Joss Whedon on why he writes strong female characters

4 thoughts on “Joss Whedon on why he writes strong female characters”

1. Well, considering that the current arguement going on at places like PZ’s and other sites (and pretty much the same arguement from the 80’s) is that *no* man can write a female character, since if a man rights a strong female character all that the man has done is write a male character without a penis.

   He can’t win and really should quit while he is ahead.

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2. I guess the flip side to that is that no woman can write a male character either. And no white can write a black character, black a white, American a Frenchman, gay a straight, straight a gay, adult a child, rich a poor, poor a rich, a modern person can’t write a historic character …

   And, ultimately, nobody can write about anyone except themselves.

   As Robert Parker put it in one of his Spencer novels: “Maybe the matter of understanding has been overrated. Maybe I don’t have to understand your situation to sympathize with it, to help you alter it, to be on your side. I’ve never experienced starvation, either, but I’m opposed to it. When I encounter it, I try to alleviate it. I sympathize with its victims. The question of whether I understand it doesn’t arise.”

   Ultimately, we’re human, and we all relate to each other in varying ways, along a lot of different axes. I could agree that a woman probably has a baseline advantage in writing a woman in some ways — but probably has disadvantages in other attributes of that other person (since “woman” is hardly a whole character).

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3. That is my thoughts exactly, but we live in a world where if you try and explain things like your Robert Parker quote, you are a bad evil misogynist.

   But, ever since “elevator-gate”, that seems to be the arguement that I have been seeing about men writing female characters, especially when it comes to things like Comics and Sci-fi, with Whedon’s Buffy (BtvS), Zoe, River (Firefly), Fred (Angel) being used as prime examples of a man writing a “male character without a penis” as a Strong Female Character.

   Not sure where any of this is going, but it should be interesting to see where things end up in a year.

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4. Jeez, and here I thought I might get some feminist street cred with my Prager-is-a-dolt piece …

   If someone wanted to argue that a man would have a more difficult time writing about a woman’s perspective in an Elevatorgate episode … then, yeah, I could see that argument. Women’s concerns and perspectives about personal safety, rape, dealing with guys who don’t take no for an answer, while hardly monolithic, are probably better understood by women than men.

   But that doesn’t define the entirety of a woman’s existence, any more than life in a foxhole might be deemed to encompass a man’s experience.

   But, then, I’m a guy, so I guess one would expect me to miss the point.

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