On the Supposed Overpopulation of Female Protagonists in Y.A.

My friend Marni sent me this amazing article entitled, "A Female Author Talks About Sexism and Self-Promotion," written by Sarah Rees Brennan (author of The Lynchburg Legacy books and the The Demon’s Lexicon trilogy). I highly recommend reading the article, as Sarah does a good job of laying out the difficulties of self-promotion for female authors and how these problems reveal an underlying sexism rampant in the way society treats female writers and artists, especially those whose work feature women or, in the case of writing, focuses on female protagonists.

I loved this piece, in part because I was already working on getting some similar thoughts written down vis-a-vis the ongoing backlash against the prominence of female authors and female-focused books in the Young Adult genre. The thing that set me off earlier this week was this piece a coworker sent me from New York Magazine, The Five: The Young-Adult Bubble. Section two, entitled “The Big Yawn,” which featured the following quotes:

The Publisher
“When something hits huge, you get a flood of manuscripts. You see a lot of heroine-who-thinks-she’s-nobody-but-has-a-special-power. Big eye roll. You’re just like, Wow, I’ve read this before in a million different ways.” —Natashya Wilson, senior editor, Harlequin Teen

The Hollywood Producer
“YA adaptations, which are easier to make because they can be franchised, are creating great parts for girls at the moment of the dormancy of the romantic comedy. It’s a nice by-product.” —Lynda Obst, Lynda Obst Productions

The Young Adult
“Can’t we get books that are predictable and happy instead of predictable and sad? I have never been starved out by my government or exiled by aliens.” —Jack, eighth-grader

These comments in particular really got my goat for a couple of reasons. First, I don't recall ever seeing a lot of publishers rolling their eyes over an uptick on books about boys-discovering-they-had-the-power-inside-them-all-along as a genre. I mean, my god. If that trope ever got old, the entire comic industry would just fall over dead, with much of the film and video game industries quickly to follow.

The vast majority of superhero stories of any kind tend to revolve the average person standing up to extraordinary events or discovering through a series of events that they are special in a way that brings them great power and great responsibility. Everything from Harry Potter to Ender's Game to Lord of the Rings is covered in that statement if we apply it to male protagonists, and I don't know anyone who has said, “Oh, no. No more of that. We can't possibly skip rebooting Spiderman for the third time to make a single movie about a solo super heroine.”

Let me be clear: it doesn't bother me that we enjoy these tropes to the point that we retell them over and over. What bothers me is that we don't seem to mind telling them to young boys, but god forbid there be more than one or two series where a female character who thought little of herself turns out to be the most powerful or special character of all. When it comes to men, we can't make media – film, tv, or book – to reinforce that message fast enough. When it's all about a girl, suddenly it's a one-and-done, trend so over. It's as if the world we live in will only allow so much room for women before it has to remind us that we need to be grateful we get to have a story at all, that we need to remain small and tucked away, that we shouldn't take up too much figurative space in the narrative or literal space in the book shop or world.

I say “girl” here, too, because receiving the message that you can be strong and powerful at a young age is critical. While boys hear plenty of it in every form of media, girls are often getting a very different message from the moment someone hands them a baby doll or a barbie doll. That is what I find so incredibly heartening about the explosion of female protagonists in Young Adult fiction. Young girls can walk into a bookstore now and see a wall full of books with stories featuring characters they can see themselves in. (This remains significantly less true for POC teens and queer teens, but I feel hopeful when I see reddit hosting AMAs on writing diversity in YA that at least we -- those who read and write YA -- are talking about it and what we can do about it, even if we still have a very long way to go.)

Being a teenage girl is hellish. I'm not trying to diminish that teenagerdom is a particular kind of hell for everyone, but I think it is particularly difficult for girls because it isn't until you hit puberty that it really starts to sink in that the world sees you primarily not as yourself, but as a future appendage or object. For some girls that happens when they are fifteen. For me, it started when I was about nine. Though the inundation of patriarchal messaging starts at birth, puberty is when a girl start consciously realizing that the world is more likely to identify and value her vis-a-vis her relationship to someone or something else: someone's hook-up; someone's girlfriend; someone's mother; someone's wife. She is told clearly that the world does not need or want her in the public sphere and that her individual personhood is far less meaningful or consequential than what she can do for someone else. She is not the hero of her own story. She is the one who waits: waits to be loved, waits to be rescued, waits to be admired. She is the object, not the subject, even in her own life. In a world that repeatedly tells teenage girls they are most valuable only when they are obedient, when they are agreeable, when they keeps their heads down and their mouths shut, and simultaneously says that they should value themselves primarily for what others see as valuable in them instead of who they really are, I am happy every time time I see a new book that sends a contradictory message.

When I see someone saying, “Yawn. I am so over this whole female empowerment trope,” all I want to do is scream, “Part of the problem.” There is a reason these stories resonate with female readership, from teens all the way into adulthood. So many of us feel disempowered by our sex or gender identity every day: in classrooms, in our jobs, in our homes, in our relationships. And I have to tell you, rereading bell hooks and Audre Lorde and trying to imagine new approaches to rebuilding the master's house can be just as disheartening sometimes as it is inspiring. Sometimes we need to be shown a world where someone like us can make a difference just to get out of bed in the morning. We need to be reminded that we are powerful and that we can make a difference, but that creativity and perseverance are required.

Through fiction, we sometimes see choices we cannot make or cannot even see as possibilities until they are shown to us. While I think it's nice that an eight-year-old boy wants a predictable and happy book, it is also not that surprising that Jack isn't experiencing quite the same siege mentality as a twelve-year-old female peer. And for that little girl, I don't want fewer of these stories; I want more of them. I think we cannot have enough of Suzanne Collin's Katniss, Veronica Roth's Tris, Lauren DeStefano's Rhine, Lauren Oliver's Lena, Carrie Ryan's Mary, just to name a handful of girls kicking butt and taking names in the YA dystopia genre alone. Maybe that seems like a lot of girl vs. the world stories for you, but when your whole life feels like that, it isn't hard to relate. Why is it so surprising that these stories resonate with female readers of all ages or that they revel in the idea that they could change things for the better, no matter how bad the odds? And why is that a bad or even a boring thing?

And the best thing about all of those books, and all their protagonists, is that each girl faces different obstacles.  Despite all being YA books  following a girl in a dystopian society, the ways each girl fights systematic oppression and challenges privilege in her respective stories is different -- different in motivation, in technique, in detail.  Yet all of them are strong. All of them are fierce.  All of them are brave and courageous and take wild risks in their quest to be free.  The world needs that. It needs more of that.  

When The Publisher is ready to move on, it makes me nervous. Why? Because we love these books for a reason, and we need more of them.  I get nervous when the people who sit at the gates of media decide they don't want more of that story, even if we still do.

The same thing goes for The Producer. By saying these films are nice because they give young female actresses something to do while interest in developing rom-coms seems flat, she is sending a horrible message. It's all right there, in one sentence. “Since there aren't any love stories for the girls to be in right now, maybe they can find something else to do in the meantime.” It implies that the market cannot sustain both stories with female warriors and stories with female love interests, and this will do until we can get back to telling those old stories we are more comfortable with.

I don't want to go back to the old stories to the exclusion of other, newer ones, ones were a girl gets to be the hero, where she saves herself. I don't want this to be a trend or a fad or a flash in the pan. Boys have had books to see themselves in, to empower themselves, to dream of better worlds for themselves, forever. I'm thrilled to see that the scale is finally evening out a bit for girls today.

Me? I'll be supporting that effort by continuing to buy and read those books, to recommend them and give them to others. I'll check them out of libraries. I'll review them online. I'll show up for readings when those authors come to town.

It isn't much. It's my voice, shouting into the communication void of the masses, hoping to be heard. But it is my voice. Right now, flexing my power in the marketplace of ideas is the best recommendation I have for making sure that those stories continue despite those in the industry who are uncomfortable with them and would like us all to say "thank you," shut up, and move on.

Everyone likes it better when you just shut up.

On fear of being a woman in the virtual public sphere

As I sit here writing this to you, dear reader, I have a confession: there are reasons I have not written in a while. Even as I sit down to write you this, I have cracked open my very last bottle of beer I carried back from Kigali just to find the will to say what I am about to say.

It has gotten really scary to be a woman on the internet lately.

This is not new. Frankly, it's always been a little scary being a woman doing anything in the public sphere that people disagree with. I've worked on political campaigns, I've done public speaking engagements around issues like abortion, I've even written things on this and other blogs that have brought threats and harassment to my virtual door. I play online games; I attend gaming events like Quakecon and Blizzcon, and gaming isn't always the most female friendliest of hobbies. I've worked to prosecute domestic violence offenders and stalkers, many of whom by virtue of my work knew my full name as well as my work location and hours. And I've been personally stalked and harassed by a former partner.  So I get what it's like to have the inescapable dragnet that is modern technology used against me, to get me, to make me feel sad ans scared and miserable, even from thousands of miles away.

But in doing all my various work and activism over the last decade or so, being a vocal woman in the virtual public sphere has never felt as...fraught as it does now. I don't know how else to explain it. And I am not someone who is easily scared or who tends to shut up because people want me to. (Let's be honest; if you know me, you know I'm more likely to yell louder if someone tries to take my voice away.)

So when I tell you there's this undercurrent that I keep bumping up against, even in my generally carefully manicured and limited interactions with the web, I hope you will hear me, and not dismiss it. There is a relatively new (past couple of years, I think) and more virulent strain of hatred toward women on the internet, something I didn't always feel and now think about every time I tweet or post on Facebook.  It is real. It is palpable. And it is working as a silent and insidious form of censorship in all sorts of ways.

There are a lot of contexts in which I could talk about this. I could talk about #GamerGate, and my experiences as a gamer from my early teenage years, and the various women who have been attacked in response to #GamerGate, to the point that frankly I have been afraid to write about it at all. I could talk about what it's like to work a tech company and make my living working on the web as a woman, and the daily wear and tear of that even in a progressive, wonderfully decent and well-intentioned company like mine. But what I actually want to talk to you about is something that happened recently to a Young Adult author, Stacey Jay.

A lot of people have been writing about Stacey Jay's Kickstarter campaign and the backlash against it. Stacey wrote about it on her blog. My friend, Marni, who knows Stacey, wrote a pretty good critique of all this on her blog as well. Additionally, if you want to read a rather impassioned piece, you can check out The World in A Satin Bag's response which - profanity aside - sums up my feelings about this pretty thoroughly and also shows some of the critique tweets about the Kickstarter.

The TL;DR is that Stacey got dropped from her publisher due to weak sales, but had fans who really wanted a sequel her recently released (e.g. a few weeks ago) novel, Princess of Thorns. She decided to set up a Kickstarter to fund writing the book and get it into the hands of the fans who wanted it. I will note here that Stacey writes a lot, and has a number of published books under her belt, mostly with female protagonists, many of whom are strong and smart and kicking butt all over the place. 

But back to the Kickstarter: In exchange for things like getting a digital copy or hardcopy of the follow-up book to Princess of Thorns and some of the other usual perks that come with a Kickstarter, Stacey asked for enough money to support her for about 90 days while she wrote the book. To justify the amount she was kickstarting for – the princely sum of $10,500; $3000 going to cover editing and artwork and the rest for living expenses – Stacey demonstrated her need for her income to what I feel was an astonishingly high degree. FN2. She talked about how much it would help her support her family, how it would compensate for the time she might be writing other projects that would generate income, how she had calculated the amount, and how it was reasonable given her familial and financial responsibilities for things like gas, her mortgage, and heat during winter. Extravagant, I know.

$7,500 for three months of work. That's not a lot of money, particularly when you are talking about a proven author who has been published several times and has a record of being able to produce a real product. She was going to create something she knew there was a market for, and all she asked was to be compensated in return.

Now there are people out there who have criticized Stacey for using Kickstarter when they feel she should have used Indiegogo or GoFundMe. And there are those who think her price was too high. All of these people had the right to simply choose not to fund her. But today we live on the internet, and that's never where things stop when people get angry anymore.

Instead, people have harassed Stacey to the point that she has completely exited social media and says she will not be publishing more books under the name Stacey Jay. They talked about how much she was asking for, criticized her for asking to be compensated at all, and even went so far as to discuss the costs of living and median mortgage rates in her zip code. From her blog post, in which she explains why she took down the Kickstarter and then went on to apologize for ever posting it, it seems clear that she has received some rather harsh and personally scary responses as a result of all this. All because she was a person on the internet with a product she knew had a market and she had the audacity to ask people to pay for said product, which largely consists of the time and effort it takes to create something out of nothing, an entire world out of the weird and scary meanderings of a human brain.

As a writer who aspires to get my books out into the world, this really upsets me. While I have a good job, I dream of being able to write full time. It's not inconceivable to me that, if one of my series got dropped, I'd want to finish it and be able to give it to the people who loved it. And as a reader, I know how upset I am when I end up never getting to the end of a story I enjoy. I personally really like Stacey's books. Princess of Thorns is on my “to purchase” list. As someone who enjoys her storytelling, I want her to be able to finish that story.

But beyond that upsetness I feel as a reader and writer, I find myself feeling afraid of the internet as a tool for promotion and social interaction. Whether you're talking about Zoe Quinn making and reviewing games and then, after an ex-boyfriend turned the trolls of the gaming community against her, having to flee her home in fear, or you're talking about Soraya Chemaly's article on “The Digital Safety Gap and the Online Harassment of Women," the internet is a scary place for women, and the threats feel like they're increasing on all sides. (If you want to read a truly terrifying read, check out Amanda Hess' ”Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.”

And here's the thing – women are treated differently, both online and in the real world. And we have a reason, when someone threatens us online, to fear that might become a reality. And whether you are Zoe Quinn, or Stacey Jay, or even a barely read no one like me, you never know when the thing you want to do in the virtual space might suddenly catapult you into the web'o'sphere and gather a lot of attention, for good or ill.

Fear of women in the public sphere is not new, particularly when women choose to speak and act as though their voices matter. It's a historical and global challenge that continues for women everywhere, everyday. To walk down the street without being verbally harassed. To have equal access to physical space on the subway. To speak without being threatened. To control their own money, their education, their own lives, their own bodies.  The message women get is clear and consistent: everyone likes it better when you just shut up.

And though I am sure there will be readers among you that see my ties between #GamerGate harassers and Stacey's Kickstarter kerfluffle as tenuous, or will assert that this isn't a gendered issue, I will simply point out to you that 1. some idiot got kickstarted for five times what Stacey asked for to make potato salad, and no one threatened him; and 2. no matter what reason people show up in your inbox, direct message on twitter, or other social media to threaten or shame or harass you, it all feels the same -- awful. And the through-line in the worst of cases seems to be uniformly that the worst of the internet's hatred and vitriol is saved for female-identified persons, and that the response will be even worse for you if you are (a) trying to create something of your own or (b) critiquing something a man made.

In a world where death threats and doxing have become normalized, where one site's trolls can turn your life to terrifying shambles, it's hard to want to write or blog or tweet or really interact with people. I spent most of the last few weeks of 2014 just hiding and considering how much, if any, I wanted to be part of social media. But I refuse to be scared off. And I refuse to shut up.

So here I am, writing about the very things that might invite trouble into my life and my home. Because at the end of the day, I refuse to be silenced by fear.

And hey - if you like Young Adult novels, Stacey Jay has quite a few good ones. You should check them out.  I personally recommend Juliet Immortal. If you need me, I'll be out buying some of her books, including Princess of Thorns, and showing the world that we could use more people like her, and that no one deserves to be forced out of the public sphere

_________________

FN1. It's a Virunga Mist for any of you with knowledge of Rwanda. My last full day there, I was challenged to drink one of every type of local beer so I could determine what my favorite was to bring home. Virunga Mist was the winner by a significant margin.

FN2. Seriously, it was one of those moments that reminds me of that moment in 1952 when President Nixon and his wife went on television to disclose a lot of information about their financial situation in an effort to beat back some accusations about campaign finance stuff during his VP run with President Eisenhower. This is historically known as the “Checkers” speech, the name of Nixon's dog, who sat with him and his wife through this very personal and, probably somewhat humiliating, speech. PBS has a transcript posted if you want to read it.