How feminism ruins everything

My own ‘Eeyore’ tendencies have been considerably reinforced today by the revelation that a new ‘Winnie the Pooh’ story written by one David Benedictus features a character called Lottie the Otter, described by the publishers as “a feisty character who is bound to cause a stir.”

There is a weary predictability about the introduction (dare one say ‘intrusion’) of a female character into what is an otherwise male-dominated environment. But what is even more wearisome is that she has to be something other than ‘girlie’.

In Milne’s day, feistiness amongst women was, of course, not unknown. I remember being very impressed, on viewing the Three Sisters peaks in Australia’s Blue Mountains region, to be told that at the turn of the 19^th century a group including some young women in long Victorian dresses had hiked across from Katoomba and climbed all three in an afternoon. That is feisty indeed.

But not everyone is ‘feisty’, nor need they be. Personally, having absolutely no head for heights, that is a particular form of feistiness to which I will never aspire. Indeed, I am not sure I would ever qualify for the term under any circumstances. But then neither would Winnie-the-Pooh himself, nor Piglet, and certainly not Eeyore.

On the contrary, the only ‘feisty’ personality in Winnie-the-Pooh that I can recall is Tigger —a character whose ‘feistiness’ borders on the frankly irritating.

And this is what is truly depressing about ‘feisty’ female characters. The fact is that in real life, feistiness —a word which apparently derives from an obscene term for a ‘lap dog’ —is quite rare. Some people are feisty (in the sense of ‘spirited and exuberant’) most are not. But for the modern female heroine, feistiness is de rigeur, whether it be Rose Tyler in Doctor Who (indeed, the Doctor’s female companions passim), almost every character played by Sandra Bullock, that skinny woman in The Matrix, or Bridget Jones, etc.

Feminism, it seems, requires that where there are not ‘enough’ females they must be introduced, and where they are introduced, they must be at the forefront. They must stand out. They must be ‘feisty’.

Yet here, surely, is an irony. For the fictional women who are conjured up by such exercises in ‘correction’ are oddly unfeminine compared with the real thing. The very fact that they must be ‘feisty’ is an admission that merely being female is not good enough. Of course, fictional male characters are equally ‘unreal’, but today the fictional woman has to be able to compete with the fictional man. Jane may still be rescued by Tarzan, but Jane must be equally capable of carrying out a few rescues of her own. She must, in a word, be feisty.

And thus, paradoxically, we show how ‘unfeisty’ we have all become —or rather how we have been cowed by the other type of feistiness, for the word can also mean ‘touchy’, ‘aggressive’, ‘argumentative’. And that is surely something we find in feminism and its proponents.

The result is that we are afraid not merely of bucking the trend but admitting the reality. Feistiness in women is at once real and rare. Moreover, it is (surely) of no greater value than other personality types, such as demureness, or warmth. It is feminism which demands that fiction follows such doctrinaire lines. In the process, fiction suffers, and through the distortions it embraces and entails, so does our experience of reality.

Thus (in the ultimate unlikely plot-twist) Lottie, we are told, “turns out to be good at cricket.” And here is the greatest irony of all. For the female character introduced (one suspects) to satisfy the requirement for gender balance for the contemporary audience of boys and girls, is made out to be more like a fictional boy  —the boy that boy readers of fiction aspire to be  —than the typical, real, girl.

John P Richardson
3 October 2009

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