Woman Cannot
Fictitious or Not
Woman cannot be strong, or brave, or cunning. Woman cannot be intelligent, master of her craft, lord of her creed. Woman cannot be revolutionary, or first, or free. No, woman is not her own, she is the lives of her children, her community, her civilization. Woman is the lesser, the humble, the suffering, a suffering in which even she can’t be the winner. Man is the true sufferer, man was here first, man laid claim to everything, laid waste to much, and then sat woman in various little prisons of secondary importance.
Goddess is secondary to God, wife secondary to spouse, mother secondary to father. She is the steady earth beneath man’s feet, unchanging unless acted upon, even if one look around would falsify such an idea. She is small, timid, quiet. She sits and waits. But the earth does not wait for anyone, neither does the stream, neither does the storm.
And stories must represent this right? Because woman is not strong, or brave, or cunning. Woman never led an army, or fought for her ideals, or invented, or painted, or sang, or danced, or discovered. Woman cannot. Woman sits and waits, she does what she is told, she is bound by someone else’s duty, that is her role.
But what happens when woman is stronger than man? What happens when she is better, faster, smarter?
The biggest lie ever conceived was in the notion of feminine passivity, in feminine virtues, in femininity itself. Because woman has never sat and waited. Penelope did not sit and wait, Boudicca did not sit and wait, Catherine did not sit and wait, neither did Victoria, nor Elizabeth, nor Abigail, nor Sybil, nor Eva, nor Susan, nor Katherine, nor Sally, nor Christina. No, woman has never been passive. She is the river that cuts through steady rock, the felled tree that sprouts anew. Through every trial and tribulation she rebuilds. Like the sun the coasts across the sky, she rises and falls.
And yet, woman cannot. Even if she is fictitious, even if she is supernatural, even if she is deity herself. For her immeasurable power must always come second, because of man.
-Pythia
Also, I forgot to make this comment on one of your earlier posts, but something I've always hated about how we write women is that we're unable to see how clever some women can be. In anime, when we write the young male protagonist, we write him understanding that he's leagues above the rest of men. We don't write our protagonist like the average man. We understand that this man is fully capable of doing what the supermajority of men cannot. But when we write women, we write the average woman. It's as if most people don't want to see an exceptional woman. And we never write about how clever women can be at bending reality to their will without force.
One of the best examples I've seen is actually in Game of Thrones, in the Tyrell family and even Sansa Stark. The Tyrells show how a family can use charm, intelligence, and ingenuity to advance their own cause. Olenna is as much a kingslayer as Jaime Lannister. Margaery is the only person able to tame the mad king, Joffrey.
I also remember a movie I watched about a woman who married a farmer because she'd had a child out of wedlock, set during World War II. A naive Japanese girl falls in love with a prisoner of war and brings him to the woman's house. If the main character in that moment had been her husband, a man, a fight would have broken out. But she knew she couldn't physically take on a man. So what did she do? She told him to go upstairs and change into her husband's clothes, and while he did that, she drained the extra fuel from their truck. As he drove off, she called the police and told them a prisoner of war had escaped, broken into her husband's house, and stolen his clothes, and that based on how much fuel should be in the car, he'd be in roughly this location. She captured him without capturing him. And if these female characters are unrealistic, most male protagonist are unrealistic as well.
That's what I've always hated about how we write female characters. In movies, they're meant to be far more clever than men, far more conniving, meant to approach a battle in a way men cannot, but we never seem able to write these characters well. And maybe it's because of how lazily we write in general. We fill our movies with action scenes, so we end up writing petite women overcoming ridiculously large men. But in a world where so much can be carried by dialogue, where we can actually inhabit and understand our characters' motivations, I don't know why we can't have intelligent, compelling, unique women navigating the world through their wits. I don't watch Naruto, thinking every man could be Naruto. Most men are Kiba.
And lastly, I think we've lost the plot on archetypal female characters. Take Fairy Tail. You have Erza Scarlet, the archetypal older sister who keeps the entire guild in line. You have Lucy, the archetypal romantic lead, the girl in class with you. And you have Wendy, the archetypal little sister. And in that guild, everyone is actually a family. One of the problems with the way we write characters today is that for a lot of modern audiences, the female character can only truly exist as the romantic lead. Not the big sister who is formidable, authoritative, and guides the entire process the way Erza does. Not the little sister who exists as a kind of emotional framework for the entire story the way Wendy does.