My WIP is a heavily action-based science-fiction, based in a world where most of the women stay at home and the men are warriors. A lot of my characters are fairly sexist, but I don't want my novel to be!

My main female character is not like that - she's a bit kick-ass, and I have plans to introduce more female warrior types later on who aren't the sort who need regular rescuing. However, my problem is with a lot of my minor characters.

For instance, I've just written a scene at a slave market where a woman is treated pretty badly, and another where the hero has to remove a device implanted in a woman's body (her back). In both scenes, I struggled to avoid it sounding a bit '50 Shades', which is definitely not what I'm aiming for.

How do I write about women being victimised without making it sound like something out of a bad 70s comedy?

It was actually quite funny, writing the medical scene which involved a lot of poking and prodding of the heroines body, and not writing double-entendres. I had my thesaurus out, looking up alternative words for 'pressed', 'pushed' etc and ended up having to make my victim unconscious so she couldn't 'wimper' or worse, 'groan' and sound altogether too exciting about it.

And now, having written a world in which women are, by and large, stay at home mothers (by virtue of the fact that there isn't any contraception and they get married at 16), I'm trying to avoid my male protagonists being sexist pigs.

Unfortunately, I'm not Margaret Attwood

Ada, if you are a stay at home mother do you have to be written as a victim? Women wield an awful lot of power in the home on the domestic front. Could you show hem in their own environment making decisions and ruling the roost? And speaking of roost, we all know about the pecking order among hens. Can you show them actually victimising lesser "hens" or have a woman at the top of the pecking order with levels down? Then you'd get fifty shades of women - as opposed to 50 shades of grey. Or is it gray?

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Have them "advising" their husbands/ taking issue with them etc.

yes, the men think they're in charge, but it's clear that really it's the women.

Just like real life

Yes, that's excellent advice. I will certainly incorporate some 'power behind the throne'.

However, it is an essential part of my plot that some women are victimised and exploited, as they are in real life societies which have slavery. Central to my plot is the idea of two races of humans, one of whom are treated as inferior by the other.

Maybe I should read 'Roots' again.

This crops up in hist fic too.

One way is to take advantage of point-of-view: the oppressor's take on a scene is very different from the oppressed. When the victim is seen from the outside it can worry modern readers because it's uncomfortably close to voyeurism. If you're inside the victim's head it helps, plus you can see the internally furious and resistive thoughts, even if externally she's passive and victimised. (The only risk is for her fury to come out like a feminist treatise... It does have to be within the terms of reference - the familiar discourses - of the world you've set up.)

Also, yes, adding another character who comes from the same group but either refuses to be a victim (although maybe pays for it), or works successfully inside the system - like Jem's ferocious matriarch, say. The Wife of Bath... I always think they're fascinating characters.

At the trivial level, if I need a character to be a cliché - a gay man who likes interior decor, a muslim who's very devout, a stingey Scot - I'll try to chuck in a minor character who doesn't conform to that cliché, just to even things out...

When the victim is seen from the outside it can worry modern readers because it's uncomfortably close to voyeurism.

Emma, may I ask that you expand on this? It seems to me the inference is that in some way, modern readers are less forgiving / tolerant than 'old-fashioned' ones?
I'm sure I am misunderstanding the true meaning.

Alan, what I meant was that modern sensibilities are more attuned to how ambiguous it is, to paint/write, say, a graphic description of someone being raped, or dying in battle.

It may be meant to be simple be horrible: to make this part of the story alive and vivid for the reader as is our fundamental job in fiction. It may also be fuel for an anti-war or feminist political argument implicit or explicit in the story.

But by reading it/looking at it and feeling the horror, as the artist/writer means us to for honest reasons, are we also complicit in the rapist's pleasure in the victim's pain and degradation? And even if there's no sexual component, are we getting off on the horror of battle? What kind of arousal is actually going on?

The misery memoir is a case in point. They're meant to be inspiring - triumph over difficult lives. But at what point do the descriptions of awfulness become a kind of porn? Some of the nastier ones are apparently very popular in prisons...

I built a whole novel round that question.

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And, of course, the artist may not mean it honestly - even if the reader does, IYSWIM.

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What I meant by that last bit is - if the artist/writer is covertly getting off on the sexual horror, say, but I as a reader/viewer am not, am I nonetheless complicit in that act of voyeurism?

Emma,
Many thanks for answering so fully. I always get something from your blogs / posts. (one day, the penny will drop what CW means)

Thanks All, including Emma,
I definitely want to avoid my scenes being voyeuristic.

For this discussion, I think its good to write such scenes as much as possible from the victim's point of view (although my victim in this case is mute and passive, so its more in the body language than anything).

But also be careful about my vocabulary e.g. wept instead of groaned, my victim is 'strung up like a piece of meat', not 'writhing in handcuffs' like a person in a BDSM scene.

There are certain words and allusions rarely if effect applied to sex, and they seem to be useful in dulling down any unintentional titillation. So I think my thesaurus and I will become intimate buddies in the near future.

I do think, though, that it's possible to let yourself be hamstrung in your attempts not to give every possible kind of warped libido or prejudice fodder. That's why I try to balance it, rather than eliminate it.

Otherwise you get to the point that Adrian Lester described on a Front Row Special where, as a brilliant actor who is black, even after he was so good in Primary Colours he was unemployed for a year; he kept not getting jobs because the producers "have decided not to go black with that one" because it would be seen as a negative stereotype. He didn't care if it was a bad guy or whatever - what he wanted was work, and the juicy parts...

As well as being about voyeurism, TMOL is also about transgressive sex, and I was careful there. But that didn't mean I didn't do it.