I Knew There Was a Reason I Liked Charles Stross's Work

Matthew Smith over on Smithology brought this link from Charles Stross’s blog to my attention by posting it on Pownce earlier today.

I’d not come across Alison Bechdel’s checklist for movies before, but it runs like this:

1. Does it have at least two women in it,

2. Who [at some point] talk to each other,

3. About something besides a man.

As Stross points out, if you extend that final point to “something besides a man, or marriage, or babies,” you’ve got a much shorter list of movies.

It’s been over ten years since Gail Simone compiled her list of Women in Refrigerators. The first time I came across that list, I thought to myself, “That’s right! Why is it that Batman can heal a broken back in less than an issue, but Barbara Gordon is still in a wheelchair?” And neither a Frank Milleresque “He’s the goddamn Batman!” or a friend’s argument that Barbara is just more interesting as Oracle than as Batgirl convinces me.

And here we are, ten years later, in the middle of a conservative backlash against feminism. Not just a backlash specifically against that fifty percent of the population that has two X chromosomes, by the way—a backlash against a concept of gender equality that benefits one-hundred percent of the population.

And Stross is correct in pointing out this trend towards men-centred women is even more obvious in television.

Take Dexter, for example. Much as I enjoy that show, and I do, the three major female characters are a high-ranking policewoman who not only inappropriately sexually harasses her male staff and openly dismisses the female ones, but also isn’t that good at her job, although she’s very good at the politics; another policewoman who, while ambitious and driven, is fixated on the idea of a successful relationship; and a woman horribly traumatised by an abusive marriage.

Not the sort of show you’d go to for role models.

You know, not all shows have to have strong female role models in them. Let’s face it: not all shows have strong male role models in them.

But I’m as worried as the next feminist (regardless of their gender) by what seems to be an increasingly conservative bent in story-telling—as my more or less constant diatribes against Lynx deodorant commercials shows.

Where’s the Sarah Conner for this generation? Sure, we have The Sarah Conner Chronicles, but I don’t remember that including a one-armed shotgun rack at any point. And, anyway, that wasn’t my Sarah Conner: my Sarah Conner wasn’t actually an exclusively maternal figure. She taught her son what he needed to survive in the post-apocalyptic future, but she herself was as fierce a fighter as he would ever have been—and she didn’t sublimate that to a concept of maternity predicated on complete self-abnegation. If she had, her son wouldn’t have been in foster care.

I loved Sarah Conner—she was more important to me than Ellen Ripley—and I miss her.

And her absence—and the absence of her descendants, women like Aeryn Sun—worries me.

There are texts out there that don’t trivialise women. I’ve always had a soft spot for Simon R. Green’s Hawk and Fisher series. They’re a little shlocky, perhaps, and more than a little bloodthirsty, but I’ll like any fantasy hero who says of his wife, while pursuing a villain, “Are you going to open the door, or am I going to have to get Fisher to kick it down?” when you know she could and would kick it down.

And Charles Stross is, I feel, doing himself a disservice when he suspects that not all his books would pass Bechdel’s test. I haven’t read the Laundry stories or Singularity Sky, which he thinks are fails, but the Merchant Princes saga certainly passes.

I knew I was going to like Miriam when, having found herself accidentally catapulted (on a swivelling desk chair, no less) into a fantasy world, she returns voluntarily with a video camera, camping gear, and a handgun.

Sarah Conner would have done no less.