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Women In Refrigerators
Jul. 27th, 2008 09:00 pmIn 1994, comic book superhero Kyle Rayner (the Green Lantern) came home to find that one of his arch-enemies had killed his girlfriend and stuffed her body in his refrigerator. This caused a public comic book fan recognition of the "women in refrigerators" problem in comic books and (by extension, when you think about it) most literature and pop culture over the centuries.
This happens when bad things happen to women solely to motivate the men around them. Female characters are raped, murdered, mutilated, depowered (in comic books) etc., so that their boyfriends/husbands/brothers/etc. can grieve and seek vengeance. The female characters are only important for their impact on the men around them. They have no agency or weight in the story in their own right. On a fundamental level, they don't matter. A good example of this is the TV show "Supernatural," in which the primary cause of Dean and Sam (the heroes) starting on their adventures is the death of their mother Mary. But the only important thing about Mary for the purpose of the story is that she died, and that only because it affected Dean and Sam. Another good example of this is the movie "The Searchers, starring John Wayne. Ethan (Wayne)'s niece Lucy is abducted by Indians, and he and his nephew Martin spend the whole movie searching for her. The movie is not about her. At the end of the movie we know little more about her than we did at the beginning. The movie is about Ethan and Martin, and their friendship and strife in difficult circumstances. There are other female characters besides Lucy; their job is to die in the raid (so Ethan and Martin can grieve) or write to them while flirting with the men who stayed behind (so Martin can worry about his girl back home). Now, there's nothing wrong in principle with having a character who exists only as motivation for another character. You can't flesh out every character in a work; it's simply not possible, at least not if you're writing anything coherent and reasonably well written. And a lot of great works of art and literature use this model to great effect (including The Searchers, which is arguably the greatest Western of all time and is twelfth on the American Film Institute's list of the hundred greatest movies of all time).
The problem is when the characters who exist purely as motivation are all women and the characters who get motivated are all men.
This is one of those things where if you're looking at it in the abstract, it's real easy to tell when "fridging" is happening. In practice, with an actual story, it may not be so easy to tell the difference between chauvinistic cultural assumptions (even ones so deep you're not aware of them) and good storytelling. Where do you draw the line? At what point does it become objectionable?![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
resolute has an interesting discussion of this you should check out, particularly the writers out there.
This happens when bad things happen to women solely to motivate the men around them. Female characters are raped, murdered, mutilated, depowered (in comic books) etc., so that their boyfriends/husbands/brothers/etc. can grieve and seek vengeance. The female characters are only important for their impact on the men around them. They have no agency or weight in the story in their own right. On a fundamental level, they don't matter. A good example of this is the TV show "Supernatural," in which the primary cause of Dean and Sam (the heroes) starting on their adventures is the death of their mother Mary. But the only important thing about Mary for the purpose of the story is that she died, and that only because it affected Dean and Sam. Another good example of this is the movie "The Searchers, starring John Wayne. Ethan (Wayne)'s niece Lucy is abducted by Indians, and he and his nephew Martin spend the whole movie searching for her. The movie is not about her. At the end of the movie we know little more about her than we did at the beginning. The movie is about Ethan and Martin, and their friendship and strife in difficult circumstances. There are other female characters besides Lucy; their job is to die in the raid (so Ethan and Martin can grieve) or write to them while flirting with the men who stayed behind (so Martin can worry about his girl back home). Now, there's nothing wrong in principle with having a character who exists only as motivation for another character. You can't flesh out every character in a work; it's simply not possible, at least not if you're writing anything coherent and reasonably well written. And a lot of great works of art and literature use this model to great effect (including The Searchers, which is arguably the greatest Western of all time and is twelfth on the American Film Institute's list of the hundred greatest movies of all time).
The problem is when the characters who exist purely as motivation are all women and the characters who get motivated are all men.
This is one of those things where if you're looking at it in the abstract, it's real easy to tell when "fridging" is happening. In practice, with an actual story, it may not be so easy to tell the difference between chauvinistic cultural assumptions (even ones so deep you're not aware of them) and good storytelling. Where do you draw the line? At what point does it become objectionable?
resolute has an interesting discussion of this you should check out, particularly the writers out there.![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}