Some months ago I finally read Neuromancer for the first time. I'd always heard it was good, and friends had always recommended it to me. I enjoyed it a lot -- though it took two thorough reads to fully understand -- and meant to blog about it, but somehow, that didn't end up happening.
I want to talk, though, about the character of Molly Millions, who appears to be the foremother of characters like Trinity from the Matrix and a bunch of other ass-kicking sexy women in science fiction.
I've seen a lot of talk lately about the limitations of "writing strong women." The idea seems to be that authors, particularly male authors, assume that a "strong woman" is a woman who fights in battles, has a no-nonsense attitude, and probably looks amazing in skintight leather. (In a way that doesn't look "too muscular" for insecure straight fellows who would find a very buff woman "ugly" or "unfeminine.") People who critique "writing strong women" say "write women instead." Which is meant to encourage authors of all genders to write different kinds of women characters.
And to just plain make sure our stories include enough women that one major character doesn't get taken as "what we think of women." Because if there are lots of different women in our stories, they're easy to take as individuals. But if there's only one woman in the main cast, it looks an awful lot like she's what we think women should be. Like we're trying to make some kind of statement about Women that we're usually not making about Men, because there are usually more men than women in our cast of characters and they usually do lots of different things for lots of different reasons.
And I get that. I do. But at the same time, when I was young, I looked up to those "strong women" and yearned to be like them. I didn't key on the sexualization or the pandering to male fantasy. I'm sure I sometimes noticed it and sometimes disliked it, but it wasn't a big deal to me. Being queer, I probably thought "ooh, pretty," with a few "that's unrealistic" or "how does that stay on, exactly?" or "she must be really agile to fight in that and not have lots of scars" caveats. But mostly, I looked at these characters and saw fearlessness.
I wrestled with anxiety as a youngun. And I had limitations due to disability that made me scared to do a lot of things other people did all the time. Those characters were an escape for me and a source of hope for me. In them, I saw something I wanted to be.
So I get the critique, but I'm biased in favor of those characters, despite their flaws.
Which brings me to Molly, and the things I like about her. One, that she's one of those kinds of characters. And two, that she does, in fact, have a flaw.
Or at least, that she does, in fact, fail.
Those of you who've read this book will know what I'm talking about. She's the muscle for a group of... I'll just call them hacker-thieves, to avoid doing too much explaining. Toward the beginning of their mission/adventure, she sneaks in to a corporate warehouse and steals a digital copy of a dead hacker's personality.
And catches some heat and breaks her leg.
And for the whole rest of the novel, she has this broken leg to deal with. It's repaired, and she goes about her badass business, but it hurts and it limits her and, in the end, her Crowning Badass move when she finally confronts the antagonists fails. Not because they're more badass than she is, but because her leg can't take the strain and breaks again.
At first, I didn't like that. At first, I found it frustrating as all hell. She's already a supporting character, as so many Badass Ladies are, and she's foiled by a broken leg that wasn't set right? The guys have to come save her? Bull pucky!
But the more I sat with my frustration, the more I liked it, because it made her human. She wasn't just wish fulfillment, whether for the male author who wanted a sexy badass to drool over or the me who wanted someone to want to be. She was a person, who did lots of amazing things, and who had a dumb setback at the end for dumb reasons. Just like so many of us do in real life.
So what's the connection I'm drawing? How would I like other people to write women? How do I want to write women myself?
I'm not entirely sure. (And honestly, there are some passages in Neuromancer where for some reason I think Molly sounds "too much" like a man. I can't quite say why.) But I think they're connected because, personally, I don't want to see the Badass Lady die. (I'm not sure anyone else does either. I'm just saying.)
I guess if I want anything, I want to see her change. I want to see things happen to her that no one expects, and I want to see how she handles them, and how others support her, whether male friends or female friends or male love interests or a sweet homebody of a wife she really wants to go home to at the end.
And weirdly enough, flawed as it is, I think this one old example has a bit of what I want to see in it.
