So here's the thing with Women in Horror Month—I mean, beyond the
same conversation we've been having about anything earmarked For Women since I was literally in high school (Random High School Guy: “But why do we even need a Women's Day?” Girl Whose Name I Can't Remember, speaking for every other girl in the class: “Because every day is Man's Day, asshole.”). I mean, I certainly know it works for
me, and always has...it's a spotlight aimed at
fellow female-identifying creators, something I can use to bring
forth those I feel have been forgotten or overlooked while
simultaneously discovering new reading/viewing/listening matter for
myself, along with new potential friends, fans and allies.
As we move
further into the 2020s, however, what with the very idea of gender
becoming a far more culturally slippery thing than it used to be, I
have to wonder if slapping the word “women” on WiHM doesn't end
up accidentally excluding people beyond the traditionally privileged
white/cis/straight/male default—people who might well be just as
eager to consume and create horror, if only we were a bit more
welcoming with our labels?
A
(slightly) older cis white lady friend of mine and I were chatting
the other day, when she suddenly asked me, as if she really thought I
was more likely to know: “Why do you think so many young people
these days don't seem to want to be men or women anymore? I
mean...like how sometimes they say they're male one day and female
the next, and maybe nothing the day after that? Why do you think that
is?” To which I replied, without even really thinking about it much
beforehand: “Well, look at how polarized and toxic and stressful
identifying as either sex is, these days—performative
heterosexuality, gender-essentialism, biological determinism, people
constantly policing each other's fantasies like thinking of something
is the same as doing it. Who the hell wouldn't choose to opt
out of that whole mess, if they really believed it was possible?”
And given
my age—I was born in 1968, y'all—I'm sure some part of how I just
expressed myself up there sounds like I'm minimizing or dismissing
genderqueer and non-binary people's identities, for which I
apologize, because that truly wasn't my intention; I'm very aware
that almost everything is a spectrum, not least since I'm already on
at least one of those myself, if not more. It's simply that I envy
anybody who can actually persuade themselves it's an option to life
hack one's way around the bigender ties that bind, especially in a
world so goddamned bent on making sure we all fall neatly on either
the pink or blue side of things.
For some
people, it means a lot to be identified as a woman, so much so that
they've fought for it. But for me it's Tuesday, because being a woman
was handed to me at birth: AFAB, and ever after. Not to mention how,
much as I love to roleplay as someone I'm not and cisswap the
characters I supposedly shouldn't be able to imagine myself inside
just because of the fact that I once cooked an entire larval human
being almost to term inside my uterus, I just don't think I'll ever
be able to free myself entirely from looking at life through a
gendered frame. Which doesn't mean I'm sitting here in the corner
muttering about kids getting off my lawn or plaintively wondering
aloud why everything these days has to be so gosh-darn COMPLICATED,
either...just that I often find myself wondering about not just women
in horror, but gender in horror. Is it necessary? Is it
escapable?
Whenever I
think about the “necessity” of gendered horror, my mind always
goes back to that highly-applicable Margaret Atwood quote about the
difference between men's and women's fears, most recently in context
with
this particular article,
which caused me to reblog it and comment: “Men are afraid that
women [won't stop laughing] at them. Women are afraid men will kill
them.” But that's just the surface, as ever; there are
female-identifying narcissists just as quick to hammer down on anyone
who tries to puncture their toxic sense that only they truly exist,
and while a lot of them tend to do it a bit more slyly than the guy
in the article, some of them don't. There are also male-identifying
people who spent their lives well aware that if they step out of line
socially, if they give anyone around them the impression that they
aren't living up to the right sort of masculine standard, they risk
either being murdered, or being made
into a murderer. And then
there are the people who feel like they're both at once, or neither,
or whatever—do you think they aren't sometimes made hopeless and
hateful by ridicule that denies and denigrates who they literally
are, or immersed in a terror that seems inescapable over the prospect
of being “found out” and eradicated by the very culture that
surrounds them?
Self-policing
is very much a thing, after all, and if someone's allowed to get away
with being the “wrong” sort of man or woman, then what does that
make the rest of us bigendered folks? Just people, I guess. Which is,
for some reason or other, apparently not enough.
Or, to put
it another way—pronouns aside, we're all pretty much afraid of the
same shit, and that doesn't change. Which is why, whenever
default-adhering people ask me why I feel like I have to “shoehorn”
diversity into my/their horror, I find myself answering: “Because
life is diverse, and everyone deserves to be able to find themselves
reflected in the media they consume.”
Now, back
when I started writing horror, in the later 1980s/early 1990s, I had
three quote-quote female role-models: Kathe Koja, Caitlin R. Kiernan
and Poppy Z. Brite. Brite is now Billy Martin, and just as awesome as
he always was; when I first heard about his transition, I thought:
“Ah, this explains a lot about our shared interests.” But never
have I ever had the figurative-to-literal balls to follow the
knowledge that I LOVE to write about guys fucking each other from
those guys' POV up by thinking: “So obviously I'm a gay guy, and I
should probably do something about that.” Because I'm just not, and
never will be. Billy is, and always was, the same was Caitlin's a
queer woman, and always was. The same way Kathe and I are...whatever
we are.
“Identity”
is a bit of a difficult word for writers, I think—no matter the
genre they're drawn to—because, to some degree, of its similarity
to word “identify.” I get to place myself inside the people I
write, which is my joy, my both-senses-of-the-word privilege; I get
to think myself into patterns of thought, emotion and experience I
both share and don't share, to wear those identities for a while and
then discard them when the story I'm telling is “done,” and walk
back into my own life grinning. If I do it well, I sometimes get
praise, and that's beautiful; if I do it badly I get criticism, and I
should. My intent, aside from simple narrative creation, is to
hopefully create characters that my readers can enjoy seeing
themselves in, or be surprised by seeing themselves in. But can I
also damage other people, real people with real lives, by briefly
pretending to inhabit an identity they exist inside every moment of
every IRL day in order to usher readers through a fictional
beginning, middle and end?
Much like
pronoun protocol—“Are we just supposed to call people whatever
they hell they tell us they want to be called, now?” “Um, yes.
Yes, that is pretty much exactly how things are now supposed to
go.”—I simply have to accept that this idea, however odd it may
seem to me based on when I was born and what I was taught, is true.
And that as much as I never mean to, the mere fact that I work
primarily in a genre which deals with disturbance, offence, pain,
means that I will disturb someone, offend someone, hurt
someone. It's inevitable. I'll wound someone, and that wound—however
fictional its cause—will have to be treated as if it's exactly as
real as they feel it to be. Not only can I not debate the concept, at
this point in my life, I don't even want to.
So here we
are, women of all sorts alike and everybody else likewise: mutually
responsible for both the harm we might do and the care we owe
ourselves in turn, on either side of the page. As we always were,
most probably, but now we have almost enough language to try to
acknowledge it directly, along with—hopefully—the moral willpower
to do so. “An outsider knows an Outsider,” as Holly Gibney says;
we've all been called monsters by somebody, after all, just like we
all know how we want to be treated, especially while still carrying
deep wounds from being treated the exact opposite way. Just like we
all know how it can feel, the sheer power of the term: awful in every
sense, elevating, denigrating.
And yes,
change can feel hard, but this? It seems far easier than most people
seem to want to treat it, to me. Like a conversation I'm fine with
having as many times as I need to so long as it helps me get back to
telling stories in the dark, any given month of any given year, ad
infinitum. There being so many far scarier things to discuss,
after all, than how the people you're telling stories about refer to
themselves.
