When did I become this kind of a writer?

I have posted about feminism and misogyny and objectification of women and morality quite a bit, even just within the past year, and those are things that are important to me, and remain relevant, and that I will be posting about again and again. Given that, it is of a concern to me when I have two of my heroines lose their shirt in the same week.

One is in the comic book. Jane has to do some field dissection, and she gets covered with blood and brains during it. It was an important scene for me to write, in that doing so was the first time I felt like I could ever write about zombies. (I still haven’t yet, but I believe I can.) There are important things going on there with the plot and with the characters, and ultimately she was always going to need to change. I knew that.

What I realized on rewrite is that kind of wiping herself off before she has a chance to change clothes is insufficient. The sterile wipes that she has available would be completely insufficient for blood on fabric, and turning it inside out would be disgusting, and there is no way that she is going to keep that one. The source of the blood has been such a horror to her and her new husband that she could not get it off fast enough. It’s all how it needs to be, but then it leaves her in a bra.

The other is in Family Blood. As I originally wrote the scene, Chris is bleeding and Sarah asks for a first aid kit, and on rewrite I cannot convince myself that these guys keep a first aid kit in the van. It would be a good idea, and very responsible of them, but they are young musicians, and not accustomed to fighitng vampires, and they don’t. So she whips off her shirt, and she does have a tank underneath.

Medically, it would really be better if they had the first aid kit, and she could unwrap some sterile gauze. For the character, it’s kind of another step in this transformation she has been undergoing.

She starts out literally buttoned down. She is wearing a buttoned shirt over a t-shirt, and she has her hair in a french braid, and those are little things, but they are outwards signs of how very hard she has been trying to cover everything and just be good enough that things will work out. And it doesn’t. They get found, her brother dies, and everything that she worked for his gone. And so, she is getting stripped down in a sense, and turning into something new.

I know, and actresses will do nudity if its integral to the plot. Well, no one is nude, but still, no one should be leering at them. These are women in times of crisis, who sacrifice a lot for those they love, and they maybe aren’t the strongest or the fastest, but they are kind and persistent, and ultimately resilient. They have to be.

I know it could be worse. And there is some equity, because there are scenes where Gerard and Mikey are shirtless too, and it is completely integral to the plot. I wouldn’t want to be gratuitous with the males either. Just because it’s not such a pervasive issue doesn’t make it right.

And of course, obviously, more people should have first aid kits in their vehicles. You just never know when you will need one.