LITTLE WOMEN, THE 'MEN PROBLEM' AND SFR

There’s a lot to talk about in this week’s Oscar nominations, but one controversy, in particular, should make science fiction authors think twice. Because if Greta Gerwig’s film LITTLE WOMEN has a “men problem,” as Vanity Fair asserts and Constance Grady in Vox explains here, then SFR has one, too, for a lot of the same reasons.

 

LITTLE WOMEN: A uniquely feminine POV.

As Grady points out, this latest film adaptation of the beloved novel by Louisa May Alcott has a 95 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 91 percent Metacritic score and earned $60 million at the box office even before garnering a Best Picture Oscar nomination and a Best Actress nomination for Saoirse Ronan, who plays aspiring-author-sister Jo, a role previously, and famously, taken on at different times by Katharine Hepburn and Wynona Ryder. Yet director Greta Gerwig herself was passed over for Best Director nominations not only by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but also by the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild and the Golden Globes. Indeed, all except the Oscars ignored the film as a whole. (The Academy gave LITTLE WOMEN six nominations in total.) Only the Writers Guild recognized Gerwig herself with a nomination for the screenplay.

The problem—the “men problem,” if you will—is that two-thirds of those 60 million bucks being spent to see this film were being spent by women. Guys, apparently, were outright refusing to see the movie, or were being dragged kicking and screaming to the theater by wives or girlfriends. And because men still dominate the film industry, not only in production, but also in marketing and, most especially in this case, in the awards voting process, no “girly” film like this was ever going to get the recognition it deserved.

Other films with women in the lead have attracted a male (or a mixed) audience. WONDER WOMAN comes to mind, a film after our own hearts, or MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. But as Grady so well explains, these are heroines who act like male action heroes. TERMINATOR’s Sarah Conner, ALIEN’s Ripley, every Marvel superheroine, all share these same masculine characteristics—physical strength and agility, stoic determination, a square-jawed lack of words. The only difference is they look better in tight clothes (or bustiers, or underwear, as the case may be).

Part of this is a function of "fanboy" culture, the result of the influence of comic books and video games, long the purview of teenage males, on the wider film world. The avatars in those types of media accentuate unrealistic female physical characteristics coupled with supernatural male abilities. 

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The male POV, despite all efforts to broaden it or open it, is still dominant. Girls are expected to read and relate to Huckleberry Finn, Call of the Wild, Red Badge of Courage, but boys are no longer expected to read and relate to Heidi, Black Beauty or Little Women, as they once were. 

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But Grady argues the problem runs deeper and further back, to the way we are taught to embrace or reject “masculine” and “feminine” ways of viewing the world. (And, even though I frame this discussion in stark binary terms, it shouldn’t go without saying that the real sexual world is NOT binary at all and any attempts to squeeze real life into that framework are doomed to failure.) The male POV, despite all efforts to broaden it or open it, is still dominant. Girls are expected to read and relate to Huckleberry Finn, Call of the Wild, Red Badge of Courage, but boys are no longer expected to read and relate to Heidi, Black Beauty or Little Women, as they once were. Perhaps this change was a result of mid-twentieth-century sexual stereotyping or maybe it was just plain laziness. But a book like Little Women, centered as it is on uniquely female interaction, has lost popularity, even though as modern and muscular a writer as Stephen King counts it as a seminal influence.

This “female-blindness” is a big problem for us in SFR, not only because men think because there is romance in our books, our books must be for “girls,” but also because some of us play into that stereotype by creating one-dimensional “kickass” heroines that are no more than Mel Gibson-in- leather-with-boobs. I admit I love my two most kickass heroines—undercover Rescue agent Rayna Carver (Fools Rush In, Interstellar Rescue Book 3) and FBI Special Agent Lana Matheson(Trouble in Mind, Interstellar Rescue Book 2)—but the heroines of my first novel, Asia Burdette (Unchained Memory, Interstellar Rescue Book 1), and my most recent one, Charlie McIntyre (Not Fade Away, Interstellar Rescue Book 4), are more nurturing, communicating types. And in all cases I try to make my heroines genuine full-featured women, with all the talents and flaws a real person would have.

Kickass heroine?

Nurturing heroine?

  I have always found that if I can get men to pick up my books, they really like them. They like my heroines (and my heroes), because—guess what? –the women in their lives are multifaceted, too.  Grady says this, too, in her article on LITTLE WOMEN. If you can just get the men to see the film, suddenly the scales fall from their beady little eyes.

Still, it begs the question. We may lead the horses to water, but what in the universe will make them drink? 

Cheers, Donna