On Sexism of Older Speculative Fiction and on Excusing It

This may be an unpopular opinion but I feel I should express it. And if I am expressing it, it isn’t only because I’m a feminist. It’s because I can prove it. With proofs going as far as to nineteenth century.

Stop making this excuse, please. Stop talking that “the times were different” or that your favourite writer “was no man of the left” when it would come to describing women. Stop claiming that “everybody” wrote “like that” “back then”. Stop excusing Zelazny, Vance, King, Bradbury or whoever else with such poor arguments.

Because guess what? There were times more sexist than the fifties, sixties and seventies of the twentieeth century. There were medieval times, there was the whole nineteenth century, there was the whole sexist past of our world. And guess what again? Even back then, there were authors damnably good at describing women simply as human beings. Better at it than your favourite describers of Adventurous Adventures in Alternate Worlds and Alien Planets.

That may be the reason. Old boring privileged cis guys such as Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Forster or Tolstoy were no feminists and no anarcho-communist riding trans-gender unicorns, but they did manage. They were much more focused on dailyness than the writers of speculative fiction and they were able to write about women without fetishizing them; maybe that’s their mystery?

Somehow, they avoided bringing their female characters down to prizes or even worse—to playthings to be played around or raped. Somehow, they didn’t praise or excuse characters who would beat or harass women. Somehow, they were able to write about women (almost) without slut-shaming—remember Anna Karenina? And that book was written by a guy who actually expressed very misogynistic views in his Kreutzer Sonata!

It doesn’t mean that the general fiction now considered classical was free from the problems with the representation of women. Forster or Balzac used to make rather unnecessary generalizations on their female characters; Dickens would often step into the clichè of a plain innocent young girl and he apparently liked to portray old single or widowed women as weirdos. His heroines were also quite detached from one another; he was better at describing male bonds and friendships, that’s for sure.

But such problems are nothing in comparison with simply nasty or stereotypical things commonly present in the speculative fiction once (and sometimes still persisting nowadays). Reading Balzac you aren’t afraid that your protagonist will beat a woman for the very act of disagreeing with him; you aren’t so safe while immersing into the world of Zelazny’s Amber, meanwhile. Reading Dickens you may expect some stereotypes about women but not that they’ll be treated as mere sex-dolls; you can’t say the same about the installment of The Dark Tower. And in an average novel by Tolstoy, there are so many female characters that you don’t need to choose between Your Typical Inspiring Girl and Your Bad Wife like in 451 Fahrenheit.

Also, two more things.

Saying that those authors are on some unreachable level of mastery because of being Classy Classics is nonsense. They’ve become classics because they were popular in their times. And those popular authors were able to describe women as human beings.

Saying that general fiction and speculative fiction are two separate things not to be compared is no better. We all owe a lot to our Balzacs, Dickenses, and so on. And I think that instead of blind sticking with our own, we should take valid inspiration from each other, beyond genres and conventions.

It seems to me that many science fiction and fantasy authors weren’t eager to learn this lesson, apparently.