The Idiot's Guide to Writing

Lesson 13: Fictional Bigotry

This is a hard turn from the current trend of lessons on the Guide, and probably the single most controversial topic I could've brought up.  But I'm not going to shelf this because I do think this is important.  Bluntly, this rant isn't even really advice, it's mostly my attempt to name something that's bothered me for the better part of my life.  When I have tried to explain this before, I've been written off as uncaring, stepping out of my boundaries, or even just bigoted myself, which is a little rude...so I'm going to try to condense my thoughts here for my own and everyone else's benefit.

Anyways.

Reading about bigotry makes me really unhappy.  For starters: it's just very uncomfortable. I'm female, I'm not straight, I'm not entirely white, and I don't feel very safe even hearing about bigotry towards other people and especially my own groups.  So I choose not to read about it when I can.  The second problem is that most fictional bigotry is really painfully stupid. 

Despite everything I said above and even experiencing some systemic racism, I practically never empathize with any depiction of bigotry in any story I've read, even the ones that claim to be "exposing the heart of racism/sexism/xenophobia/whatever".  This...for obvious reasons...is a problem.  The only story with a depiction that I did empathize with was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and even then, I don't think the book was really about racism and it wasn't even my group of people?  So...eh?

The problem isn't that we don't try to depict bigotry enough.  Trust me, there's plenty where that came from.  The pile is way larger than some of us think it is.  The issue is trying to depict realistic bigotry, both on a systemic and personal level, and very few people actually understand this.  I don't blame them.  The only way to know is to experience it and also be able to disassociate for the purposes of analysis.  You need to be able to empathize with the bigot to understand why bigotry happens (and, very importantly, note that empathy ≠ sympathy).  I don't need to explain why that's hard. 

What happens when we don't have realistic bigotry, then?  Well, I was recently talking about this in regards to a feminist retelling of Theseus and the minotaur.  If you're unfamiliar with the original Greek myth, the long and short of it is that fourteen virgins are annually sacrificed to a minotaur in a labyrinth, until a hero named Theseus comes along one year to kill the minotaur and rescue the virgins.  Importantly, a princess named Ariadne helps Theseus and gives him a ball of yarn to use as a trail out of the labyrinth.  The "feminist retelling" I heard was that the Ariadne stand-in was one of the virgins, and she clearly tells the Theseus stand-in what the monster is and how to kill it.  But he just...ignores her?  Because he's just so dagnasty misogynistic?  And then he gets his ass kicked, because of course he does.  Comeuppance and all.

I thought this was silly and voiced my concerns, and the response I got was "It is extremely silly, it is irrational, utterly stupid, that is the point, but I am willing to bet any woman from any walk of life has experienced this." I...ugh, look, if this is supposed to be a realistic depiction of misogyny, either I am greatly misinformed on what that word means or my female knee-jerk reaction of "this is dumb" tells you a lot. 

I'm not mentioning this to complain about a personal experience I had, it's just very illustrative of the topic at hand.  The reason why I thought this was dumb isn't because I think misogyny doesn't exist.  It does, and especially did in ancient Greece.  I thought this retelling was dumb because it's cartoonish, even in the context of classical Greek society, and that entirely defeats the purpose of talking about it!  If this is supposed to be the feminist takeaway from Theseus' myth and ancient Greek culture, it is going out of its way to ignore the context that we need to understand them.  Theseus is putting himself in danger to rescue helpless women in the original.  He very overtly accepts the princess Ariadne's assistance.  From my perspective, the original Greek author was very clear that women shouldn't be ignored in their society.  So what exactly are we 'exposing'?

It's not like Greece wasn't full of misogyny.  There are a lot of ways to meaningfully dissect it, especially in literature.  If I were to talk about it, I'd talk about the goddess Athena and her paradoxal characterization as "badass, intelligent goddess of justice" versus being incredibly petty.  Like, Aphrodite-levels of petty.  And this is despite her being well-liked!  The city Athens is named after her, and when she migrated to Rome as 'Minerva', she became one of their chief gods.  It's bizarre!  And that disconnect is the kind of really important stuff that we have to unpack. 

I think I've more clearly explained my issue here, and this particular anecdote applies to pretty much all depictions of bigotry. We have to recognize that it's way more complicated than some of us are apparently willing to admit, and write accordingly.  I don't have the answer to every single example of it, and let's not pretend any of us do.  It's not rational.  But we have to think about it, because if we don't, we fundamentally misunderstand how it works...and we can't explain to others what they're doing wrong and teach them to avoid being the worst of themselves.