and for whatever reason Mario can eat things and get superpowers. Princess Peach in this situation cannot escape on her own, but its justified because Bowser isn't just a normal person. If you dont see common examples of the Trope as sexist, you're probably just suffering from your own criticisms getting in the way of your writing.
Answer: It depends on the execution.
What makes this misogyny is if the sister is in the story (solely) to allow Edward to be a hero. If she is a throwaway character who serves only to provide a prop for him, then your execution is flawed and in that case, yes it is misogynistic.
But, if the sister is a hero in her own right, perhaps facilitating Edward's efforts earlier using skills that she has and he does not, or perhaps playing a required role in the escape that Edward cannot or does not play, (perhaps he is wounded or some such thing, perhaps she can pick locks, who knows...), then no.
If she has her own life within the novel, a personal goal and conflict, and if she is fully realized and participates uniquely in the story arc, you will be okay.
This is a matter of opinion; personally I don't find it sexist. People have genders, and sexual orientations, and they have to mix.
We stray into sexism when we pile up too many tropes. In your case, you avoid the trope of sexual reward for Edward's effort on two fronts; Lily is his sister, and he doesn't seem oriented toward heterosexual reward anyway. Also, any family member has inherent value to normal people.
She doesn't have to be "helpless", she can fight and perhaps injure her captors. I love the little girl kidnapped in Along Came A Spider, she actually manages to escape, freeing herself and then repeatedly injuring herself loosening boards but continuing her efforts despite this. Although she would have been caught if the hero did not show up in time; I was impressed the writers did not make that little girl just a damsel in distress waiting for a white knight.
Do something similar. A stereotype is a collection of traits, you can break it by letting Lily play against type. Heck, you might make it clear that given another hour or two, she might not have needed Edward to save her at all.
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