Okay I understand I am going to get some grief for this topic but please try your best to hear me out. A couple of years ago I was working on a short story, around 5,000 words, which eventually turned into the first few chapters of my Joy Left The World story. At the stories birth I was enrolled in a community college course about creative writing and it was up to my peers to review my stuff and provide feedback. My story was originally about a distraught woman having an argument with her husband and things just getting worse between them from there. I’m not sure how accurate my memory is of the timeline but I’m pretty sure I had an inkling that this short story was just the beginning of a much larger story that had yet to be written. I was also sure I wanted a nasty archetype of a woman from which we would have our protagonist. Over the course of the eventually expanded story she would come to terms with the core reasons for her rage and eventually grow to become a kind of reinvention of herself.

If you have ever seen the television show “My Name is Earl” then you get the crux of just who my “Joy” is modeled after.

Anyway, back to my conundrum. Most of the feedback I got from women was ‘This woman is nasty’ and stuff along the line of ‘You sound like a woman hater.’ That kind of left me in a bit of shock. For you see I was trying to show a human being who just happened to be female at the same time. If I had shown a scrooge type man as my protagonist would I have gotten the same level of grief? Hard to say. All I know is, in my feeble opinion, is that I was getting the impression that in the women reviewer’s minds, that womanhood shouldn’t be portrayed like that. Women have been shortchanged throughout our real history since time began and by god they wanted their literary 40 acres and a mule to never show them as being vile again. Yes I acknowledge this sounds a bit eccentric, and it is but again I am coming at this from my own personal interpretation.

You see my wife, when we first got together, admitted to me that during any given election, if there was a choice between a woman candidate and a male candidate that she would always vote for the woman regardless of their qualifications. I was shocked that she could be this shallow, this was pre Sarah Palin mind you, and did my best to try and convince her to view the candidate as a service to herself and ignore the gender bias she might have. Yes in some instances, perhaps half the time, a man might make a better candidate than the woman. Now if you want to utilize the gender as a final divider between two equal candidates then I have no problem with this kind of final decision making as we do need more women in politics.

Another thing I’ve noticed is what I call the Disney Delusion. It is the (lack of?) self-empowerment of women all over the world to wait for their man to come into their lives for that is their single reason for existence. Older Disney movies are notorious for this type of mind set. I don’t think I’m going to much argument in stating this. The flip side however, again in my opinion, is maybe just as dangerous. You see as womankind has identified this grievance they have swung the pendulum the other way which has its own adverse effects. Some women are not finding what they think are equal men in their own lives. Yes that is probably true. You know why? You are being an elitist, that’s why. As you lift yourself up in your own frame of mind you are starting to ignore everything you deem beneath you. In short you are doing nothing more than inserting yourself into the role of the problem and not the solution.

As a true humanist/feminist I hate myself for going here but back in the good ol’ days of the 50’s when men had more of the power they weren’t as ‘picky’. Perhaps that was because they knew so few women who were available who matched them or rather women that did match them frightened them. I’m open to a myriad of interpretations but in truth this is another topic for another day. Uh… I’m feeling a bit Bill O’Reilly nauseous right now. Getting back on point, men didn’t discriminate on social economic status because the pool was pretty much even with women being less than men. I’m not saying men are less picky or better but more that when everything is vanilla you can’t scream about missing your chocolate. I know men and women can be just as stupid as each other thinks they are.

Moving back to today. Women, those that have achieved, are able to pick from a rainbow of flavors of perspective partners. Maybe is because all the women all looking for (Is red the top of the rainbow?) red men and ignoring the other colors because they are self-serving and shallow? I get self-serving, but to a point. This is where my Disney delusion comes back in. It’s like they only want the red and nobody is going to accept anything less. That, once more in my humble opinion, is the definition of a feminazi. You are not truly looking to equal the field so much as displace the hierarchy with your own version.

So wrapping this all back up into itself, when women have told me I shouldn’t use a woman character like that, is it because they are under the reverse Disney delusion or that the character truly sucks? In the years since I have since shared this same story with other women, who I personally deemed to be a bit more societally unbiased, and have not gotten the same reactions. Yes the character was dark but in no way did they try to sterilize the character I had written. They seemed to accept that black can also be a color of the rainbow.