To persuade a straight, male audience to identify with a woman character
Meryl Streep made an important point in this 2012 interview on Fresh Air:
GROSS: You gave a terrific commencement address at Barnard in 2010. And one of things you talked about was that the hardest thing in the world is to persuade a straight, male audience to identify with a woman character. It’s easier for women because we were brought up identifying with male characters in literature. It’s hard for straight boys to identify with Juliet or Wendy in “Peter Pan,” whereas girls identify with Romeo and with Peter Pan. What led you to that conclusion?
STREEP: What let me to that was I have never – I mean, I watch movies. And I don’t care who is the protagonist, I feel what that guy is feeling. You know, if it’s Tom Cruise leaping over a building – I want to make it, you know? And I’m going to – yes, I made it. And yeah, so I get that. And I’ve grown up, well, partly because there weren’t great girls’ literature – Nancy Drew, maybe – but there weren’t things.
So there was Huck Finn and “Spin And Marty.” The boys characters were interesting, and you’ve – you lived through them when you’re watching it. You know, you don’t – you’re not aware of it, but you’re following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist, you know? You feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses. But it became obvious to me that men don’t live through the female characters.
GROSS: Do you think that women have that kind of double consciousness and men, like, boys…
STREEP: I think it has to do with…
GROSS: …Don’t make that leap?
STREEP: Well, it has to do with very deep things, you know, because it might be that imagining yourself as a girl is a diminishment. But it is something that when I made “The Devil Wears Prada,” it was the first time in my life, 30 years of making movies, that a man came up and said, I know how you felt. I know how you felt. I have a job like that. People don’t understand.
GROSS: It’s the first time?
STREEP: First time. First time. And they say lots of things. I think they – this is what I was trying to say in that speech. It’s very hard point to make because I guess it’s hard to wrap your head around it. But for men, the most – usually the favorite character that I’ve ever played is Linda in “The Deer Hunter.”
Without question, of the heterosexual men that I’ve spoken to over the years, that’s usually – they say, you know, my favorite thing you’ve ever done was Linda or Sophie. And they were a particular kind of very feminine, recessive kind of personality. They – so they fell in love with her, but they didn’t feel the story through her body. And it took to “The Devil Wears Prada” to play someone tough, who had to make hard decisions, who was running an organization, and sometimes that takes making tough decisions for a certain kind of man to empathize. That’s the word – empathize. Feel the story through her. And that’s the first time anybody has ever said that they felt that way.
Can confirm. Growing up I identified with a thousand male characters – and a thousand female ones too.
I think some of this might be changing. I know that my son—in his videogaming, Magic the Gathering playing, etc.—has often preferred female characters. Playing as them, building his strategies around them, thinking they’re cool, and so on. That might not be exactly what Meryl Streep is talking about. But I have seen him totally willing (if “willing” is the right word here) to take on a female persona. Of course, most of these characters aren’t especially feminine. (They’re not even all human.)
Pretty sure late Gen xers grew up with some significant woman characters. Examples: Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley, Princess Leia, Kira (from The Dark Crystal), the Unicorn (from The Last Unicorn), Sarah (from Labyrinth) etc. The Last Unicorn is especially worth recognizing, I think. There’s a story Peter Beagle tells of how some giant tattooed men credit their emotional stability as adults to that movie. Whenever their parents would fight, they (brothers) would go to their room and watch the tape as many times as it took for the violence to end.
Now, of course, there’s a statistical element to this, and some areas and cultural backgrounds are more or less likely to be amenable to woman characters. Just … If not for the way the trans and nonbinary nonsense is spreading like cancer, my own experience would lead me to a different view on the subject.
Philip Pullman: Lyra
Shakespeare: Rosalind, Imogen, Sylvia (Two Gents), Perdita, the Countess of Salisbury (Edward III), Viola, Juliet, et al.
Thomas Middleton, The Changeling: Beatrice-Joanna (particularly in Helen Mirren’s wonderful performance).
Miyazaki Hayao: the sisters in ‘Tonari no Totoro’; the wolf-girl in ‘Mononokehime’; Chihiro in ‘Spirited Away’; and the girl heroes of many other of his films.
Tanizaki Jun’ichiro: the sisters in ‘The Makioka Sisters’, especially Sachiko.
Mrs Dalloway.
Jane Austen; Emma, Elizabeth
Emily Bronte: Catherine
Lewis Carroll: Alice
Some of Ingmar Bergman’s films.
Ken Loach: Cathy Come Home
These are some of many plays, films and novels in which I’ve certainly identified with the female characters.
Away from fictional characters: I don’t know whether people are aware of the poet Denise Riley, but she is one of the very finest poets writing in Britain and I really recommend her harrowingly honest sequence, ‘A Part Song’, which is about the death of her son. Please read her. ‘A Part Song’ is published in her collection ‘Say Something Back’, published by Picador Poetry. She also wrote an extraordinary prose account of ‘the altered condition of life’ which grief at the death of someone very close to you bring about: ‘Time Lived, Without its Flow’ (Capsule). I really recommend her work.
There might be a certain degree of selection bias in the sort of films Meryl Streep’s been in. I just looked through her filmography prior to The Devil Wears Prada, and … there are four films that I’ve seen. And I’m a cinephile. Maybe the movies where she played characters straight men might identify with strongly enough to be compelled to mention it to her were not viewed by straight men in large numbers to begin with.
I doubt I’d be able to get either of my brothers excited to see “Marvin’s Room”.
Subscribe + a few other plays that have come to mind
Harley Granville Barker: The Marrying of Anne Leete (a wonderful brief play by Britain’s greatest and hardly known playwrights)
Shaw: Saint Joan
Saunders Lewis (originally written in Welsh): Blodeuwedd (‘The Woman Made from Flowers’); ‘The Two Marriages of Ann Thomas’
Terence Rattigan: Hester Collier in ‘The Deep Blue Sea’
The women in, in particular, Caryl Churchill’s ‘Top Girls’ (which is also a splendid critique of what is supposed to be masculine)
I know you are all mentioning women characters you can identify with, but perhaps you are unique? Neither of my brothers would identify with any of those women, or any other woman character. Women playwrights are often rejected because they “write women”. Men playwrights are told they “write women well” when the women fit a particular stereotypical woman, a woman probably none of their wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters actually resemble, and maybe could not relate with.
When I write women (I am a woman), the males in my playwriting group, the male directors, and the male actors will often say they “don’t seem real”, they are “not believable”. When they write women, the women don’t work for me, but a lot of the other women will say, “yeah, we’re like that”. None of the women in my playwriting group are like the women in the plays written by the men in the group, and most of them know they are not, but they believe they are different somehow than other women, because they, too, see the women on TV and the movies, on commercials, and in other places where women act like…well, like women are thought by men to act.
So, yeah, it may not be Streep’s fault or Streep’s bubble, it may be that you are indeed unique men. None of the men I know would dream of watching, reading, or in any other way interacting with most of the women you named; the exception is my younger brother who was into Xena and anime.
I don’t know how unique I am. As a matter of fact, I think there is a very great deal of truth in what Meryl Streep and you say – even in the works of one of my favourite women writers, Beatrix Potter, it is noticeable that most of the characters are ‘boys’ – boy rabbits, kittens, who do not do what they are told, and come a cropper as a result. I think it has to with the fact that it was mostly ‘boys’ who were in a position to be ‘naughty’ and to have ‘adventures’ in the past. And I do agree that in general men find it much harder to enter imaginatively into women’s lives than women do into men’s; and this has clearly to do with the lack of interest many men have in women’s lives, and also to the fact that male society does tend to be more hierarchical, I think, than female society, and that makes are generally more aggressive – though I should certainly not draw the sort of conclusions that Jordan Peterson draws from lobsters and ‘evolutionary psychology’. But also, I think, it may have to do with cultural factors: Japan, where I have lived for nearly 47 years, and Britain, where I was born & grew up, can certainly be just as misogynist and condescending to women as anywhere else (and more so at times – certainly Japan is quite low in the scale where women holding important positions is concerned), but there has been, in literature at least, a rather more welcoming attitude to women by men than perhaps has been the case in other places. Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Murasaki Shikibu, Ono no Komachi, Izumi Shikibu – all are writers whom I admire. The translator Edward Seidensticker, whom I knew, would religiously read all of Jane Austen’s novels every year – and her novels, I think, inform in some ways his translations of ‘Genji monogatari’ and Tanizaki’s ‘The Makioka Sisters’. And in the Americas, there are of course Emily Dickinson (a very great favourite of mine), Elizabeth Bishop, Lorine Niedecker, Margaret Atwood and a host of other women writers whom I admire.
Oh, I don’t know – but certainly the kind of masculine ‘culture’ or ‘nature’ bruited about by such as Jordan Peterson, and the idea that to be a proper man one has to be successful and a go-getter which is so intimately bound up with business ‘culture’, particularly nowadays, in which everything is reduced being ‘aggressive’, ‘ruthless’, ‘competitive’ and ‘successful’ (at one of the international school here where we performed, I was shocked to discover on the bookshelves nothing but books on how to be ‘successful’). It is an ideology (I think that is the right word) that I have always loathed (I am neither greatly successful nor a go-getter, and prefer to get on quietly with what I find valuable and interesting!).
Old lit. major here.
Cordelia; Desdemona.
Daisy Miller.
Eve.
I recently saw this tweet:
‘One of the great epiphanies of my lifetime was realising that I disliked so many female characters because they were created by men who didn’t like women.’
Men tend not to identify with female characters, but the male media gatekeepers rarely let identifiable female characters through. It does seem that things are changing, though–it seems ‘ok’ for boys to identify as Elsa or Dr Who (or presumably Ray, though I haven’t seen any examples).
Perhaps I should add that in my experience in theatre women are rather better at portraying men than men are at portraying women – with the exception of kabuki actors: perhaps the best ‘Twelfth Night’ I have seen was done (in Japanese) by kabuki actors. Men – who are not, as I think Elizabethan boys were, accustomed to playing female roles – tend to produce caricatures; though I did see a good and believable Cleopatra played by Mark Rylance at the Globe in London when I was back in England once. The trouble was that most of the other actors were at best mediocre, and at worst… Which reminds me, there was a rather good book about Shakespearean performance with respect to female roles by a good British woman scholar entitled ‘Squeaking Cleopatras’ – ah, I’ve found it on my shelves: ‘Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player’, by Joy Leslie Gibson.
I wonder if it’s worth noting that Streep is an actress, not an author of note, and she is talking about the difficulty of portraying a scripted character in film in a way that men identify with her, however the examples that come to mind of female characters with whom men may identify are from literature and not film. Perhaps the creation of film requires or involves a degree of dumbing-down that strips the identifiable humanity from female characters. How many movies pass the Bechdel Test? Should we even consider that a female character in a film that fails it would provoke empathy? I expect it’s true that female characters in literature may succeed in garnering male identification until they are bowdlerized for the screen (and perhaps cast as Meryl Streep).
I don’t “identify” with fictional characters, I observe them. I loved, and still love, the novel Kidnapped – I didn’t ever dream of being Alan Breck or David Balfour. Similarly with any characters of fiction, whether Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke or Tom Sawyer. I admire them, am amused by them, interested in them – but “identifying” with them?
Surely, it is not a matter of ‘identifying’ in any absolute sense with characters. One doesn’t. Whoever said one does? Certainly no-one here. But there is surely a a sympathetic understanding of characters, of why they do certain things, and an entry into their worlds – and if one is an actor, as Meryl Streep is, this becomes rather more apparent than, I suspect, when reading novels. Readers don’t sit, critically, on the outside when they read a novel, unless they are a certain kind of critic. They are involved imaginatively. Otherwise, why would they read them?
Pace Papito, I have spoken mainly about plays (which are certainly not mere ‘literature’) and novels, because I am not a great film-goer. But I did also mention a number of films – some of them, admittedly, Japanese anime – including those of Ingmar Bergman and Ken Loach. Perhaps the problem of many films is that their scripts, which may well be written by men, are not all that good in their portrayal of women, so that even an actress of the quality of Meryl Streep cannot do much with what she is given? (But I remember Jane Campion’s film ‘An Angel at My Table’, which certainly was well-scripted, and surely gave a good portrait of a very gifted woman.) The performance of Helen Mirren as Beatrice-Joanna in Thomas Middleton’s ‘The Changeling’ is available on a DVD from the BBC – it was done for television.
You knew Edward Seidensticker! Gosh. I’ve read his translation of Genji. Got quite immersed in it, did further reading, etc.
About identifying with…I think I do, in a few cases. I mean I’m not confused or anything, I don’t forget that they’re fictional characters, but I do feel a sort of overlap. It’s part of the art of fiction, getting readers to do that. It’s not always the goal, certainly, but it’s one goal, and some fiction writers are obsessed with it.
@KBPlayer:
To be able to see oneself in the character and the character in oneself, to recognize similarities of experience and response to experience, to feel a resonance with the character—that is to identify with a character. (It certainly should not be confused with the ludicrous abuse of “identify” by the trans ideology.) It is mentally modeling a fictional character and experiencing sympathy rather than mere empathy.
I recently saw Pride & Prejudice for the first time since I was a little’un. I found myself identifying with, that is sympathizing with, several characters including Mrs. Bennett, Elizabeth, and Mr. Doyle.
When I was young, I found it impossible to “identify with” any characters in fiction, male or female. Their experiences seemed so alien to me. The first time I felt that sense was when I saw, and read, Paul Zindel’s play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon-Marigolds. It was the first time I ever saw a character who had the same sorts of problems I did, someone with nothing, and on the verge of losing that. She had a loud, obnoxious mother, a sister who was pampered because of an illness, and her mother hated the things she liked to do, like science. And the poor girl had to deal with her mother actually attending her award ceremony.
It isn’t just about sex/gender. It’s about finding someone you can relate to. I needed someone in my own socioeconomic class, someone who had a mother on the verge of…something…a breakdown? Who knows? But definitely not the nice, sweet, June Cleaver cookie-baking mother, or the working mother, but one who lay around all day doing as little as possible while complaining about how overworked she is…or at least, a mother who wasn’t kind and understanding.
For far too long, characters in children’s books were too middle class, and many of us, while enjoying the books, could not identify with the characters.
@Nullius – I can sympathise with Mrs Bennet, i.e. see her point of view about a rich marriage being the best thing for her daughters. Why use the word “identify”? To me “identify” means “feeling one has having characteristics in common with”. I might think this about Dorothea Brooke to some extent – a young idealist who does wrong-headed things – as having some similarities with my young self – but on the whole I view Dorothea as a distinct being, and our small overlap is insignificant. It’s certainly not my main reason for reading about her in Middlemarch.
I think what Streep meant, and what we’re all more or less meaning, is feeling temporarily as if inside that character’s head. Not just understanding the character’s point of view but sharing it. Keats talked about doing it with everyone he encountered, such that he felt he had no real self of his own.
Middlemarch, by the way, for me is packed with characters I temporarily identify with. Not just Dorothea but also Celia – and Mary Garth, and Lydgate, and in one passage even Casaubon. Not Will Ladislaw though, so much – too sentimentalized.
I don’t know, I think this might be a case where something is believed in a board room, but isn’t necessarily true per se.
The reason I say this is a few years ago Activision axed a game for having a female protagonist – because they thought that such a game wouldn’t sell based on what they’d seen on the market at the time.
The problem with that was, there weren’t a lot of games with female protagonists at the time, and the games that were there weren’t very well marketed or, in a lot of cases, well made. You shouldn’t really blame the game’s protagonist being female for poor sales, if it was a bad game that wasn’t being advertised you know?
Anyway, come 2017 and we saw the release of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. This game basically revolves around its female protagonist suffering from psychosis. It is very heavily dependent on immersion, without that the game just wouldn’t work.
And it broke even within three months of release. It sold very well. I don’t know the gender split on the sales, but given the market it aimed at (As a “Indie AAA” title) I wouldn’t be surprised if it skewed male.
The thing with this sort of board room belief is that it often ends up becoming a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. It isn’t that the female character can’t do very well, or that there isn’t demand, it is that someone figures men won’t be into it, that’s their core audience, so they won’t even try – and so you end up with this increasingly segregated pink vs blue aisle mentality.
It isn’t that men can’t, it is that men aren’t expected to – and that builds in a lot of prejudice in just what characters men get exposed to in the first place.
Yes, that too. Or maybe instead but I think there’s some truth to the “men don’t like” explanation. Misogynist rage is so close to the surface in so many men that it’s hard to believe there’s no “ew gross a woman get her off the screen” out there.
Bruce, that may very well be the case, but it still prevents women from succeeding in many cases. Take playwriting, for example (something I know about). Women are told that no one wants to produce their plays because they “write about women” (even though maybe they don’t – not all my plays are about women, and not all of them are even about humans). Plays by women do better at the box office, make more profit – and close much earlier than plays by men, for inexplicable reasons, though I suppose it could be that the men running the theatre do not want the data points showing they are wrong, so they close them early? Bad marketing, but we do all understand humans are not inherently rational, right?
And, since women are the majority of ticket buyers for live theatre, the entire attitude makes no damn sense anyway. Why wouldn’t women want to see plays about women? Besides plays about women written by men do very well (Dancing at Lughnasa, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, Taming of the Shrew…etc, etc, etc).
So, yeah, board room perceptions wrapped in societal misogyny wrapped in male entitlement…and now, any white woman is being told her play must be “diverse” – something I haven’t heard white men being told. The single most underrepresented group in theatre is, in fact, white women…the most overrepresented is, well, you guessed it – white men.
One thing that is certainly happening in Britain, is that since Caryl Churchill (with Edward Bond & Harold Pinter, one of the three giants of postwar British theatre, in my view) a number of very accomplished women playwrights have emerged – Michael Billington, in his farewell to reviewing in the Guardian, names a number of them. Alas, since I have been back only once to our islands since 2004, and intermittently beforehand, I have not seen their plays, but have read some. I recommend Lucy Kirkwood, who deals in those plays of hers that I have read very intelligently and imaginatively with science and with morality (not of course in the sense of laying down the law about things). ‘The Children’ is a very good play, which was obviously prompted by the Fukushima disaster here in Japan. I also admire Sarah Kane, now long dead, alas.
I must say, I’m appalled by the attitudes that iknklast describes.
Regarding misogynist rage, there comes a point in childhood when males seem naturally to want to separate and distinguish themselves from females (including their mothers), so that they begin playing mainly with other boys – and too many males never seem to advance beyond that point, instead devoting themselves to cultivating their resentments.
iknklast
Yes, exactly.
And the weird thing being – women I’ve noticed are also far quicker to be accused of “cultural appropriation”. So make your play more diverse, but don’t dare have characters who fall outside of your culture.
It soon becomes clear that it isn’t really about what women are writing, or what audiences want to see, its a frankly creepy opposition to the fact that women are writing.
Ophelia Benson
I think there is an element of misogynist rage going on, but I think a big chunk of it is that they’re afraid of losing the power to say “men don’t like” – and thus their grip on the market.
There is a lot of power to be gained by dictating the tastes of a bloc, so anything that threatens that must be crushed, so you have entire communities dedicated to that crushing.
Meanwhile I suspect most men don’t really care all that much, so that vocal minority gets treated with more weight than it strictly speaking deserves.
‘Diversity’ – but not applicable where female characters are concerned.
Exactly. Same as with presidential candidates – a debate stage containing two women and one Jew is not considered diverse, because they are white. Whiteness trumps femaleness every time. Never mind that allowing white women their share of the goodies would not need to displace a single trans-, gay, disabled, black woman. All we need to do is spread the power evenly, which would give everyone their chance. It’s the white males that are overrepresented, and that should shift somewhat.
The thing is, everyone treats it as a zero sum game. To be intersectional, you must ignore all women who do not check the other boxes (and as for disabled, being white also trumps disabled when you are talking about women’s issues). It seems to be believe (1) that white women are the oppressors, and not oppressed; and (2) for white women to make any gains, it must be at the expense of non-white women. No, that isn’t necessary, nor would I consider it desirable.
Unfortunately, for white women (or any women) to succeed, it has always come at the (real or perceived) expense of white men. And since white men have traditionally controlled the power structure, they have, and always have had, a homefield advantage.