AIBU by saying it isn’t misogynistic to have a female villain in fiction?

[Historyguy]

I’d normally never post something like this on this forum, but I am writing a book and I don’t want to dedicate months of my time to just be called a misogynist.

Most of the protagonists are men, but they aren’t great guys either. They are former pirates lmao, not exactly known for being saints. The main villain is going to be a wealthy woman who actually existed in real life. Her name is Abigail Williams (she will be revealed to have still been alive), and she was one of the first accusers of witchcraft that eventually lead to the Salem Witch trials. In real life, she went missing. In my book, she’s alive and is now under investigation from British authorities on what she did.

She was literally only 12 when she did all that crap, but 12 is old enough to know not to lie in order to get someone killed.

I told people about this and they said that I won’t have a good time making a female villain in 2025 against a bunch of men, and I feel like they’re ignoring the point of my story. That nobody is the “good guy”, it’s literally bad men living in poverty against a sociopathic wealthy woman. AIBU?

She WAS the main villain, the little minx. Kids those days, eh? What was society coming to?

Yeah, absolutely nothing to do with Putnam or Hathorne. Has to be an adolescent female getting all those people killed for shits and giggles to blame. The misogyny, enslavement and abuse of all those powerful men was nothing, compared to the machinations of a female criminal genius/psychopath who is now attempting to destroy innocent friendly pirates ('no angels' meaning just the normal amount of murder, rape, enslavement that any bloke would do given the circumstances and opportunity, presumably).

Go on, write the damn book - pip historyguy to the post! 🥰

I'm quite confused as I don't know the history here so coming at it from an outside view.

I'm less interested in why a 12 year old would lie and more interested in how this came to be believed.

If she is alive in your book, but in real life she went missing, I think personally you have to account for this lost period In your book. Otherwise you have rewritten history and I'm not sure people will take to that entirely.

That links to a wider modern question of interest that your book could more directly address - should we be allowed to go after people for crimes committed that weren't crimes at the time, and where do you draw the line between what was an individuals responsibility and what was the responsibility of the social system? While you might not present answers to this it could be quite thought provoking and relevant to modern times. Or you might highlight that different versions of facts are often indistinguishable from the facts themselves - in itself quite relevant to post truth modern society.

I have no idea what actually sells books though.

I don't think she went missing as such, there just isn't any further documentation of her life. Presumably she's the head of a pirate conglomerate somewhere.

Female villains are the opposite of misogynistic surely. It proves women are strong, powerful and can do anything men can do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_the_Witch

If you like reading and are interested in history!

Read the Robert Galbraith books for some fascinating portrails of female villains - Elizabeth Tassle, Abigail Wace, Janice Beattie. Delicious!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Sweden

I don't know of any Swedish pirates though!

Modern readings of The Crucible usually don’t see Abigail as simply a sociopathic villain - she is understood as a young girl who has suffered terribly and who is living in an awful, misogynistic society. She is mistreated by all around her and, honestly, who could blame her for wanting a bit of fun and shagging John Proctor, who should have known better! She utilises the tiny bit of power she has and is corrupted by it to save her own skin. She isn’t a nice person but there aren’t many nice people in her world. From what you’ve said you’re going back to source as the original was 12yo so I realise you’re not basing her on Miller’s play (although it sounds like the character is inspired by a very literal/old fashioned reading of Miller’s character) but I would hope you might show understanding of how her experiences might have made her into a villain, and that she isn’t completely one dimensional!

There female villains all over the place. What an odd thing to ask.

Women don’t have the same criminality as men. I don’t think striving to be serial killers is a good thing just to prove “we’re like men “. We’re not.

back to the question- really depends in how it’s written. It’s not enough to answer based on that info. But i have appreciated some wonderfully evil female villains

Well, I do get tired of tv shows bending themselves over backwards to try ensure that women are equal represented as the baddies in their stories. So perhaps I am the audience youbare worried about cancelling you?

Frankly though, in your story, the fact that you seem to think it's totally ok to let a 12 year old girl, with all the oppression she was facing because she was a girl, plus her age, take the fall for the Salen Witch trials tells me this is a book thats going to piss me off, yes.

This would be particularly amusing if you are one of those posters on MN who is outraged if a 12 yer old walks home from.school, takes a bus, has their own phone...

Wait, are you a man?! Have you even done any research or thinking?!

The OPs name is "Historyguy" so I assumed male. I also assumed idiot for thinking just having a female villain is enough to be cancelled; and for thinking that he's important enough to be cancelled in the first place.

I’ve read quite a bit of US colonial history, and Abigail Williams was not a sociopath. The execution of the innocent women of Salem and nearby towns is on the heads of the men who tried and convicted them. Witch-hunts were a socio-religious pretext invented by men to enforce sex roles on lower class and/or marginalised girls and women.

If you’re going to write historical fiction, you need to be true to the history.

If you want to write a fictional book with a female anti-hero, I would suggest you create a fictional world.

For what it’s worth, she’s going to be 30 come time of story.

Is there any need to be quite so unpleasant?

Well, I dunno what she's been doing for the past 18 years but I'd say it's reasonable to suppose she has a lot of cause to be very, very angry.

I've recently been looking up histories of malevolently scheming women (real ones). I find it interesting to look at the contexts of their lives; whether they could have had a 'voice' without murdering their friends and family and if there are any signs they had personal reasons to hate their victims, as well as political ones.

Plotting, scheming and murdering was usually popular with the men in their circles, too, so I don't believe every female villain has to have a tragic underlying excuse for being a cunt. Ambition tended to necessitate ruthlessness. But Abigail's short childhood is known to have been difficult, which must have informed her later development.

@HistoryguyI’m assuming you’ve read Rachel Dyer?

No problem with having a female baddie, of course. One manifestation of misogyny is confining women to the roles of representing all the virtues and/or being victims of others' badness, both of which roles make them passive, dull and less able to take centre-stage in their own histories.

However, there is massive scope for misogyny in the writing of her character. For example by making her badness something that has simply developed as a consequence of being made to suffer in a patriarchal society (more passivity) or by simply forcing her into the cookie cutter shape of a male villain, just with some male-gaze sexuality bolted on. Or basically any suggestion that her femaleness is more central as the source of her actions than the maleness of a male character is central to his actions.

I'm hoping that Historyguy is a woman because the portrayal of women by male authors in genre fiction is generally so lame.

Is there any need to police threads like this? Really?

I'm wondering what novels you actually do read if you think that women can't be the perpetrators of crime.

My favourite roles as an actor are playing villains and murdering my way through the rest of the cast so the more female baddies the better imo. Why should men have all the fun while we play the supporting cast?

Many many real life villains are women.
I find the plot interesting indeed. Not sure you should give it away here....
I do not agree with this people that call misogyny....