Accidental femsploitation?

I like to spend some of my time creating game ideas and writing them up. One involved a pair of girls, who were Best Friends Forever since childhood, and one of them must rescue the other from the evil villain, using the power of science.

I shared the (slightly more fleshed out) early design with a friend, and his reaction was, "femsploitation, nice, i can dig it."

I was taken aback. Exploiting stereotypes of femaleness for the sake of humor? That sounds bad! I didn't mean to do that! Except, I kind of did. I was giggling a little inside as I wrote up the storyline.

And then I begin to question the validity of the work and my goals in how I set it up. Am I going to include something that trivializes the experience of women or any other group represented in the story? Am I going to offend feminists by letting the women in the story have "trivial" interests like crushes and BFF? Will I trivialize the experiences of black women pursuing advanced science degrees if I make the main character into a black woman scientist who makes no big deal of being what she is? After all, I haven't thus far consulted any black woman scientists in the real world to try to find out what they feel about life, the universe, and everything.

I've also spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks reading about feminism and concepts like privilege, wherein a person doesn't realize the benefits they have or the ways in which another group is disadvantaged. So I feel an urge to do mental backflips to try to see what I might be overlooking in terms of messages I accidentally convey that could somehow hurt people.

But I think I am on target. I wanted to make a story that pushes the boundaries in storytelling a bit, something that takes the default superhero "man saves woman hooray!" story and turns it on its side, to "woman saves BFF hooray!" and see what happens. I want to reach the "normal female" audience, or the audience who has a certain narrow idea of what a "normal female" is, and tell them it's okay and possible to become a strong woman without giving up everything familiar and girlish if they don't want to. I want to say, you can have a major, dramatic life experience without it being all about falling in love and living happily ever after with your SO, even if you are a woman. I want to celebrate values of friendship and community; whether you think of that as stereotypically feminine or not, I believe those are good things!

Yes, I have it in mind to play off of some stereotypical female behaviors, partly for the sake of humor. But I don't mean to pin down and weaken the female character with these behaviors, nor to define her with them. I mean to allow her to have them, without reducing her overall strength and capability.

And I realize it's impossible to predict everything that could possibly offend anyone. Maybe it's overly feminine to worry about it in the first place, or maybe it's just the same kind of quandary that many standard-white-men face when someone first accuses them of ignoring their privilege, but it's taken conscious effort for me to move past it. My solution is this:

1. Don't deliberately include content I know to be really offensive to some groups of people.
2. Acknowledge any feedback from offended parties and try to consider them next time.
3. Acknowledge that no story will ring true to every audience member.

I can't write something that illuminates all aspects of an ideal world at once, and also resonates with all possible readers. My work will be incomplete in that sense, and it will be flawed in some ways. Then, 100 years from now, it may seem offensively old-fashioned and stereotypical. But it will still have value now, and it will put something new into the mix of culture out there. I think that is a good goal: create something that is different from most of the other video game and superhero stories out there, and see if anyone follows that path.

That would be my favorite possible outcome: as a result of something I make, more people create major characters and concerns that are minorities amongst the current collection of characters and concerns in the medium, and eventually we get to have stories that make me think and feel more new things, and help me become a broader-minded person, able to believe in new possibilities.