Where Do Babies Come From? . . . Or, Sexism And Women In Fantasy

A lot of electrons have been spilled recently about the presence (or lack thereof) and roles of women in fantasy stories.  Both The Mary Sue and Tansy Roberts have weighed in on the supposed historical justification of sexism in the fantasy genre, and each author makes compelling arguments.  Basically, it goes that women throughout history have played vital roles and pursued all sorts of careers so it makes little sense to indulge historically inaccurate portrayals of women in fantasy stories.

Roberts's critique of The Mary Sue is spot on:

"History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely."

Her point is absolutely right, but then she moves to identify the two main tropes in fantasy as military/warfare and politics.  Magic is identified as a strong third, and links these to male dominance in historical reporting.  Ignoring the role that women played in war and politics, however, is a willful ignorance on the part of ancient reporters, and continues to be so in the fantasy genre.

"When it comes to politics, I’m sorry, but there are no excuses. Sure, women have been excluded from the public political process for large swathes of history and culture (except, you know, when they weren’t—even the supreme patriarchy that was Rome didn’t have complete control over the provinces, where female politicians and civil servants sprung up like weeds) but public is only one piece of politics. The Mary Sue article refers substantially to Game of Thrones, and that’s a very good example, but again you can look to history—as soon as there is any form of dynastic element to your politics, then women are IMPORTANT. Even when the political careers are solely male, those men have wives and families who have a stake in the proceedings and the outcomes, they have risks to take and campaigns to wage every bit as much as the men. And if the women’s politics are happening in salons rather than assembly halls… maybe you should be peeking into those salons. I can guarantee political DYNAMITE is going on in there. With finger sandwiches and mint tea? Why not?"

Okay, that makes a bit of sense.  But here's where I digress.  Historically inspired stories, like the fantastically successful Game of Thrones mentioned above, replicate stereotypes and inadequately populate fantastical worlds with shallow or fulsome representations of human activity.

I don't really want to engage the staggering sexism in fantasy except to make a more general point: historically inspired fantasy is boring.  Don't get me wrong, history is chock full of great stories, and they're perfect jumping off points for a couple dozen novels.  But historically flavored novels that simply replace the Lancasters with the Lannisters and England for Westeros (but what if St. George really did kill a dragon?) is about as interesting as sitting in traffic.

I suspect that my distaste for George Martin's novels stems from its conscious departure from fantasy tropes; instead of dealing with heroes and magic, his world is ours, though dimly glimpsed.  Essentially, it's bad fantasy and boring history, yet readers mistake it for verisimilitude the way a man dying of thirst will mistake a mirage for an oasis in the desert.

So thinking about fantasy as somehow a historical representation misses the point entirely.  Literature in all its guises is about human behavior.  Science fiction and fantasy offer wonder, but they also allow us to examine our present and speculate about our future.  Political worries, cultural values, dominant hierarchies are all reflected in fantasy and reveal a glimpse of the zeitgeist.  That is their power.

Science fiction excels by extrapolating human achievements to their logical end.  Fantasy can do the same by extrapolating human activity in settings beyond the mundane.  J.R.R. Tolkien reproduced the Earthly milieu consciously.  Writers following in that vein from Robert Jordan to Terry Brooks continued that trend with greater or lesser success.  Where G.R.R. Martin succeeds is creating a world disengaged from the environment of evolutionary adaptation -- though by failing to follow his worldbuilding to a logical end it quickly reveals its shaky foundations.  Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings successfully disengages from a historical model by creating whole-cloth both a world and its inhabitants.

Marie Antoinette

None of these authors engage the elephant in the fantastical room, however.  Why there are human beings more or less indistinguishable from the reader is never addressed.  Indeed, it remains such a persistent trope that it is rarely considered.  C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy successfully tackles the trope by wrapping it science fiction -- the human beings in her story are the descendants of human colonists on an alien world (where physics is kind of wonky -- a concession to the genre which corresponds well enough with what we know of science).

Regardless, instead of confronting sexism in the genre, commentators like Tansy Roberts should instead engage sexism in our own culture (and in our authors), and recast the mirror which reflects it.  And calling your empire