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

MEET CHARLIE, HEROINE OF NOT FADE AWAY

Heroines come in all shapes, sizes and degrees of kickassery. Some just leap off the page into your face, like the come-in- stunners-blasting, pint-sized-but-all-the-way-badass Rayna Carver of Fools Rush In, the third novel in my Interstellar Rescue series.

Others, like Charlie McIntyre, the heroine of Not Fade Away, Interstellar Rescue Book 4, exert a more subtle charm. In the end, they display a quieter form of courage. Charlie is a home care nurse in a small mountain town when she is hired to care for an elderly, wheelchair-bound man suffering from dementia. Her client, Del, is a stranger in town, with only his son to care for him, and from the beginning, his case raises questions.

Del isn’t like most of her patients. Oh, he has many of the symptoms she’s familiar with, but he has freakish otherworldly hallucinations that seem almost like memories of another time and place—one that couldn’t possibly exist. And, then there’s his son, Rafe. Charlie feels an irresistible pull toward the younger man, despite his obvious lack of social skills and an almost pathological tendency to overprotect his father.

Yes, her new clients are an odd pair. But, somehow, Charlie can’t help getting attached to both Del and Rafe. She opens herself to all her clients and their families, just like she opened her home to Happy, the shelter puppy who became her therapy dog and best friend. Still, her kindness led to serious trouble once, and an ongoing running battle with the ex in question. When it comes to intimate relationships, Charlie has erected a few walls of her own to protect a vulnerable heart.

The island of peace Charlie has created around her mysterious clients can’t last forever, though, and neither can the secrets Rafe has been guarding. Charlie’s gentle soul will be tested to its limits when the truth Rafe has been hiding is finally revealed. When her world is suddenly remade in the light of what he tells her, Charlie will have find the courage to face a new future—with him.

Earth shielded his secrets--

Until her love unlocked his heart.

Rescue agent Rafe Gordon is human, though Earth has never been his home. But when his legendary father Del becomes the target of alien assassins, Rafe must hide the dementia-debilitated hero in the small mountain town where the old man was born—Masey, North Carolina, USA, Earth.

Home care nurse Charlie McIntyre and her therapy dog, Happy, have never had such challenging clients before. Del’s otherworldly “episodes” are not explained by his diagnosis, making Charlie question everything about her mysterious charge and his dangerously attractive son. Rafe has the answers she needs, but Charlie will have to break through his wall of secrets to get them.

As the heat rises between Charlie and Rafe, the deadly alien hunters circle closer. The light they seek to extinguish flickers in the gloom of Del’s fading mind—the memory of a planet-killer that threatens to enslave the galaxy.

Not Fade Away, Interstellar Rescue Book 4 launches June 12. Get yours on pre-order NOW on Amazon.com!

MEET RAYNA, FIERY HEROINE OF FOOLS RUSH IN

Meet Rayna Carver. She’s not usually as demure as she seems in her portrait here. In fact, she’s much more likely to be found with a big grin on her face or a deep scowl, depending on what the situation calls for. You never have to guess what the heroine of Fools Rush In, Book 3, Interstellar Rescue Series, is feeling. She lets you know in no uncertain terms what’s on her mind.

This third book in my SFR series debuts October 18, so I thought it was about time to introduce its main characters to the world. But if you’ve been a reader of the series up to now, you already know Rayna (and her hero, Sam Murphy, captain of the pirate ship Shadowhawk). She first appeared as the Rescue agent Dozen in Unchained Memory, and played a part in the second book, Trouble in Mind, also.

Rayna was an intriguing character even as a secondary player in the first two books. There was no doubt she’d have to have her own book. She’s a little ball of can-do energy who just won’t take no for an answer, as Sam finds out very quickly in Fools Rush In. She’s confident to the point of arrogance, yet she extends that confidence to everyone around her, making them believe they can do the impossible, too. She’s a survivor, having grown up in the polyglot former-slave colony of Terrene, where resources of all kinds are limited and quick wits, quick fists and a quick tongue are all valuable assets in the struggle that is daily life.

Rayna has a very personal reason for taking on the most dangerous job in the Interstellar Council for Abolition and Rescue—the undercover agent inside the slave labor camps known as a “conductor.” But it turns out it’s not very different from the reason Sam Murphy hates the alien slavers called “Grays” as much as she does. Though the two seem at odds from the moment they meet, at heart they are much alike, and the sparks they throw off are the beginning of a roaring flame. 

Here’s more about Fools Rush In, Book 3, Interstellar Rescue Series:

She thought she had the toughest job in Rescue—

until the day she had to convert a pirate into a hero.

Interstellar Rescue “conductor” Rayna Carver is deep undercover on a slave ship bound for an isolated region of space when the ship is attacked by pirates. Her liberator is Captain Sam Murphy, a man known in the spacer bars to love only profit, adventure and women.

But Murphy hates a few things, too, chief among them slavers. Will it be enough to gain his help for Rayna’s mission—ferreting out two spies bent on sabotaging an arms factory to turn the tide in an alien civil war?

The books is on pre-order NOW on Amazon!

Cheers, Donna