A Flawed Woman
On intersectional feminism and heroines
*Disclaimer: I write this not as a writer who knows at all how to craft whole and complete characters, but as a reader who is tired of "feminist" stories that do nothing to liberate us, but only serve to reinforce stereotypes and fail to deliver the heroines we need.
Imagine your character taking a shit.
Seated on the toilet, in a state of non-glamour and vulnerability. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the scrolling.
Why? Because humans shit and you're trying to convince me your character is human, so please bring them down a peg or two and make them relatable.
She's one-of-a-kind right? Not like the other girls. Angry, wronged, perfect makeup, great bone structure, no body hair? Right?
I am so tired of being let down by characters who promise to embark on a truly eye-opening journey, get halfway there, and then turn around and go home. (Though that is a great plot.)
Don't feed me the made-for-TV movie on ground-breaking feminist heroines — I want the summer blockbuster that will make me rethink my whole personality, leaving me grasping for my own sense of self in a dimly lit theater as the images of this terror to white cishet men rewrites our future.
White Characters and Pseudo-Feminism
A few questions for you, the author:
Are all your characters white?
Are they all blonde?
Impossibly long legs?
Thin?
Have you created them with the male gaze in mind?
Are you holding your character to higher beauty standards than you hold yourself?
Are they euro-centric beauty standards?
Is she misunderstood, weird, quirky, but also undeniably hot and every guy wants to bang her?
A note on #8: I thought we all decided we were done with the manic-pixie-dream-girls. I thought we all decided that Zooey Deschanel's annoying little quirky skit was overdone and obviously manufactured by the male gaze to sell us performative femininity.
Newsflash: being a weirdo is an "outsider" trait. It is unattractive. It is a negative quality. Please, let us keep this negative quality. Let it build who we are into someone better than a blue-eyed neurotic hot girl in a pinafore dress that I can't recognize in a photo without her signature bangs. Please.
Stop writing predictable women. Stop telling us they don't fit in and then having your plot twist be them fitting in with little to no friction.
Stop reinforcing gender stereotypes because you are too scared to write a flawed woman.
Your feminism needs to be radical and intersectional. It needs to reflect the entire beautiful spectrum that is being a "woman" or "femme". If you're not practicing intersectional feminism, you are perpetuating white supremacy and violence against transgender and intersex folks.
BIPOC Characters
A few questions for those attempting to write BIPOC characters:
Do you have well-developed BIPOC characters?
Are any of them built on racial/cultural stereotypes?
Are they over-sexualized, ugly, fat, loud, angry?
Are they the placeholder best friend?
I have news for you. We are the main characters of our own stories — for generations, before any of our ancestors even met any of yours.
We're not seductive, great cooks, exotic, or caretakers. We are people.
On writing BIPOC characters, from an article by Nisha Tuli:
'If you’re going to describe the skin tones of black and brown people, then you also must include skin descriptions for the white characters in your story. Otherwise, you’re contributing to the idea that white is the default, and anyone who isn’t is “other.”'
Nisha goes on to discuss all the important parts of writing BIPOC characters respectfully. Please do read the entire article but for now, my biggest recommendation is: do not ever describe our skin tones in relation to food.
Describing our skin in relation to foods reduces us to a commodity, a good to be consumed, and strips us of our humanity, focusing too much on just one characteristic about us, which happens to be the SMALLEST characteristic about us.
If you can't write BIPOC characters — DON'T. But also don't reinforce white supremacist ideals in your white characters.
Kill Your Heroines
Don't talk to me about your suffragettes. They are not my heroes. They shouldn't be yours, if you consider yourself a real, intersectional feminist.
From the ACLU:
"When suffragists gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, they advocated for the right of white women to vote. The participants were middle and upper-class white women, a cadre of white men supporters and one African-American male — Frederick Douglass. The esteemed abolitionist had forged a strong working relationship with fellow abolitionists and white women suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. No Black women attended the convention. None were invited."
Stanton and Anthony were racists, and the suffragette movement used racism as part of their campaign to win the vote. They promised to leave Black women and men OUT of their plea for equality if white men would just let them have the right to vote. Attempting to crush women of color underfoot to get exactly what they want is what liberal and conservative women alike still do to this day in this country.
While your ancestors were voting, mine were not.
From PBS:
Native American women were not citizens in 1920, when white women (all descendants of immigrants) got the right to vote. In 1924, Native American women were granted citizenship, but until as late as 1962, many states still denied them the right to vote.
Asian American immigrant women were denied the right to vote until 1952.
Hispanic/Mexican American women were not granted complete voting rights until 1975.
African American women gained their full rights to vote in 1965.
So do not come at me with any type of feminism that does not have these facts memorized by heart. Your feminism has never included women and femmes of color. Don't get me started on queerness.
Performative Allyship and Fragility
So now that you've read thus far, I want you to look deep inside and confront the defensive, fragile part of yourself that wants to push back. Now put that in the dumpster where it belongs. Set aside your ego, make room for others. You have privilege, now use it.
That said, don't come at this from a white savior standpoint. Do not create a character so emboldened by radical feminism and speaking up for "minorities" that she becomes a perfect, blonde activist with a tight ass and sweet tits.
We don't need you to save us. We need you to get out of the way.
Do not create a perfect ally character who is a better ally than you are. You aren't fooling us. We all know you can't challenge your drunk uncle in his red hat at Thanksgiving, much less put your body on the line for true equality. How do you think we got here, in the year 2025, with U.S. citizens being detained and folks being deported to the wrong country and into enslavement? From your silence. So, again, don't.
Perfectionism is a pillar of white supremacy culture. Write your ally as you are, and if you don't like how little she does to crush the racist, ableist, bigot patriarchy, to speak the truth, to strive to see the viewpoint of others and change her behaviors, to struggle to make way for the stories of others, then you yourself need to do better.
A Few Notes from BIPOC Women/Femmes/Nonbinary folks on Substack
My nana’s name was María. They called her Mary at the funeral and printed it in her obituary. Said it ‘fit our name better,’ but it was erasure wearing etiquette’s mask. More than changing the name, it erased my family’s story and the identity of the brightest light of my life. In fiction, it looks different but does the same damage.
If you’re writing a woman, especially a BIPOC woman or femme or nonbinary character, don’t give me a symbol. Don’t give me a trope you plucked from the media.
Give me a fucking person.
Someone with contradictions, rage, tenderness, bad decisions, crooked teeth, weird laughs, hunger, and memory. Someone imperfect and real.
Don’t write her to be loved by your imagined reader. Write her because you love her already, flaws and all. And write her so who she is is simply who she is, so she can’t be erased.
Otherwise, you’re just calling her Mary.
From Delise Fantome of What A Time To Be Alive and Penny Carnival:
What gets me the most about "feminist" characters in so many stories, is how quietly and quickly the author packages that feminism away once the female character has obtained a romantic partner. Where once the author made certain to mention frequently the character's thoughts about independence, gender roles or stereotypes, or whatever they had the character choose to believe in order to pass the bechdel test . . . it all gets stripped away little by little as they fall in love. Oh, sure, the character still has little spats with her male partner-- little assertions of independence and free will to assure the reader she isn't a pick-me. But then there goes the ooey gooey feeling when the male partner gets "overprotective", the fanny fluttering about dominance, the sense of comfort for being "taken care of" and then guess what? You never hear a peep about that character's feminist takes again. It's just fucking and loving and a short revival of feminism in the third act break-up before the makeup and then the patriarchal shuffle continues. It's like "it's not right until it's my right!"
From sofi <3 of calling all dreamr grls <3:
White feminism does not specify itself as an incomplete lens; it assumes itself as the all-encompassing feminist dogma. Within literature and other spheres of fiction we are subliminally fed the pillars of white feminism through tropes and archetypes depicted by the white woman. Since the term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw over thirty years ago, we have seen a larger effort in female diversity in the name of intersectionality. However this representation often falls short when it is done by white feminists (feminists that practice white feminism, not necessarily feminists that are white). WOC characters end up being surrogates for what would otherwise be a white woman’s story. Arguably, it is even more harmful to have the illusion of intersectionality than the absence of it. That said, mainstream, neoliberal feminism is still very much flooded with cultural feminist icons in characters such as Jo March (Little Women) and Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice). Bright, young, white women who ardently resist the patriarchal ideals of marriage. While these characters are beloved and related to by many women they are incapable of reaching WOC the same way they do white women. The issue is not inherently that white female characters written by white female authors are for an exclusively white female audience, but rather that this is the narrative that dominates popular culture and further lends itself into mainstream feminist thought. What dominates is what sustains power – this is the foundation of white supremacy. Proclaimed feminist stories about the white leading woman navigating womanhood, battling misogyny, subverting characterizations of fragile femininity, are not radical (now more than ever) and therefore not valuable to the movement. These stories damage and divide an already alienated demographic. White feminism in fiction is not just lukewarm, it is cold and unappetizing, while also flawed in its truths and values. So long as white feminism keeps reign, so will white supremacy.
From Bea of beesandbelladonna:
Erasure typically comes when fear has the bigger audience. For me personally, my belief is that hatred breeds hatred but it is all born from fear. The fear of being outshined by the beauty of darker skin or course hair. Put those features on a woman? Forget about it. It’s pander to the majority and then fight for your limitations.
I dislike when characters get diminished or reduced to a sidekick because of genetics. It disgusts me that women of color still take the back seat. Not because they aren’t standing up, but because they refuse to sit down.
Conclusion
My advice to white women is this: get angry. Get absolutely feral. Scream, kick, punch, fart, shit, claw, rage, bare your teeth, grunt, stop smiling — because these are all the things cishet white men have bred out of you.
And then, make your character do the same.
If you're wondering how to write a better, intersectional feminist character, be a better intersectional feminist. Don't just say the word, learn what it is, practice it, learn your own history.
Then imagine your character taking a shit.
This really got me thinking. We do smooth the edges of women in stories just to make them easier to like. I felt seen, and honestly called in too. In the best kind of way. Thank you for saying it like this.
So much wisdom in this. Really exposes how hollow and disingenuous white feminism is, both in art and in life. Here’s to more characters taking shits 🍻🥂