Discussion of the Day: Sexism in Crime Fiction
Jessica Mann rattled a lot of cages with her announcement that she intends to quit reviewing crime fiction because of its pervasive “sexist misogyny”.
But Examiner’s Michelle Kerns says Ms. Mann has it backwards:
Ms. Mann is right about one thing — modern crime fiction is bathed in sexism. She’s just off on the gender. It’s not women these books are sexist against — it’s men.
She goes on to point to three basic stereotypes foisted upon male crime fiction characters:
1. The Useless, Shiftless, Gutless Male. This will be a secondary character who is either too weak to stand up for himself or excessively blustery and abusive because he is all too aware of his inferiority.
2. The Sensitive Inspector. This is reserved for detectives, detective inspectors, policemen, etc. I’ve ranted about this at length before. These lawmen are moody, broody, terribly sensitive, unlucky in love, deferential to women, and spend time reading the classics, listening to obscure music, and quoting Shakespeare over the autopsy table.
3. The Nasty Killer. He may occasionally indulge in a bit of murder that involves children, elderly people, or men, but his favorite target is women. Especially young women, whom he likes to mentally and physically torture in any number of weird and inexcusable ways.
Check out the entire piece here and join in the discussion in the comments section.
AuthorScoop
October 27th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I do believe there’s a taint of one-upmanship in crime fiction. I’ve screened my crime fiction purchases carefully for some time now, because it seems that ever since Anthony Hopkins brilliantly brought Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter to screen life, many writers have been trying to create the literary equivalent of a ‘Saw’ film to ‘catch up’. Ms. Cooper’s comments that women writers can be some of the worst perpetrators is, I think, valid and for the reason she states: so they can show they aren’t squeamish and can be just as gross as the boys.
This wouldn’t be so cynical if the attention was weighted to the ‘literary’ and not to the emulation of the visual splatter achieved on film. Words aren’t pictures. They light up different places in the brain. Good writers respect that.
In entertainment, we do seem to be wallowing in a blood trough. I’d like to think there was a bottom to this. I still believe that fiction is exercise for our coping mechanisms. We create extreme circumstances for our brains to process so our bodies don’t have to, but we do seem to be Sodom and Gomorrah-ing it - straight into another Victorian era if we don’t get a hold of ourselves. I wish writers would play to the cerebrum over the adrenals and the gag reflex.
As far as the sexism argument, I think both Ms. Mann and Ms. Kerns are correct. Both sexes in crime fiction have a tendency to be drawn in stark caricature, which is terrible for any genre.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
interesting perspectives, jamie. it seems to me that, as an entrenched genre, crime fiction might be over-relying on stereotypes of both sexes as a shorthand way of getting the reader into the story.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
There is another element to the sexism part of the discussion that seems to have been neglected - if you remove gang and drug violence from the equation, most violent crime is perpetrated against women. And we all know that art imitates life.
Now we can philosophize all day (for many days in a row) about the deep psychological reasons that gild homicidal tendencies, but at the end of that day of ransacking our subconscious closets, we have to admit that the size and strength factor just makes it more advantageous to pick women as the target of your basic nasty impulses. There’s no percentage in picking a man, unless the murderer really wants to risk losing the battle.
This isn’t to say that some women can’t kick ass and fend off murderous advances, but that’s not what makes the news.
For me, the disturbing trend in inventing more and more perverse tortures and describing them in loving detail is a pathology akin to drug addiction. We’ve always been fascinated by peril in our fantasies and I wouldn’t want it any other way. But the stakes keep getting higher and higher, because danger and tragedy as concepts no longer give the same high. It is a cultural phenomenon, this preoccupation with every glistening color and ripe sound that could possibly accompany someone, as is often the case a women, being relieved of her life.