I found quite interesting our writer's group's recent brief
discussion touching on whether clues to the sexual identity of a character
could be safely assumed in the following situation and whether that mattered.
One of our female writers had included in her story a character who had not as
yet been defined as male or female before beginning to play the daisy game,
plucking the petals of a daisy while saying, "He loves me, he loves me
not." We discussed and determined that the pronoun the character selected,
"He," does not necessarily tell the reader anything definitive about
the character's gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or sexual
preference. Those complicated characteristics require more clues to pin down.
"Boys in real life simply do not play the daisy
game," I had argued. "It is a girl's game, played by romantic young
girls fantasizing about boys returning their affections. She says, 'He loves
me, he loves me not.' Boys don't play the daisy game, or if they do, they say, "She
loves me, she loves me not,' not 'He loves me, he loves me not.'"
"Unless they are gay," offered another of our
writers.
"I play that game, and when I do, I say, 'He loves me,
he loves me not,'" said the lone male writer in our group, without hinting
at his own sexual preferences.
"But, you are not a character in a book. You are a real
person. The reader does not know you, and the writer has not described the real
you. The writer has described for the reader a player of the daisy game who
chooses the pronoun 'He' in saying, 'He loves me, he loves me not,' and that is
enough of a clue for the reader to assume the character is female, unless the
writer goes on to specify otherwise."
My argument was in vain. The other writers defended the
author of the story as having provided a story element for her male character
which needed no further explanation.
I am old-fashioned and out-of-touch in assuming that today's
reader would rely on old stereotypes to make assumptions about the character.
What is the writer to do, to provide his reader with
shortcuts to understanding his characters, if he cannot rely on stereotype?
Is the boy who says "He loves me, he loves me not"
expressing wishes for his male heartthrob to return his own desires, or is he
mockingly aping his sister's practice of playing "that girly daisy
game"? Is his experience with the daisy game so limited that, in reciting
the words, he is simply repeating by rote exactly what he had heard or read,
"He loves me, he loves me not," with an immature understanding of the
implications of the questioning petal picker's words? If we don't know anything
else about who the male character is, an explanation is in order, to avoid the
reader's confusion. The reader needs to know what the author's intention was in
having his character play the daisy game. The reader should not be left hanging
with such a red herring.
I had argued that if those characteristics are irrelevant to
the story, they could safely be omitted, but if including mention of the daisy
game and no other relevant details presented the reader with only a partial
clue to the character's sexual characteristics, the writer has not told his
reader how and why it is important. Finding no other evidence to identify the
character as male or female, the reader might make the false assumption that
the character was female, simply because readers make assumptions based on
societal norms and their experience with the statistical distribution along a
Bell curve of common behavior patterns and human characteristics. If they
believe that it is most likely that it is a girl who would play the daisy game
using "He loves me" rather than "She loves me," they might
well assume the character is a female. It might be very distracting to find out
later that the assumption that the character was female was incorrect, as the
reader will then stretch his memory to try to determine whether any other clues
might also have been missed.
As readers, we generally make assumptions about a
character's undetermined characteristics based on what fits the statistical
norm on a Bell curve, either from our experience with real life or from our
experience with other literature in general. Unless directed otherwise by the
writer, we tend to disregard race, sex, age, nationality, sexual orientation,
gender identity, religion, height, weight, and preferences and characteristics
in so many areas. We simply assume we are reading about the average Joe, who
conforms to our preconceived stereotypes of "normal" characters in
most stories written in English: a young, white, Christian, heterosexual male
of average build, and of statistically average characteristics, who watches
television, goes to work, and has a family. We assume that if it was a girl,
the author would have told us. If any of our assumptions inaccurately describe
the character, we expect the writer will clarify for us in what ways the
character differs from the expected norm, and as early in the story as
possible. We develop expectations for that character based on our real life
experiences with the statistical distribution of the characteristics of the
population of the real world. More importantly, we base our expectations on
what we think society says is right and normal.
We expect characters to be sane, unless crazy is written
into the script. We don't have to be told that the roommate of a nun in a
nunnery is female. At one time it was safe to assume that all residents of a
college fraternity house were male, but that is no longer the case. Norms and
rules for society change, but it is often description of character we readers
rely on for clues as to which society the story is set in. If we read about a
female CEO of a major corporation in a story which is set in the present and
the writer does not mention her sex, we wrongly assume the CEO is male. If
later we learn she is pregnant, we are unpleasantly surprised, rightfully
annoyed with the writer that we were not warned aforehand to alter our
expectations. If we read about a male character fantasizing about his love
interest, we expect it will be a daydream about a woman, because it is a
commonly accepted fact that ninety percent of men are heterosexual (at least
that is what we have been told to believe).
The reader's assumptions reflect a society's assumptions, and
if we as writers can change our readers' assumptions, we can change society as
a whole. As a society, we have just recently learned that it is wrong to assume
anyone's sexual orientation based on statistics, where it used to be socially
acceptable to do so. If I knew of two unmarried twenty-somethings, I could feel
free to try to arrange a blind date and hope they would be "perfect for
each other" without first inquiring of them their sexual preferences. It
was assumed that an incorrigible bachelor might be a rogue, making him unfit
for marriage, but never was it just assumed that he was gay and that it would
be okay to set him up on blind dates with other unmarried men.
Each person is a unique individual. People do not always
"come out" and tell the rest of us what their sexual orientation is,
even in a story, and we have learned that we cannot make assumptions if we are
not told explicitly. If we see our male hero in our story and an attractive
available female shows up, we cannot assume that she is a suitable love
interest. This complicates things for modern writers in a way that writers of
yore did not have to deal with. In older stories, romantic themes could be
relied on to add underlying meaning in specific ways, simply because it was
understood that readers could make assumptions. Today, writers may have to
spell out very specifically what exactly it is they want us to know about their
characters. We readers now know we can't rely on clues about the character's
sexuality from the society he lives in or from the situations he finds himself
in. As writers and readers, we see now more variation in the possibilities a
writer is free to offer a character in expressing his sexuality. This causes
readers to put off forming expectations of what will happen next.
As writers, we can take on our society's stereotypes and
change the world, one reader at a time, by changing the reader's expectations
of what is "normal." We do this by pointing out details about how our
character differs from the norm, and leaving out details about how he is
similar to the majority of other characters found in the same society. For
instance, in a society where men regularly beat their wives, a writer's
character who does not beat his wife is seen as "different," and a reader
who is told that the character does not beat his wife changes his expectations
about what the character will do, and comes to expect that he may behave
differently than other "normal" men in the same situation. However,
if the writer in telling the story does not give the reader a clue in advance
that he is "different," and it turns out that he is a man who does
not beat his wife, the reader adjusts his own view of what the norms are, in
the world he is reading about. He was not told ahead of time that this character
was not a wife-beater; therefore, the reader has learned that the societal norm
in this story is that men do not beat their wives, even if in the real-world
society the reader lives in, it is the case that most men beat their wives.
The reader knows that a writer will clue him in about the
norms by pointing out a character's differences from the norm, but the writer
will be silent and not mention the character's attributes that conform to the
norm. If the reader has then changed his perception of what the societal norms
are, simply because he has trusted the writer to describe his fictional world
according to writing conventions, the writer has accomplished a change in the
reader's thought processes. The reader now has a new idea of what "normal"
is.
The fiction writer who does not tell the reader ahead of
time that his CEO is female, and on page 207 reveals she is pregnant, forces
the reader to reassess his own assumptions about society. If the writer had
considered it the norm that CEOs are mostly female, then he would of course not
bother to mention the fact that she is female, any more than he would mention a
character's heterosexuality if it is believed that the overwhelming majority of
the population is heterosexual. The reader, confronted with the writer's
description of a world where the overwhelming majority of CEOs are women, will
then second-guess his own original assumption that almost all CEOs are male,
and may then discard his initial assumption based on what he may come to
believe is a false or old-fashioned stereotype that is no longer true. The next
time that reader reads about a CEO, he is likely to assume that the character
is at least equally likely to be male or female, or more likely to be female,
since the writer has planted that suggestion in his subconscious.
In this way, the writer has the power to change the
assumptions made by readers. If the writer convinces the reader that the new
norms in his fiction actually reflect the new realities of the real world, the
reader now has acquired new beliefs about the real world.
Therefore, to change the world's views on women taking over
in the boardroom, a writer should not give a clue that the powerful, successful
executive is a woman, not until the last page of the story. She does everything
a normal woman executive does, and the reader learns that she is a normal
executive, who does everything the same way a male executive would. In the
story, she has been just as cut-throat as the next corporate head-honcho, and
it is only on the last page that she is late to a meeting because her newborn
threw up on her suit as she was leaving for work and she had to change her
clothes. That is an event which, of course, also happens to male executives
with children, but it is her changing of her "skirt" that gives her
sex away, and not the fact that she has been nurturing her infant, which both
men and women do. The reader comes to see that it is normal and expected that a
CEO would be a woman, and it is a short step from believing it about a fictional
world to believing it about the real world.
Alternatively, for a writer to alter a reader's perception
that males are the norm in the area of who controls decision-making at the top
of the corporate ceiling, it may suffice to introduce as CEO a male character
with a first name ambiguous with regard to his sex, and very early on in the
story purposefully describe him as "male," as a way to tell the
reader, "Aha! You thought you were reading about an ordinary CEO, and
ordinary CEOs, as everyone knows, are female. But, my character is a
successful, powerful CEO, who also happens to be male. Surprise!" The
reader is surprised, not that the CEO is a male, but he is surprised at
himself, that he thought he expected a CEO to automatically be a male, when obviously
the writer is telling him that he should have been expecting the CEO to be a
female.
The writer tells the reader what the norms are, by pointing
out how his character differs from the norm. A writer never wastes the reader's
time pointing out the "obvious." That would be like having a
character who lives in Bermuda say to another character, "Honey, I just
checked the thermometer, and would you believe it, it is 82 degrees Fahrenheit
outside today?" In Bermuda, it is just about always a balmy 82 degrees, every
single day. That is so perfectly normal for Bermuda that it borders on the
ridiculous to point it out.
The writer wants his reader to make assumptions that are
correct about the world, so that his expectations are properly set up, and he
can surprise him with a good story. The reader loves a surprise, and the writer
can't wait to give him an extraordinary one.
Therefore, in order for a writer to change the real world,
the only thing he must do is to make his assumptions about the norms of the
world he wants to live in, and then only mention to the reader those attributes
of his characters that "differ" from that which is found to be true
of the majority of the inhabitants of his created society.
This is why stories about superheroes and extreme villains
are so popular. The writer describes good and evil as outside the norm. The
reader already knows that not everyone in his real life world is a hero,
beginning with himself as an example of just an ordinary guy, and he wants to
believe that there are few villains and that their bad behavior will be
contained so his own personal safety is not at risk. When the writer depicts a
villain and calls attention to their villainy as being far outside the societal
norm, the reader is gratified that evil-doers are so easily identified and
rare. As the writer describes the heroic efforts of the champion, the reader
feels happy to learn that, although evil-fighters braver and stronger than he
himself are rare, they exist and will answer the call to duty to protect
society, so that he himself may continue on with his ordinary life. The teams
of multiple superheroes now in popular movies portray a world in which the
reader is made to feel even safer, that no matter how bad the evil is which is
faced by society, there will be no need for the reader himself to alter his
pattern in daily existence, as more and more others will rise to extinguish the
bad guys. It is even better that the good guys rising up look just like
ordinary guys like himself, because in real life, when he looks around, all he
sees are more ordinary guys. It is comforting to know that some of these
ordinary guys are actually superheroes in disguise, and can be counted on to
reveal themselves as heroes when needed. The reader knows that he himself is
not a superhero in disguise, but can relax without feeling the pressure of
being on-call to take on that role. He can relax even though when he looks
around his ordinary world he does not see the strong heroes around him: day to
day, the truly good guys are incognito.
