A few weeks ago, I read Joanna Russ’s 1975 review of the movie A Boy and His Dog, which had originally been published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. I hadn’t intended to, and wasn’t deliberately seeking it out. I just came upon it the way one often does online, clicking through from link to link, and eventually ending up somewhere unexpected but necessary.

It’s a wonderful piece, and deserves your attention, as all of her work does, but the passage that intrigued me the most was a paraphrase of something Chip Delany once wrote:

According to Samuel Delany, a literary characterization proceeds by means of three kinds of actions: gratuitous, purposeful, and habitual, and well-written characters perform all three. (This classification certainly applies to realistic fiction, and I suspect it applies to all fiction, however stylized.) Sexist literature produces two kinds of female characters, both imperfect: the Heroine, whose actions are all gratuitious, and the Villainess, whose actions are all purposeful. Neither performs habitual actions.

This stood out for me because, being a writer, I immediately wanted to understand more fully exactly what Delany meant by these three classifications. I could tell the concept would be helpful to my own writing. And as I thought, hmmm, how will I ever track down the source, I suddenly remembered that due to this connected world in which we live, I could simply ask the source directly, since Chip and I are friends on Facebook. So I reached out to query where I could find his full essay explicating this idea.

It turns out the essay “Letter to the Symposium on Women In Science Fiction” originally appeared in an issue of Khatru, and was then reprinted in his non-fiction collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. But not, unfortunately, my copy of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, as it’s a first edition. It can be found in the current expanded edition, though. I decided I’d pick up a copy at this year’s Readercon, where I could get him to autograph it, and then thought nothing more.

Until last night, when as I once more clicked at random from this link to that online, I ended up at the issue of Khatru containing his essay. Ah, serendipity!

Here, then, is Chip’s original expression of the idea for which Russ had sent me hunting.

There’s also a second passage against which I need to weigh myself, one which presents a proto Bechdel test.

Reading these two sections, I immediately, wondered … how do I measure up? I must confess that I feel (perhaps wrongly) as if I’m having having some small success with his first standard, because my protagonists have tended to be both male and female equally, particularly over the past decade, and have been empowered without intentional prejudice to the best of my abilities at the time. (Of course, there’s surely unintentional bias present, so there’s always room to do much better.) But when it comes to the second measure, showing women in the fullness of their friendships … there I fail almost completely.

Is it an evasion for me to think that this is due to my focus entirely on the short story form, in which I rarely choose to illustrate male friendship either? I can see that in a novel, there’s plenty of room to explore those relationships, but in the space I allow myself to tell my tales, I never seem to find the room.

Thinking back, I can recall plenty of stories which explored familial relationships—of daughters with their mothers and/or fathers, sons with their mothers and/or fathers, siblings with each other, spouses with each other … but friendships are rare. I, in some strange power’s employ, move on a rigorous line from story openings to story endings without finding a need for friendship.

Because of that, I’m going to go out on a limb and say this has less to do with my feelings toward gender roles then it does with my particular storytelling techniques. That doesn’t mean, however, that Chip’s thesis doesn’t leave me with much to think about. Because … why aren’t friendships, regardless of whether they’re male-male, male-female, female-female, or non-binary in whatever the configuration, a part of my fiction? Shouldn’t they exist, even if for the sole purpose of verisimilitude?

And yet, looking back, they don’t, save for only a handful of my stories.

As always, Chip, you’ve given me much to consider, as I move forward with the construction of future stories …