Here, Behind My Eyes

*Heinlein flamewars will have to wait, as I’m still trying to finish the book. For now, content yourself with this*
Are any of you walking stereotypes? If you know anyone very well, do you know anyone who is a walking stereotype?

Let me see… I’m not particularly attuned to American stereotypes about someone like me, but I suppose I could fit several niches.

I could be the Portuguese-born, married-an-American woman. Right. A week after my wedding, my mother in law informed me I shouldn’t be submissive because men don’t like submissive women. I presume that is part of the stereotype because NO ONE in their right mind has ever spent more than ten minutes talking to me and called me submissive. (Also, for the record, it’s not true of Portuguese women in general. Yeah, I suppose some Portuguese women are submissive to males – how the heck would I know? I never had that many female friends back then and women in my family are known for being holy terrors.) And I presume I’m supposed to be dark, small, pretty and, as the stereotype bleeds into Spanish or perhaps Brazilian, which is what most Americans resort to when failing to find a niche for “Portuguese” I’m supposed to dress in colorful clothes, love to dance and… I’m running out of ideas here. I’m relatively dark, I think – but not if I haven’t been out in the sun for a while. Small… eh… I hope to see small again in my lifetime. I wear black, mostly because it makes me look smaller. Dancing – I used to be okay with it, like most young people. But these days I’d rather sit down with a good book.

I also know – from the things kids’ teachers have let drop that I’m supposed to miss the more “communal” life in Portugal and that I’m supposed to speak Portuguese at home.

I’m so sorry, life is full of these little disappointments. You must cope with them as best you can. I was raised in a village, so life was, of necessity, more… “connected” – and I hated it with a burning passion. I can’t imagine anything worse for a born odd duck than having someone follow your every move and come up with – outrageous – explanations for them. I’m fond of saying “It takes a village to make you completely insane.”

If I were a sitcom character, I would be forever talking about how things were in Portugal and acting surprised at things in the States. My dears, I was never an ADULT in Portugal. Legal adult, sure. But I was a college student until I married and came here, where I learned all the … “rituals” of adulthood. If I were required to say, rent a house, get a phone connected or even have dry cleaning done in Portugal I’d go into the fetal position on the floor and suck my thumb. And if after twenty five years here I were still surprised at how things work, I would take myself quickly to the nearest hospital and try to figure out the source of my memory issues.

I am, so Dan says – and he should know – “excitable” which is part of the stereotype for any Latin. But actually I think I’m only excitable compared to him, since he was born and partly raised in New England and “excitable” is reacting to a home break-in with more than a “oh, my. How inconvenient.” I’m often the voice of calm and reason when dealing with my friends, who are, none of them – now I think about it – Portuguese and only one of whom (hi Alicia!) has Latin blood (even if born and raised in the US!) And the exception isn’t excitable. She’s cutting, snarky and occasionally sarcastic (in the best way) but NOT excitable.

Okay, you’ll say. But you’re an (over) EDUCATED woman. You’ll be different. Right. So… let me see. Birkenstocks. I don’t shave my legs. I don’t pluck my moustache. I hang out in cafes that have poetry readings. I talk about herstory. I can’t discuss anything without bringing Foucault or perhaps Derrida. I dress mother-Earth style. I drive a prius. I…

Yeah, those of you who know me personally can get up off the floor before you die of laughing. I hear it can happen (indulgently.)

I shave my legs. My footware of choice is slippers, because I work at home. Tennis shoes for running about. But if I get a chance, I like high heels and I have a terrifying THING for stilettos. I wax my face. Look, I am a Mediterranean woman of middle years. If I didn’t wax my face regularly, most supermarket cashiers wouldn’t know whether to call me sir or ma’am. Their lives are hard enough. Let it go.

I’ll confess to a fondness for Shakespeare quotes, and waiting to see who catches them. And I love reading the sort of history books that are published in batches of eighty and sold to me and seventy nine university professors. I also like Jane Austen. But you’re as likely to find me with cheap romance, an old, pulp sf novel or… Disney comics. Sigh, I hate to confess it, but it’s true. I have no intellectual consistency. And I’m not ashamed of it.

Oh, and I drive an Expedition, which is handy, because it’s often filled up with furniture to be refinished or boards for my latest, odd, home improvement project. The current dream is a workshop in the basement for my projects. I do fit the SF author stereotype in that I have way too many cats, but then so did my grandmother, and she didn’t write any science fiction. (Or anything.) If I lived in the country, I’d have rabbits, pigeons, goats, turtles and dogs, as well.

Let me see what else – I love cheap amusement parks, diners (particularly Greek diners), zoos, and museums and lectures by scientists and historians.

Okay. Go and get the sponge. Clean the bits of brain off the wall. Then sit down and listen.

None of us are stereotypes. Or few of us are. (I can’t claim to know everyone in the world!) So why are so many characters stereotypical? It’s not just in sitcoms. How many times have we read versions of the blood-thirsty warrior, the large, dumb oaf, the – oh, please, even if her first few books in the series were enjoyable, I will NEVER forgive Misty for this one – too-sensitive-for-words gay magician, the spunky woman, the rebellious regency woman (all of them kindred to Scarlet O’Hara), the … Need I go on?

And the answer to that is, we create stereotypes because they are easy to signal and easy to allow the reader to fill in the rest of the mental map. We create stereotypes because we, to some extent, file people under stereotypes. When you don’t know people very well, you tend to fill in the vast empty areas with things that seem to be true of the group. This is how the human brain works. It’s how language works. We organize things in categories. (I say “table” and you don’t think of every table you’ve ever seen – you think of a generic (in my case line drawing) of a table, details to be filled in as they emerge.)

If you’re at a party, and you meet ten new people, you’re going to organize them by stereotypes – “the skinny girl who probably has never been kissed”, “the jolly matron”, the… But if you get to know them, then they stop being stereotypes.

My problem, I guess, and the reason for this post, is that in books, they rarely do. In books, in tv, in movies, particularly when talking about the villain parts, you tend to cast them in general molds. So, what is wrong with that, you say? Why, everything. Because books and stories are how we learn about life, and I’m getting sick and tired of being put in categories I couldn’t remotely belong to.

But stories are how the human brain works – Pratchett is correct on that. Stories are what helps our brain organize reality in ways that make sense. (No, “real” reality doesn’t. Too many variables, most of the time to draw significant conclusions. Only with the aid of stories, we can sort of see the relevant bits to form a picture, to learn from our experiences.)

The problem is getting fed on a continuous diet of stereotypes does NOT help us learn from our experience. Instead, it convinces us, subconsciously, that, outside the space behind the eyes everything goes by groups and that knowing one characteristic of the group you know everything. In the wake of this come the true evils – treating people as things; treating people as ciphers, members of a group; all alike within the group. After that come collective guilt, collective reward and, ultimately, collective punishment – a chain that has led to some of the very worst atrocities in the twentieth century.

So? So, if you’re a writer, try not to write stereotypes*. For one, because they’re boring and will get your book classed as “another one of x”. It’s more difficult to signal who the good and bad guys are without stereotypes. And you have to walk a fine line, because your characters have to be predictable enough to please the reader, but not so predictable they bore the reader.

I once, not very long ago, got in serious trouble in a romance writers’ group (what can I say. I’m a trouble maker) by suggesting that this character they were talking about as ideal, who is a social reformer and trying to stop the manufactures from exploiting children probably owned Victorian slums. Oh, the boos and hisses, but look… How many times is that true? Hypocrisy is not confined to religious people. Often “enlightened” people have their hands in all sorts of dirt. Why not show that, if nothing else to surprise the reader.

In the same way, I got in trouble in the same group for suggesting this – yeah, I know, what can I say. I said I was a troublemaker – wouldn’t you love to have a character you set up as the “bad guy” because (let’s say this is a regency, it’s easier) he’s a Lord and very full of himself, but then you find out secretly he finances homes for orphans? He will present as everything you hate, then turn out to be wonderfully complex? (If you think about it, Jane Austen did it with Darcy. Not the homes for the orphans, but secretly sensitive and caring.)

And wouldn’t it be okay, just once, to have a bad boy who really is a bad boy? An unredeemable undeserving rogue? You see where I’m going, right? It’s doable. It’s more of a challenge. And it’s something that might – just might – take your character from okay to truly alive, vibrant, memorable.

Look at Heyer for examples of how it can make you have staying power with the readers. (Really? She has a romance heroine who stutters AND has disfiguring heavy eyebrows. Heck, in fact none of her characters are standard-issue.)

And if you’re a reader? Next time you come across one more standard-issue villain or achingly simplistic goody-two-shoes hero*, do try to remember this is nothing but an expression of the writer’s failure.

Reality is not like that. In reality everyone is as complex as you are – there, behind your eyes.

*stereotypes for walk on or very secondary characters are perfectly all right. They are the writers equivalent of the painter leaving the background unfocused. Yeah, you can mix it up a little, but if you bring every little walk-on part to absolute sharp individuality you’ll do nothing but muddle background and foreground and confuse your reader. Hinting that your general collects porcelain tea cups is okay, but if we must also know about his passion for baroque painting and his interest in raising bulldogs, we start wondering which one is his most important trait. And if he ONLY appears for three lines, you’ll find it hard to cram all of those things on the page. (Though the image of a general charging into battle with a bulldog across his saddle, an antique porcelain cup in his left hand and a baroque painting behind him IS going to keep me awake at night.)