Women in Refrigerators

For Vulash and anyone else who wants to chime in.

I know this is something I've touched on at various times on TAC, but I like the idea of a metathread. Even though I am posting in Literary ecstasy, feel free to branch out.

I'm kind of surprised that I haven't mentioned Women in Refrigerators before on TAC - maybe I have and it didn't come up in a search, if so, forgive me for repeating myself.

Women in Refrigerators.

If you don't feel like following the link, the site is a list of female comic book characters who have had their powers taken away, been raped, or have been cut up and stuffed into a refrigerator. The name comes from a Green Lantern strip in which his girlfriend is chopped up and, you guessed it, stuffed into a refrigerator. It poses some interesting questions, but what I really want to get at is the idea that women are all too often used as cannon fodder to progress a male character's plot. For me, once I heard about WiF, the cliche started showing up everywhere.

What is it about violence against women that makes for such an irresistible plot point? There's the idea that we're wired to get more upset when women are hurt/killed, either biologically or culturally, and that makes it more interesting. Or maybe it's fashionable in some way - 'look, the women get hurt too, we're not afraid to push people's boundaries because we're just that edgy!'

Whatever - I call it lazy storytelling. Need your main man to make a choice? Kill his wife, that'll get him on his feet! Want to do a storyline where your main man slips into insanity? Rape his girlfriend! I can't decide if it's the laziest or the second laziest (behind 'Want your MC to be angry, brooding, and/or needy? Get that father out of there!') tactic in the book.

In my ideal world, every writer would ask themselves why it is important that a given character be male or female. And if a character is female because they make better cannon fodder, I'd like it if the writer made their pencil disappear (notice the gender neutral pronoun - women are guilty of this laziness too).

Not that that's the only reason writers should consider gender, by any means, but I think that's enough for one post 🙂.