The cheerleader’s gonna die: horror, writing and misogyny - Die Booth

          So, at the risk of touching upon an emotive and controversial

Die's forthcoming book

subject for my first Authors Electric post, I really need to talk about the treatment of women in horror (not to mention writing in general). This is a huge topic. I’m not even scratching the surface here.
          Horror is no place for women.
          Of course I’m saying that as an ‘outrageous opening statement’, similar to the recent and excellent New Statesman article ‘I hate strong female characters’. But I do mean it a little. Why any woman would want to bother writing in the horror genre considering the pernicious, outmoded sexism that’s rife in it is beyond me.
          Every genre writer I’m sure is aware that (and I don’t want to blanket here, there are good examples out there; this is just based on what I’ve observed to be overriding attitudes) horror and sci-fi remain pretty much male-dominated. Unless there are a lot of female writers out there who use male-sounding pen names, in which case, they write pretty convincingly as 'men' too, and by that I mean that the majority of horror can’t be considered exactly feminist. Or even neutral.
          You see it everywhere. I’ve been really enjoying the recent TV series of Hannibal, but even in a well-shot, well-written, beautiful horror series which does actually feature a good few female characters, the clichés are still rife. There’s (SPOILER ALERT):

The serial-mom who kidnaps boys and has them kill their families. There’s the would-be victim implicated in her father’s crimes, and the sympathetic mad girl who just can’t help it. Every female character is a victim in some way, even if she’s the killer. Even the psychiatrist-to-the-psychopath has been the victim of an attack which defines her character on the show.

          (END SPOILERS) None of them are allowed to operate outside of the pre-set roles of mother/whore/innocent. Call me a non-traditionalist, but I’m getting tired of every female character in horror being there seemingly as vehicles for sexual threat, commodities to be rescued, stolen or ogled, with the predictable inevitability of any horror-story pet’s gory demise. Even relatively hard-nut female protagonists often suffer sexual threat along the way, whereas men never do, at least not outside of prison drama (go on; think of a single example to prove me wrong).
          Obviously, it’s horrifying: of course everyone is unsettled by sexual threat, just as anybody would hate to have their eyeballs gouged out. Why just stop at the girls, though, who have The Fear institutionalised in them in Real Life from early childhood? Let’s get some good ol’ terrifying rape threat going for the boys too (or, you know, can we just cease to have it all? Please?)
          Otherwise, female characters are executing revenge for a traumatic event (often a rape) or are operating in response to a male character or pre-determined roles. Have you ever seen a female villain operating solely from the motivation that she’s just a bit of a bad egg? Ever?
          Think about it: a male lead in the genre cliché is rescuing his women, protecting his women, or avenging his father. A female lead, if granted an action role, even more rarely a leading action role, is rescuing or protecting her children (Silent Hill, anyone? Mama?), or trying to not get raped/killed by the masked maniac. Even those who aren't, like Alice in Resident Evil are often created by men. Male is the default. If there is a rare, well-rounded, female character, her female-ness will be referred to, whereas a man’s maleness is assumed, because it’s default, right?
        When your leads are described in a horror story, you get hair colour maybe, general build. If the guy is solidly built, it might be mentioned, at a push. If the woman’s boobs aren’t mentioned at some point, I’d be surprised. It sounds far-fetched, but go on - watch out for it next time you read. I read a horror anthology recently where out of 14 stories (all by male writers) 7 contained sexual objectification of women and 4 described actual sexual assault. I can only assume these were written by a male audience, for a male audience, which is not only terrifying but also really dumb - why lose half of a potential market because you can’t resist going gaga over titties?
          The truly scary thing is that this overriding attitude is not confined to female characters (or indeed to the horror genre, although I’ve noticed it’s worse). Authors themselves also come in for endless stick. I’ve read a lot of horror stories (pardon the pun) about female authors being harassed and intimidated at cons and how not enough is done to prevent or address this. It shouldn’t be happening at all. To anyone. What is wrong with those guys? They are literally treating a fellow human being differently solely because of their appearance. That’s all it comes down to. It is a mind-blowingly stupid situation (and word to the wise: there’s no better way to impress a girl than, oh, treating her like a fellow intelligent human being.)
          An author is an author. Their gender is irrelevant. What matters is how well (or not) they write and whether or not you enjoy the stories they are telling you. It makes me wish we could all just have an author number under which to publish; we might actually get judged on our talent then, rather than ourselves - or, more importantly, what people perceive us as.
          Here’s a thing.
          I have a fairly unusual name. I write under my real name (yeah, how about that) because it’s pretty distinctive and (I thought) fairly gender-neutral. Maybe there’s a bit of predetermination evident, but I thought it’d be a good pen name, especially for a writer of the macabre (let’s set aside for a moment the interminable jokes I have to endure about it). However, when submitting stories, it seems I fall into one of two camps: those of people who assume I’m a Di and those who assume I’m a Dai (even though I’m clearly neither; it’s written down right there, monsterlickers).
          The difference in attitude I experience between people who assume, from merely my email correspondence and writing, that I’m male and those who assume I’m female, is staggering. And it happens all the time. It makes me wish I had more time in which to experiment with different pen names: I’d be very curious to see if the same story submitted to similar markets under an obviously 'male' or 'female' pen name would be greeted with a very different response.
          Take the example of J.K. Rowling. I’m sure we all know now about her being advised to use just initials so she wouldn’t be outed as a lady-shape. I’m sure we’ve all heard about her incognito crime debut under the pen name Robert Galbraith. The thing that strikes me most about this article about it in the Telegraph is the following quote: "Reviewers have described it as an “exhilarating debut” and marvelled at how a male author could ever describe women’s clothes so well."
          That's what they pick up on in this interview? A sort of 'oh, well, actually, we could tell it was a chick because she, erm, like, wrote about chick stuff,' as if someone writing with knowledge about women's clothes has to be a woman, it couldn't be, say, a man with an interest in fashion, or a man who knows how to operate a search engine to do some research, or a man with eyesight who can look at stuff and describe it with words.
          The pathetic, contrived ways in which people routinely attempt to widen the gender gap: words fail me. And the worst thing is, reading the comments on the linked article, it’s a whole heap of similarly bizarre views “This is a remarkable woman. When I read the first Harry Potter I couldn’t believe that a woman could have such a “boyish” imagination. As a child, we boys were always more imaginative in the games we played than the girls, and to see these fantasies brought to life by a woman was a revelation,” writes ‘armchairman’, who was probably viewed as too irritating as a child to be invited to play with the girls.
          “Isn't Robert Galbraith pretty,” opines ‘spamshredder’ 'humorously', because as Amanda Palmer well knows, you can’t be in possession of a vagina in any line of work and not have your appearance commented upon ahead of your talent.
          Readers. Gender is a construct. It doesn't matter. What if I start sending this out as my author photo, to prospective publishers? (Set aside for a moment that it's a terrible low-res cameraphone selfie!)

Or what about this?

          How do you think the attitudes toward me would be affected? But here’s the thing: those photos are of the same person; same person, same day, same hour - the only difference is a bit of makeup and a lot of padding and fake hair. It is a construct and does not affect the writing, so why should we carry on accepting that authors and characters both be treated so disparately according to their gender?
          Horror is no place for women. But it should be, and this needs to change. Haul yourselves into the 21st century, genre literature: you might learn something from the entire half-a-population whom you seem keen to marginalise.

          Thanks for reading, you can read more from me on my blog.

          You can find some of Die's stories in the ReVamp! collection - but look out for the forthcoming Spirit House.