1. The Highlander Rule
There can only be one woman. If there are more than one, only one should have a speaking role, the rest should be NPCs or minions without names, skills, stats, or backgrounds.
2. Bechdel's Test
If there absolutely has to be more than one female character, they should only talk about their male companions or counterparts.
3. Pink Washing
Make sure that the women are color coded. Pink is currently the best color for this purpose.
4. The Beachbody Rule
Regardless of profession, level of accomplishment, role or skillset, it is imperative that the women must be sexually attractive, and demonstrate this sexual attractiveness by wearing bikinis, displaying softcore nudity.
Corollary - The Bathing Suit Rule: Female Superheroes must wear the equivalent of a bathing suit when fighting evil-doers. One piece suits are suitable, but exotic or impossible cut multi-piece borderline lingerie outfits are preferred.
5. Feminine Singularity
The best way to write female characters is to make them as one dimensional as possible, or use existing stock caricatures and trope archetypes. Regardless of caricature used, all female characters need to be unsure of themselves, defer to masculine authority
Sample Caricatures:
The Crazy Woman - not actually mentally ill (excessively deep character development required) but comically/wacky/psycho crazy. Acts in random and unpredictable manners. Crazy Woman is good at sex.
The Ball and Chain - It is important for a female character to be a 'downer' or wet blanket.
The CEO - Corporate Estrogen Officer, an outwardly strong female character undermined by her lack of Sex.
The Spinster Maid - Indecisive and overly picky, the Spinster maid can't make up her mind, and nothing is good enough for her. The Spinster Maid pines for impossibly high standards, and is a good demonstration feminine insecurity.
The Gold-Digger - Pretty, good at Sex, willing to demonstrate nudity.
The Cougar - Older (anything past 24 is cougar territory) version of the Gold Digger
The Trophy - Like the Gold-Digger, but better dressed and in a nicer car.
The Bimbo - Like the Gold-Digger, but comically dumb.
The Feminazi - a neo-masculine woman, angry, militant, hates men. Easily typed with buzz cut hair, unshaved body hair, and boots.
The Sexy Professional - A catch all, the Sexy Professional is like any other insert job/career, but sexy. This includes Sexy Scientists, Sexy Assassins, Sexy Medical Officers, Sexy Counselors, Sexy Gardeners, Sexy Reporters, and so forth.
6. Sexy Sex Sex
Female characters should have as their primary motivation having sex, or being available for sex, or otherwise looking sexy, acting sexy. Breasts should be seen, or referred to as often as possible, because the reader/viewer might forget that the female character has them.
Corollary - The Bi Rule: all female characters should be at the very minimum bi-curious because it is important for them to have sexual thoughts about other female characters.
7. Like a Bra
Female characters should be like a bra, there to provide support, but ultimately something that is in the way. The male characters should never be upstaged by the female characters. A good rule of thumb is that if you can replace the female character with a lamp with a note on it, you've written a proper female character.
8. The No List
The No List contains all the things that your female characters cannot be, or have as attributes
Ugly or unattractive. Female characters must always be attractive. Supporting NPC females may be less attractive. If a female character needs to less attractive, she can be made Pretty Ugly, attractive under glasses and poor wardrobe choices. (This will be corrected later in a sexy confidence montage)
Old. Unless grandmotherly, the acceptable age for female characters is 14-34. Younger than this is criminal. older than this is unacceptable.
Unavailable. Female characters cannot be in unseen relationships that prevent them from being involved in Sex.
Competence. Female characters cannot demonstrate more than 3 abilities, personality facets, or personal quirks.
Leadership. A good female character should be a poor to fair leader, and require male assistance or backing.
Asexuality. Female characters must be interested in sex and relationships.
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? Responses (3)
4/5 Saw that somebody had DARED to give Scras a 3 and instantly HAD to read!!!!! Started off slow and I was starting to think the 3 was right then ran into like 3 things that made me laugh out loud. Ok it's tright but I still laughed.........
There's certainly a lot of truth to what you write here. Yet, to be honest, I found it hard to write female characters even though I'm a woman (I tend to have the reverse problem to what you write here about sex though in that I just can't write romance even though the story sometimes calls for it). Anyway, the blockquotes are definitely the winning traits of this article.