I’ve always been surrounded by literature
and stories. Growing up, both of my parents made sure of three things in my
reading life—that they read to me, that there was never a lack of books and
stories for me to read, and that my reading was never limited by my age. I am
incredibly grateful.
As
a young, weird kid who read too much and struggled to find a social circle, I
saw myself in characters like Anne Shirley—an eccentric daydreamer who didn’t
always identify with the world around her.
Like Anne, I fell in love with stories of worlds that were nothing like mine.
The Hobbit was deeply impactful on my
9-year-old imagination. Sherlock Holmes,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The
Odyssey were, admittedly, beyond my grasp at times, but I was still
enthralled with the worlds in these books. Star Wars was practically my religion.
However, it wasn’t until I grew older that I started to notice a trend—these
stories that I loved so much were not written for me. I was nowhere to be found
in them. Women who were fleshed-out, independent, and important characters had limitations,
or served the purposes of the male characters (cue Princess Leia in a gold
bikini). More often than not, they didn’t appear at all.
The Lord of the Rings remained my
favourite book for most of my teen years, and birthed a shameless period of
FanFic writing among my friends and me. In hindsight, I can see what caused
that—a need to see myself in the things that I loved the most. While it was
acceptable for the men in the books I read to be smart, tough, witty, and diverse
characters with human flaws and engaging character arcs, it was not the same
for the women.
The
older I got, the more I realized that what was missing in the books I read was
also missing in real life. You could be the tough girl, but the tough girl was
undesirable and unattractive. You could be the pretty girl, but the pretty girl
wasn’t smart, and she was usually only a commodity to be gained or earned. You couldn’t
be the smart girl, because for many men she doesn’t exist. To this day, men constantly
tell me I’m wrong or question me. I’ve been snubbed in comic shops, even though
I run a comic book club. I’ve been told I have bad taste in movies for naming my
favourite films. Once, a man insisted to me that there is only one Deathstar in
the Original Star Wars Trilogy
(there’s two). My male friends never have this problem.
In
spite of this experience, I can slowly see the limitations beginning to fade
away. In the past few years, there have been stories of women I could identify
with—all my flaws and strengths included—but I could also see women who are my
friends and family in the same stories. These are stories of women I admire. Notably,
Mad Max: Fury Road. I couldn’t have
predicted at the start of the year how much a dystopian car-chase action movie
would mean to me. To see these women—disabled, pregnant, of all ages and races—saving
themselves, and often the men around them, was one of the most powerful
experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theatre. The image, ‘WE ARE NOT THINGS,’
written on a wall behind an older woman holding a rifle, is not one I will ever
forget. Beyond that, who would have thought we would ever see a female Jedi? Star Wars: The Force Awakening gave us Rey.
I would have loved a character like that when I was a child.
The dialog is changing.
Diversity is something we talk about now in a different way, and it is changing
our perceptions of each other. If we
want to continue to better understand each other, our struggles and our
beautiful differences, then we need to keep striving for better representation
in the stories we tell.
