Category: stories&

My Blind Spots

Laura Highcove

I want to be able to shed light on how women are portrayed in media, but I will admit that even I have my own blind spots. As a woman, for whom this is personal and real, and has a vested interest in raising up women in media, I am still lost in the cyclical reality in many cases.

For a moment I’m going to talk about two books that I read very close to the same time. I’m going to spoil the endings as well, because that’s where my point gets made. The first book, Legendborn by Tracy Deonn Is the story of college student, Bree, who finds out that there’s magic in the world when she runs into a society who are basically all descendants of King Arthur and his knights, who fight against demons. When the Demons endanger the world, the person directly descended from each of the knights of the round table ‘awaken’, getting powers of that knight. This happens in order of importance and thus Lancelot and King Arthur have not awakened in like…forever. Bree is discovered to be a descendant of Lancelot and Nick, the boy she falls for, is in the line of King Arthur. The twist at the end of the book is that Bree’s ancestors were raped, which caused the knight’s bloodlines to switch, thus Nick, instead awakens as Lancelot, while Bree awakens as King Arthur. Hold onto that for a moment.

The other book is King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo. One of the major plot-lines in this book is that the current king of the country, Nikolai, is possibly a bastard, and thus doesn’t deserve the throne. But he’s a great guy and a great king, so we (the reader) don’t want him to be ousted. This mystery is thrown around through the book as he and Zoya complete the rest of the plot. (Read the book it’s great. Really, read everything by Bardugo.) We finally get to the climax scene where it comes out that Nikolai is a bastard and has no right to the throne, and during the resulting conflict, he throws out the idea that Zoya should be queen. She doesn’t have royal blood, but neither did the royal family when they first became royal. And she ends up becoming queen.

Now I read both of these books within a week of each other, and while reading I just …accepted that the woman in each of these story lines would end up in a secondary position to their romantic interest. (I could name you a dozen books where this does happen.) The man was King, and the woman was going to support him. That was just the expected and comfortable reality, and when each of these authors was like ‘Okay, and now the woman is the king/queen.’, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen that as an option. I realized how complainant I was in the cyclical reality that the woman would be secondary to the man.

I, personally, like supporting other people. I don’t like being the one taking charge. Whether that’s my personality or it was beaten into me hard enough by society, I don’t quite know, BUT that doesn’t mean that it should be true for every woman I write (or read). This was a complete blind-spot for me, and it made me completely reconsider one of the books that I’ve been writing where the female lead was, to a certain extent, just support for the male lead.

And I know that there are likely other blind-spots in my view of woman’s place in society, but now that I’m more aware of it, I am aware of the necessity to question everything, not just the obvious. Because stories shape who we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change that shape.

Mourning Women Who Never Existed

Laura Highcove

I have been aware, as most of you are, about the way women are portrayed in media, and that it’s not always the best. Those are other articles for other times, but today I’m talking specifically about Peggy Carter. I became a huge fan of her from her series and while I tend to dislike period pieces where men are blatantly bigots, Peggy was just awesome and her story was great. (It was the beginning of the end when they gave her dementia, but I digress.)

I watched the Marvel’s What If series, and the first episode was ’What if Peggy had gotten the Captain America serum instead of Steve?’ . I’m watching this episode and the fact that Peggy gets injected instead of Steve comes down to whether one man in charge sends her up into the stands vs staying on the floor where the procedure is going to take place.

And it suddenly hit me. Captain America, one of Marvel’s first and biggest heroes, and all it took for that to be a woman instead of a man was an inconsequential decision in the story. That’s all it ever took, but the people in charge didn’t make those decisions. And in the middle of this episode, I began to mourn every woman superhero who was never created. Every female artist who was denied the chance. Every girl who grew up seeing only male characters doing heroic things. I even mourned the female comic book characters we do have, created in the male gaze, for the male gaze, who only in the past few years have been written with any dignity and depth.

All those stories that were never told. All that history that will never exist. And it’s not just comic books. It’s media. It’s life. Women forgotten, pushed aside, buried, and restricted by the male gaze. Stories left to die without ever being seen. And we don’t even know what we’re missing.

In that moment, it became more real to me than it had ever been before. Overwhelmingly. There is nothing I can do except shine a light on women in stories as brightly as I can, to raise awareness, to shift the expectation. Because women deserve to tell their stories, and have those stories seen.

Cyclical Reality

Laura Highcove

Do you like your name? Do you have a nickname? Did you know that your name has actually shaped the person you’ve become? Yeah, was doubtful too when I found out your name actually affects your personality. But the more I read and thought about it, the less doubt I had.

The brain always wants to simplify things, make generalizations based on available information. It calls on previous “experience” to quickly label people who wear certain clothes, or who speak a certain way which leads to us interacting with them a certain way (often times subconsciously) and we have the same thing with names.

I created a character one time that belonged to my partner and I in a shared universe and we were trying to decide what her name was. Newly formed, we knew bits of her personality and skills. I suggested Venus, and my partner vetoed it because ‘there are implications of that name we don’t want’. We eventually agreed to call her Melanie. Now you, dear reader, knowing nothing else about this character probably have some image in your head if what a woman named ‘Venus’ looks like as opposed to a woman named ‘Melanie ‘.

The thing I want to draw your attention to is that in the universe, there is nothing saying a person named ‘Venus’ would act a certain way, or a person named ‘Melanie’, or ‘Wilbert’, or ‘Deshawn’, or ‘Barbara’, but I bet your brain came up with something on reading those names?

Cyclical Reality

This is a phenomenon I’ve come to call cyclical reality. People expect someone named “Melanie’ to act a certain way and subconsciously expect them to act that way, which subconsciously pressures them into acting that way, such that ‘Melanie’ acts that way, such that people see ‘Melanie ‘ acts that way, thus expect Melanie’s to act that way… More simply put, it’s a reality humanity creates and enforces because it’s always been that way.

Now the fact that my name is Laura, and I grew up with that name, and was expected to behave the way a ‘Laura’ would act doesn’t really bother me. I don’t feel the need to go on a crusade to change the way ‘Lauras’ are seen in this world.

Except when it comes to being an author. Because ‘Laura’ is a female name, and females are still struggling to find their place as authors in the fantasy genre, which is my genre of choice. There are still too many people who won’t pick up a book written by a ‘woman’.

Why This is Bad

And cyclical reality guides more than our opinions about names. An example from an excellent movie that calls out the results of the expectations and realities of society, Nick from the movie Zootopia. People expect foxes to be con men, untrustworthy and unscrupulous, so he decides to go ahead and act that way, thus…

Such as the fact that CEOs in America are predominately older, white males. This is because people expect CEOs to look this way, so those are the people who get promoted, and become CEOs, and thus…

Then when questioned about why it’s like this, people try to rationalize it, making up excuses like ‘well women/POCs don’t have the ambition or mental ability to be a CEO. Their logic being, if they did have the skills and abilities, then they would be CEOs. Since they’re not, it must be their own deficiency.

Our Responsibility as Writers

This cyclical reality is reinforced in the stories we write as well. And they affect people’s perception of reality, because remember all stories do, so it’s important to recognize these and write stories in such a way to not perpetuate them. Make women CEOs, make black people doctors, make someone in a wheelchair a business owner, make a man a stay at home dad.

I wrote a whole book, where every time I needed a character, I made them female, unless there was a reason for them to be male. It felt weird because the default is always (white) male. I had beta readers comment on how many people are women in this story. I went and counted up all the characters and the number of each gender, and woman were still only 60% of the characters. I put effort into putting females in as much as possible and I still only ended up with 60% female characters.

Again, as writers we want to be aware that this is happening, both to be aware of it and to write better characters and societies. And while we can’t stop our brain from making its gross oversimplifications of people, we can be aware of it and consciously try to treat people as the unique individuals they are.

Seems a little less silly that parents (and writers) spend tons of time deciding what to call their children, though, huh?