George Saunders flounders!

I'm an enormous fan of George Saunders. However, after reading a number of his stories, I've noticed a strange pattern. With the exception of The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripp, which stars an excellent heroine named Capable, every George Saunders story I've read has featured men as the primary characters and women as being put in powerless/demeaning roles - usually in a sexual way.

To be clear, when Saunders' women are put into these situations, their predicament is in no way meant to be glorified. In each occurrence of this trope, the man who overpowers and violates the woman is definitely portrayed as being in the wrong. In The Brief and Terrifying Reign of Phil, it's Phil himself – indisputably the villain of the story – who fantasizes about, idealizes, violates, and eventually murders his female crush. "Escape from Spiderhead" portrays women being killed after being sort-of sexually violated in the context of an experiment (again, the man who kills them is not supposed to be a sympathetic character). The short story "Victory Lap" features a rapist who means to rape and murder a female child, "Jon" has young girls being impaired by accidental pregnancies, and "Tenth of December" features a young boy who fantasizes about a girl being kidnapped so he can rescue her. In none of these cases is the reader supposed to sympathize with the overpowering of these female characters, and yet there they are.

It's difficult to tell what George Saunders is trying to say through this repeated trope. On the one hand, he's definitely making a statement against violating women or using them as objects. On the other hand, that's what happens to most of his female characters (again, with the exception of Capable, who is an excellent non-sexualized young heroine).

What this says to me is that Saunders is making an effort, but he's not truly there yet. It's been proven time and time again that male authors have more difficulty telling the stories of female characters than female authors do when telling the stories of male characters. This is because the majority of media is presented from a male perspective; therefore, women are constantly forced to see things from a man's point of view, whereas men are never forced to see anything from a woman's point of view.

It seems that Saunders is on the right path (saying that women should be treated as equal human beings) but he hasn't quite made it to the point of actually portraying them as human beings, instead focusing on the damage that occurs when they are not treated as such. When it comes down to it, it's a case of mutual recognition: Saunders has reached the point of saying "You're not less than me" but hasn't reached the point of "You're equal to me."

I hope to see this repetitive trope disappear as I read more of his writing. After all, a writer is only great if they can write from the perspectives of both halves of the population.