Spoilers for Naussica of the Valley of the Wind, Uprooted, Macross Frontier, and Damsel.
I have given a lot of thought to the very real fact that men have been in charge of, well everything for most, if not all, of recorded history. This means a lot of things that we are becoming more and more aware of, like the creation of and studies for drugs and safety equipment being tested on, and thus designed almost exclusively for men. The fact that I, and a vast majority of medically trained personal, didn’t know women have different symptoms for a heart attack than man. That I tried birth control, and stopped using it because it made me insane, and then I found out that’s just how it is. Women are expected to try different birth controls until they find one they can live with, take it every day at the exact same time, and this is just considered what is expected.
So I started thinking about the fact that stories are written a certain way, and that different cultures have different structures for stories. As an American, I expect stories to have a certain structure, certain beats. And then it occurred to me, that if the male experience had so permeated the world at large, in ways we don’t even notice because it’s just always been that way (seat belts are not designed for women, and the “normal” temperature that offices are set at support men in suits, leaving women in dresses freezing.), that stories are like that too.
The content and structure of stories were created by the male writers. And so I started to think about what stories might look like if written for and consumed by women. We have a few examples of that, the genres of writing where women have been “allowed” space. Romance being the main example, cozy mysteries, and books for children (picture books through young adult) But at the same time I wonder how much of even that has been dictated by the male gaze, because that’s what was available, because with very few exceptions, that’s what we’re made to read in school. (See this article about my own blind spots.) I think the only book school had me read that was by a woman was “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
Note: I am speaking in generalities and not directly to the LGBTQIA experience at this time. I recognize ‘not all men’ and ‘not all women’ and the presence of non-binary. Now, moving on with my point…
So I tried to go back to the beginning, what type of books would women write? What stories do women write when they write naturally? Men tend to be put favor on strength, being strong, beating the odds and the opponent, physical stuff and winning. Protecting, meaning they’re doing the protecting and to do that there obviously has to be a bad guy for them to protect from.
Women are the nurturers, they want to care and connect. And I have been slowly collecting examples of what I just in general call ‘feminine endings’. For the most part I am simply looking for stories where fighting, defeating your enemy, proving your superiority is not the way the story is ‘solved’.
Examples include Naussica of the Valley of the Wind (Manga)
Uprooted by Namoi Novak (Novel)
Macross Frontier (Anime)
And most recently, Damsel (Netflix Movie)
The way I determine this is that the ending is such that fighting is tried, and does not work. The way the conflict is solved, is through compassion and learning to communicate with the ‘enemy’ and coming to understand them.
In Naussica, the titular character works her way through a world that is increasingly covered by a poisonous mushroom forest where humans fight each other over the remaining livable area. Naussica takes time to understand the forest, the creatures that live within it, and works to stop the fighting when empathy and understanding.
In a similar vein is Uprooted where the world is being taken over by a forest that corrupts everything it touches, and humans are slowly losing ground to it no matter what they do. Agnieszka finds out the forest was created by hate and regret, by using magic based less on ‘rules’ and more on ‘feeling’, works slowly to heal it.
Macross Frontier, humans are traveling through space, looking for a habitable planet because Earth has been destroyed, and run into a hive-mind species of alien that they have to fight against for survival. In typical Macross fashion, the songstresses learn to communicate with the aliens through song, and once they can talk to each other, they come to a ceasefire.
When I started watching Damsel, I was hoping it would be the same. Elodie is sacrificed to a dragon (without her knowledge or consent) and manages to survive and escape, only the kingdom that is sacrificing these women say it’s because the dragon demanded it, only Elodie finds out it was because the king of old went in and killed the dragon’s whelps. Once Elodie manages to convince the dragon that the kingdom is taking women from other kingdoms and it’s not even the original kingdom suffering, she and the dragon team up and wipe out the royal family. It’s still fighting in the end, (I mean ‘fighting’ in that the dragon just burns everything down) but the came about by alliances of people who had been wronged.
Now I’m not saying stories with fighting in them are bad in any way, or that there shouldn’t be any fighting in stories. My main goal is just pointing out that this is not the only means of conflict resolution. That it has become normalized because of the pervasiveness of the males being in charge. Again, it is not inherently ‘bad’, but it means that as a society, we’ve come to expect that the person who is ‘right’ is decided to be whoever is stronger, or louder, or confidant (huh, ‘confidanter’ isn’t a word), or trickier. There is little attempt to come to a meeting of the minds, treating reasonable people as such, and using communication as a valid way to resolve conflict.
So be aware of what kind of story you’re telling, and what message you’re portraying about ‘strength’, ‘truth’, and ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’. I’d like to see more stories that have a more feminine bend, and that these stories are actually seen. I want to know what stories women would write if they weren’t inundated with male stories, expectations, and gaze since birth. It might be impossible right now, but I strive for a world where it becomes more and more possible.
