Welcome to the Saturday Spotlight, a weekly feature that shines the light on Indie and Debut authors. This week I have the pleasure introducing readers to:
H.L LEROY
~Author of The Fountain of the Earth~
February 2014
There seems to be frequent complaints in the media about the lack of strong female characters in film and print. I wasn’t sure about the description of “strong female characters,” since I’ve always felt that if you write about women, you write them as tough, resourceful, and competent but capable of mistakes. Real women with flaws, who screw up, and are occasionally frightened. In other words, genuine human beings.
Neither had I paid much attention, because I thought I’d always written about real women. But it finally hit home with me when I was asked (by a woman) the following question in an interview. “Since you’re a man, don’t you find it weird to be writing about a strong woman from a woman’s point of view?”
After the interview, I headed to my office and thought about the implications of the question. By writing from a woman’s point of view was I doing a disservice to women? Were my lead characters fakes? Can only a woman write about women?
As I pondered those questions, I listed some of the films I’d seen and the books I’d read in the previous year and tried to come up what was going on in media that I would be asked that question.
The first thing that struck me was that nearly all the screenwriters, directors, and authors were men and that the women in the films and books were generally portrayed in four different ways:
As an object – The most common and self-explanatory.
In a relationship with a man – Where their importance to the book or film is determined by their relationship to male characters.
To provide a reaction – Screams, tears, and hysterics, used to provide impetus to the hero.
To be sacrificed as motivation for the hero – A woman who only exists to be killed off and thereby providing impetus to the hero. She could be a wife, sister, girlfriend, colleague, sex worker, or whatever.
I found this to be distressing. Was this because I was consuming a disproportionate amount of male dominated media? Certainly not on purpose, I thought.
Then I looked into VIDA Women in Literary Arts. They have created a feature on their website called The Count. It consists of bar charts showing the ratio of men vs. women authors being reviewed at major publications. For example, at Harper’s Magazine in 2012 there were 54 male authors reviewed and 11 females. At London Review of Books, the ratio was 203 men and 74 women. In the New York Review of books it was male 316, female 89. And so it went.
Was this because there are simply more male authors than female? Partly, as it turns out. Of the eight publishing houses surveyed recently, only twenty-eight percent of their catalogs were represented by women authors. Not good.
I was not feeling good about any of the things I’d discovered.
Maybe, I thought, all of it was caused by gender bias. So I looked into that potential.
The Bechdel Test has become a popular device to determine the whether a book or film exhibits gender bias. “What is now known as the Bechdel test was introduced in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In a 1985 strip titled "The Rule,” an unnamed female character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirement:
1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.
Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace. She later wrote that she was pretty certain that Wallace was inspired by Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One’s Own...” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
In my research I discovered that cinemas in Sweden are now using the test and publishing the results as a rating to alert viewers to gender bias in film. A good idea, I thought. Since nearly fifty percent of films produced, fail the test to one degree or another, it looks like the Swedes are going to be busy.
So what does all this mean? Do I find writing about women weird? The answer is an emphatic no. And next time I’m asked that question, I’ll say that what we really need are more women writers and more male writers of real female characters. Then all of us need to keep our eyes open for examples of bias in our own work. When we do that, there will be no reason for that question.
What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear.
H. L. (Holly) LeRoy is an American short story writer and novelist, author of the award winning Street Crimes mystery anthology and the novel The Fountain of the Earth (Nov. 22, 2013), first in a series of young adult adventures. Born in San Jose, California, LeRoy lives in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California with his family.
GIVEAWAY
Today H.L LeRoy is giving away one eBook copy of The Fountain of the Earth. To enter just fill in the copter form. Everyone is welcome to enter.
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Terra Vonn is fighting to survive in a destroyed world,
surrounded by unspeakable horror . . .
and things are about to get much worse.
After witnessing the horrific murder of her mother, fifteen-year-old Terra Vonn has a singular focus—exacting revenge on the killers. But before she can complete her plan, savagery intervenes, and she is cast alone into a brutal post-apocalyptic world. As she trails the murderers south—through a land filled with cannibalistic criminals, slave traders, and lunatics—the hunter becomes the hunted. Terra quickly learns that she is not as tough or as brave as she thought she was. Worse, she may be the only one who stands between what little remains of civilization and destruction.
Thanks for being on the spotlight H.L LeRoy. To find out more about this author, visit:
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