My Hero

I have been tossing a story idea around in my head for probably about six months now. Today I finally sat down and drafted out the skeleton of the whole plot. It took me four hours and five pages, but that's not really remarkable. What's remarkable is that it took me six months to get started. Normally if there is a story clawing at the back of my mind as hard as this one has been, it's impossible to keep me out of it. I have *got* to get it out, and I will go on caffeinated writing binges until I can't move or until it's done. The reason I hadn't been able to with this one is... slightly depressing.

See, my story is in the genre of epic fantasy. Swords and magic, though lacking in the dragon department. It has a heroine. She's fantastic, almost Amazonian.But, it also has a hero. A male hero. A fairly stereotypical male epic fantasy hero, all young and gorgeous and long waves of blond hair and unnaturally gifted at the one thing he has to be unnaturally gifted at to be the hero. And, of course, the hero and the heroine fall in love. They have to. It's written in the fantasy rulebook somewhere. And it's so sappy too, how sweetly and predictably they fall in love. So... heteronormative.

But I thought I was more enlightened than that. I thought being enlightened wasn't that. I looked at my strong male hero, saving the day and getting the girl like everybody knows he's supposed to, and I said, "You are so old fashioned! You are so not what a hip young feminist writer should be encouraging! You should be like Nicholas Carraway in The Great Gatsby, the narrator but not the hero! I should make the heroine the only driving force in the story. Strong women! Fuck Yeah!"

But as hard as I tried to change the character, change the story, I couldn't do it. It never worked out. I'd make some "feminist" or "progressive" change, shift the heteronormativity a little to the left, pull some of the hero's power away, and hit the fuzzy gray space in my mind that means there's no more story. I tried, but I couldn't emasculate my hero. I NEED my hero. And I need him to be heroic! I need him to kick ass and take names! Because that's what heroes DO! And yes, I need him to be the love interest, the sex interest, the soulmate of our fair heroine, because that's part of what makes it epic.

So I just finished reading Who Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers, out on my porch with the hookah this afternoon. I take some serious issues with a lot of what she has to say in that book, but her last chapter deals quite a lot with how second wave feminism censored art. The book is almost twenty years old so I hesitate, without much more research, to say how much of what she suggests still holds true. But it spoke to me this afternoon. She spent a few pages talking about heated debates within feminism at the time over the scene in Gone With the Wind (which I slept through, by the way, so I'm taking her word for it) where Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs and ravishes her and then is gone by morning, when Scarlett wakes up smiling. Lots of women, understandably, swoon. Second wave feminists get enraged and talk about how it was rape (regardless of the fact that the swooners consciously make a distinction between rape and ravishment, or "mutually pleasurable rough sex," in the words of a respondent to a survey by Harriet Taylor on the subject) and it's just wrongheaded of women to swoon over such things. The feminists know better. They know that artists who create such fiction are propping up the patriarchy, and it doesn't matter if women actually enjoy reading about such things or watching them in movies because those womens' desires are just wrong and foolish and they don't know how deluded they are.

And, in one thing I just can't argue with her on, Sommers reminds her readers that there is just no right way to be attracted to someone. Well meaning as the feminist movement may have been, and as beautiful as their perfect world fantasy of genderless romance may have been, some people, some women, some FEMINISTS!, are always going to swoon over Rhett Butler. And there is nothing wrong with that. I myself find it very difficult to argue against mutually pleasurable rough sex, or the "alpha male" character that is typical of the hero. Call me crazy, but in the otherwise fulfilling life that I certainly have, that's kinda hot.

And this is mostly because I know that I live in a world where I have options, in my life and in my fiction. I don't have to spend my life tied behind a man. I don't have to be a misandrist either. I could make my hero the only character with momentum in my story and leave my heroine a trailing Lois Lane. I could make my hero a helpless puppy and give my heroine all the momentum to lead the story forward. But I don't like it that way. I like my epic fantasy hero, complete with the mark of destiny on his forehead and the heroine beautiful and strong at his side. I can't fight for censorship. I can't fight for any "one true way-ism." I can fight for options. I needed Christina Hoff Sommers this afternoon. I finally gave myself permission to make my hero as strong as I needed him to be without feeling like he was threatening feminism, or that I was through him.

And I started writing.