The Myth of Strong Female Characters
Props to Perry for sparking the conversation that itched enough at the back of my brain to make me blog on this.
I am seeing a lot of discussion on the interwebs about “strong female characters”. Particularly with regards to various writers who either do or do not live up to the rising expectations when it comes to females in gaming/writing/movies/tv/comics.
This is good. This is very, very good.
We SHOULD have discussions about this. It’s important that it matters to us that women are portrayed in a manner that empowers both boys/men and girls/women to treat their fellow humans as people.
The Disclaimer
For the purposes of this discussion, I am talking about the way that women are portrayed. The way that men are portrayed is its own barrel of problems but is out of scope.
One problem at a time, please.
The External Reading
(summaries provided to save time, but I still do recommend the source links)
Disney Princesses have come under harsh scrutiny of late, with rather a lot of snarky pokes at the way those heroines are portrayed, particularly with regards to needing men to rescue them or using their sexuality to succeed. Like this image, for example.
As a rebuttal, this tumblr posts argues that the situations and actions of the Disney princesses is not so simple as the quippy images like the one I linked above might have you believe.
And this poem that Perry sent me, which combined with the above two links in my mind to create the need for a blog post. The poem is from the point of view of a “strong female character” who lists out the things she must be (beautiful, but not too beautiful, strong but not without flaws, disabled, but not in a way that makes her look weak, good at all weapons, but still kindhearted and gentle…) and then cries that she wishes she weren’t alone, so she didn’t have to bear the burden of so many expectations.
You can also toss in some discussions on the My Little Pony “respectable show for girls” and the Lara Croft victimization if you so wish. Then there’s always Hermione and Rose Tyler versus Twilight. I don’t think we even need to talk about the Catwoman or … pretty much all of the other female comic book characters. And there’s the discussion about Sister’s Red and the subtle “she was asking for it” rape message that can be inferred.
Why It Matters
First, I think we should figure out why it matters.
It’s under discussion because women have been portrayed poorly for so long that they’ve become tropes. You’ve got the vamp, the tramp, the mother, the stepmother. You’ve got characters who have no sense of self outside of their need for a man and a family — women who are so weak they cannot protect themselves and need a man to do it for them. You’ve got the women who use their sexuality to mislead and lie, and the women who jealously and spitefully take down any who stand in their path.
It matters because our children are watching these shows and reading these books, and if they only ever see characters who love pink and frills and care about how beautiful they are, then that is what they believe women should be. This is limiting to the girls who might branch out and hurtful to the girls who have zero affinity for pink and frills and makeup.
It matters because our teenagers are trying to figure out who they are and what love is, and what their relationships with men should be. If all they see are men saving women and women subdued or bitchy, that is what they think life should be like.
In MY mind (as it’s my blog and thus my opinion gets to be on the front page) we need strong female characters to show girls and women their options. That being a woman is a multi-faceted and unique experience.
To build a sense of self-worth that has nothing to do with other people.
I’d love to know why YOU think it matters. Why it matters to you and what makes this issue something you care about.
Why We Still Have a Problem
To me, the poem most accurately details why we still have a problem. We’ve swung the pendulum the other way, and gone from weepy, useless heroines to badasses trying to be too many things at once.
I have as much in common with Teary McVictim as I do with Leather McSpikesAndStuff.
We need to split the load. It’s okay to dream of being a mommy and a princess and want a pink EasyBake Oven. It’s EQUALLY okay to want nerf guns and puppies and legos. It is ALSO equally okay to dream of being a mommy and want a puppy and to send your barbies off to war.
When you’ve only got one main female role, however, you’ve got to do a lot of scrambling to try and make as many people happy as possible.
Lord of the Rings
Incidentally, the ORIGINAL fantasy novels somehow seemed to avoid this.
Granted, they had the “women and children must be protected” stuff, but that’s societal. There weren’t a LOT of female characters, but the behavior of those women and the way that the men treated them rarely suffered from the issues we see today.
The first chapter of The Hobbit talks about Bilbo’s mother, a Took who provided the wealth used to build Bag End. Very few fans of the movies can forget the strength of Eowyn, who abhored a cage and killed the Witch King.
No End Date
There’s no end date on this problem, because you can never make everyone happy. The solution I find totally acceptable sticks in the craw of many other people, and vice versa.
We should never stop trying to improve, trying to do better.
The important part has already begun. People are critically looking at the entertainment they are being given and asking themselves if they think it’s doing a good job at anything other than mindless entertainment.
Writers
Writers, as producers of this content, I hope you’re paying attention and asking yourselves the same questions. What is acceptable to YOU?
No matter what you do, someone will accuse you of being sexist or upholding stereotypes. There’s no escape from it.
You need only write in a way that satisfies your own morality, and you can only do that by paying attention, not just to yourself, but to the way that other people are perceiving things.
You see, we grew up with these same tropes, these same images taught to us as being normal. As being not only okay, but celebrated.
We need to break free of what has always been done, and forge our own paths.
It’s up to us. We want to be writers, sure, but we also need to be aware of the responsibility that comes with creation. If I have a problem with the way female characters are portrayed, I can TALK about it all I want. In my heart, I know that it is what I DO about it that matters most.
I’m going to write female characters that I would want to know and spend time with and befriend. I’m going to write daughters and sisters and mothers and warriors and bookworms and bakers and horsewomen.
I’m going to write the role models that I think should be seen more in our entertainment.
47 Comments
* Applause!*
“I’m going to write female characters that I would want to know and spend time with and befriend. I’m going to write daughters and sisters and mothers and warriors and bookworms and bakers and horsewomen.”
This. THIS. THIS!!!!
Fantastic post, Tami! This is such an important topic because even though we are in a world where we are suppose to be “Grrl Rawr!” all of this is still soooo relevant and necessary to discuss.
Damn, thinking is hard in the morning. Going to come back when I have more brain cells firing.
Again, awesome post!
If you could choose a female character to illustrate a good example of a “strong female”, which one would you choose?
That is a great question. Many of the books that I read are either women who BECOME strong as part of the book (Lackey’s The Black Swan is one of my favorite characters of that ilk) or who are the “badass” who are actually mushy and sensitive on the inside.
I love that My Little Pony shows so many different facets of womanhood (and Apple Jack is one of my favorite “strong” female characters in there)
I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Not because there are so few that I can’t possibly find one, but because that’s not the way storing things in my brain works most of the time. If I had my bookshelf in front of me, I could probably find more than a few. =]
Might be a bit weird to consider…but what kind of character would Auri from Name of the Wind be?
I definitely don’t see her as a weak character…but I’d really hesitate to call her strong too. oO
Sometimes I think people can just be characters without having to be either strong or weak.
Characters who are a little addled in the brainpan tend to be difficult to label as strong because they rarely have enough wherewithal to be the captain of their own ship.
Oh, you know what? I thought of a GREAT strong female character. The mom from Disney’s Brave. The daughter as well, but in a different way.
I don’t know. She turned out to be a real bear
/rimshot
Ha! *hands you an award* Ted wins Thursday
Eh, I dunno if the Urban Fantasy ass-kicker female prototype you’re seeing is any worse than, say, a Duke Nukem-esque character. It’s an ULTRA ULTRA character, so beyond social norm parameters it’s ridiculous. It’s not my cup of tea, but if the pendulum is going to swing that far for the machismo, dripping in testosterone bad-ass, I don’t have much of an issue with its female counterpart. I wouldn’t BUY the book, but I would argue that it has a place.
Morality in writing is such a funny thing. You absolutely can use your “personal morality” (for lack of a better way to put it) to determine what constitutes acceptable characterization of a gender, but there also has to be an understanding that what YOU find acceptable, others may not. Let’s look at Bella from Twilight – get-a-man fixated, pretty but unaware of it, awkward, lip-biting, melodramatic and incapable of making a decision on her own – all she wants is to get married and have a baby at 18. Okay, well, that’s Stephanie Meyer’s vision of an acceptable young woman, but a character so dependent on a man that she can’t do anything but try to kill herself without him is abhorrent to me. As such, I won’t support her work. When you throw that morality THING into the mix, Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon and Mormon culture has historically not been the most, uhh, progressive re: women. It’s her moral compass, though, and apparently it worked for a lot of people. It bugs me, but thems the facts – people bought into the man-needy Bella Swan. I wish they didn’t, but they did.
So yes, you CAN use your personal moral compass as a guide for how to craft female characters, but I can say more as a reader than a writer? If your morality pigeonholes women as little more than whiny baby bots, someone like me is going to come along and wonder what the hell is wrong with you. I’d almost argue that looking at a bigger picture BEYOND your personal moral compass is the better goal. Find examples in fiction and media that portray women as strong and really think about what makes them strong. Are they mama bears? Are they gun-wielding bad-asses? Are they super intellectuals who saved the world from cyber terrorism? And when you dismantle those characters that are near and dear to our hearts, do yourself (and everyone else) a favor – please don’t make all of them strong because they were VICTIMS first. That pretty much means that you’re saying women can only become iron ladies if we abuse them, and good Christ, there’s a lot wrong with that particular mindset.
Agreed on the Duke Nukem, but that’s one of the reasons that I took the men out of the equation. There’s plenty of issues to deal with on that side of the gender barrier as well.
I would argue that just because your morality doesn’t agree with Meyer, that doesn’t mean she did a bad thing by writing that book. If she doesn’t personally believe in a stronger female role (which I would hesitate to attest, given the fact that The Host had a much stronger female role) then I am allowed to disagree with her definition of “strong” and even to say that I feel the Bella character is a step in the wrong direction, but I don’t think she should be lambasted for writing a character that DOES fulfill her moral code.
I don’t want someone expecting me to write a WEAK female character because it is their moral code, so I try not to impose mine on others, either.
I can vote with my dollars and my voice, though, and request more Hermiones than Bellas.
Also, that is a GREAT point about not making women strong AFTER being victims. It has its place, and there are enough women who are victims currently that need to know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel … but you don’t have to be raped or abused or denigrated in order to find your strength.
I’m 50. As a child, I was fed a steady diet of weak, helpless, male-obsessed ‘heroines’. So I find modern action heroines very refreshing. Yeah, they’re fantastically over-sexed and unrealistically hyper-competant. But Hilary’s right: so are the men. At least they’re not the bimbos of my youth.
Being equally idiotic IS a form of equality. I don’t mind playing Age of Conan in a chainmail bikini… as long as the guys are running around in g-strings. I get upset when only one of us is forced to look like a moron. Which is why I think that the Hawkeye Initiative is so freaking awesome. It’s a brilliant way of pointing out the sexism we no longer even see.
*nod* It’s still true that the majority of “girl” YA books are romance novels and the majority of “boy” YA books are adventure-driven.
I agree that that’s a problem — and honestly, it’s probably why I find ‘chick flicks’ so much more offensive and sexist than action films.
Movies like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil may have female protagonists, but they’re primarily aimed at a male (often teenaged) audience. It’s one of the reasons the heroines are so damned sexualized. Still, that doesn’t drive me crazy. Ugly guys never star in romances; both sexes want to watch sexy people. If we’re both being sexy idiots, I can live with it. No one sells romance to boys, however, so their stereotypical women at least have power, skill, and interests (beyond boys).
What kill me are the stereotypes of the rom-coms and ‘women-oriented’ movies. The heroines of these things are often ‘strong.’ They’re competent, beautiful, ambitious, mature, and want it all. They’re actually much ‘stronger’ than the shlubby, immature, slacker guys they’re paired with. But they’re monsters. Shrill, self-righteous, arrogant, materialistic, and selfish. Nasty pieces of work who you would never, EVER want to know. They may be more ‘mature’ than their male counterparts, but they lack humility, kindness, self-doubt, etc. All the ‘flaws’ and gentler virtues that make people human.
Maybe what we need isn’t ‘strong’ female characters — it’s well-rounded, realistic, human ones.
For instance, can you name a movie where the main heroine has a sense of humor?
Off the top of my head, I can’t. Humorous female characters are mostly secondary (eg, Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect). Female protagonists are almost as humorless as Judge Dredd. By comparison, I can name lots of male protagonists who have a good sense of humor. A sense of humor is a wonderfully redeeming trait. In A Game of Thrones, some of George RR Martin’s most vile characters are made tolerable by their sense of humor. (As a side note, none of his female characters have that trait!)
After considering, Dogma came to mind, but that wasn’t a “romance” flick and doesn’t really fit into the niche of movies we’re talking about here.
Oooh, I know! The Sweetest Thing (which, by the way, is one of the few romcoms I recommend. I typically avoid the genre because of the problems you’re pointing out.)
A good example of a movie that fits what you’re talking about is Blast from the Past. FANTASTIC hero, and incredibly bitchy and unlikeable heroine. Still a good movie (would anyone like some hot dr. pepper?) but definitely dragged down by the heroine.
Your comment on women in comic books immediately reminded me of http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/
Which is HILARIOUS and I love it. Jim C. Hines (author of YA fantasy like The Stepsister Scheme) also does a personal photo shoot to try and kill some of that stuff. He’s done MULTIPLE takes on this (including tackling male romance novel covers versus female) but here’s a recent one linked to me by Bre
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2013/01/22/author-jim-hines-personally-tackles-sci-fi-sexism-pics/
*really? Could you just be sensitive for one minute about the fact that it is tax season and I do not have time for this kind of stuff??? *
Your post immediately brought to mind two things, in the foggy “I have important issues to deal with” brain that responds to this.
The first was the character in one of Ayn Rand’s books. I can no longer remember if it was Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead. But I remember being so annoyed that here was this strong woman character who desperately needed the strong male character to validate her. I rather wonder why Rand would even bother to have the character if she was going to so blatantly undermine her with common stereotypes.
And then Hillary Clinton. Because she is a fictional character, right???
As a mother, I have watched my daughter read books and watch shows and movies that do have terrible examples of women/girls. But I have also seen her find better books and shows. And I realized a long time ago with her that she will find her own way. She will relate to some of those characters. She will find, on her own, those characters that speak to her now and those that speak for the woman she wants to become. Because not all girls want to be Hermione Granger or Elizabeth Bennett. Some girls WANT to be Lavender Brown or Mrs. Bennett.
So, with this in mind, I think the ONLY responsibility you have as a writer is to portray the type of women that you think exhibit the qualities you support. It is offering the option to view women from varied perspectives that is most important, which means you have to have the silly, fru fru, pink encrusted princesses, because some girl out there is going to identify with her. Whether any of us like that or not.
I think that strong women have been in our literature for a long time, they just get typically overlooked. Because who wants to pay attention to Elizabeth Bennett and discuss her strengths and virtues when there is Catwoman (and all the Bond) women out there?
“responsibility you have as a writer is to portray the type of women that you think exhibit the qualities you support. ” Agreed!!
And you’re right about there being examples of strong females, and they don’t get nearly as much press (either good or bad) as Catwoman.
Yeccccch.
Dagny Taggart.
I’m a strong and utterly independent woman. I will single-handed restart the economy of the world when everyone else gives up….but I really just want a man to completely dominate and own me. Just to possess my body, you know?
Right, because THAT totally made sense. I was pretty intrigued by Atlas Shrugged but I have to admit, that aspect of it REALLY was a huge turnoff for me.
Thank you! Thank you!
I was told that I missed the whole point of the book if I was going to focus on that one small aspect. But I think that one small aspect, which was brought up enought to make it matter, rather undermined the whole “moral of the story.” And I was led to believe that I was the only person in all humanity that found that character appalling and offensive. So, thank you!
AND you made me remember…Dagny! The name. Oy!
Oh, Dagny! I really liked her in the first hundred pages, and then she spent the rest of the book making me hate her!
Just happened to read an article yesterday that I thought had a wonderful drawing of “strong female character.” This art is going to be on the cover of the new Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls game. Liz Danforth is the artist.
That’s awesome!
My current WIP features a female lead that I hope I’m doing justice to. As a dad with a teenage daughter, I think about this all the time. What are her role models? What does it mean to her to be a young woman?
Let me know when you want to tackle men. The way Dad’s are potrayed 90% of the time is something that gets my blood boiling.
I’m also curious (if you’ve seen it) what you thought of the Rapunzel character in Tangled -
*I know it is off the topic…forgive me*
Ted,
I would love to hear what you think about how father’s are protrayed. I am not even able to find a father in my head…at least in literature. (Plenty from the Disney movies, though.) I am intereseted. Let’s talk…but maybe behind Tami’s back, since we are supposed to be focusing on strong women.
*laugh* I would also love to hear what you have to say about strong dads. Sounds like a blog post to me!
I have only seen Rapunzel once and although she was brave and a dreamer, there was something about her character that I couldn’t put my finger on that really bothered me.
Yes.
*steps cautiously into the minefield*
I think that women are a lot like people. There are some strong, some weak, and most fall somewhere in between.
Therefore, characters exhibiting any of these qualities could be considered realistic. Now, I know that the problem and the discussion revolve around the portrayal of women, and I agree that there are too many stereotypes being sold as factual, but in my mind I’m struck by the idea of responsibility as a writer.
I’ve written female characters that are strong, and I’ve written some that are weak. I didn’t write them in order to achieve any moral agenda, I simply wrote them to serve a particular purpose in my story. Is this wrong? It is if I’m saying that the character is weak because she’s a woman. But what if she’s weak because that’s the kind of person she is?
Now, if I wrote all of my female characters as weak stereotypes, it would say something bad about me, but it would also make me a bad writer.
Honestly, I’m not even sure what my point is, other than to take up space on Tami’s blog. I guess I’m torn on the “writer responsibility” thing. I don’t always write female characters that exhibit the qualities I support, but is that wrong? I struggle with this all the time while writing. (Not only with the female characters, either.)
You see, I also have a teenage daughter, and I worry about who she may look up to as a role model. I know for a fact that she likes Katniss from Hunger Games AND Bella from Twilight, so I’m not sure what to make of that!
I agree, women are a lot like people!
*runs away snickering*
Thank you, Steven!
That was a much better response than any of the ones I had to that VERY bold comment! Thanks for saving the world from any of my responses. Well done!
You’re welcome Motanne.
Big Willy, I hope you do not take offence to the hole poking.
No worries – I rarely take offense!
I should have been more concerned about causing offense!
*giggle* Steps on a mine with his first sentence!
*hugs and laughs*
Not all characters (gender neutral here) should be “strong” or even people you’d respect and care about. They can’t, because as you noted, they have to serve a purpose.
I draw the line at my primary protagonists. THEY are the ones I focus on, the ones that I want to be the role models I offer to the world.
Honestly, I meant the first line as a joke!
I originally had a (*snort*) included, but I assumed you would all know I was making a joke.
I was happy to see Mr. Moore’s comment, I wanted you to laugh at it.
I’m very worried now that you took offense to it instead of seeing it as intended!!
I should have left the *snort*
Oh, it was pretty hilarious. And I did laugh, even more so after Steven’s response. I oscillated between deceptive indignant rage and silly buffoonary as a retort. Steven spared us all.
I would have enjoyed reading either, or both, of those retorts!
” I know for a fact that she likes Katniss from Hunger Games AND Bella from Twilight, so I’m not sure what to make of that!”
Here is what you make of that…she is just like people. There are parts of her that are bold, parts that are weak. Few of us are caricatures.
Which brings me to my original point…you need, even as your protagonists, all variations of women represented. Do many lead characters fall into stereotypes that we find unpleasant…gender, religious, ethnic, race, education, or job related? Yep. Um, because that is just how life is.
It is the reader’s job to sort through all that. And maybe…just maybe…quite possibly…the parent’s job to help young girls sort through what is acceptable, comfortable, inspiring, and down right appalling.
Ahem. Not sure anyone else has noticed, but clothing choices for young girls are…oh, what is the word? Trashy! It is MY job to help my daughter see that clothing should be appropriate for certain occassions and that what she wears reflects who she is. THAT job is harder than finding positive female characters for her to relate to and take inspiration from.
<3
I’ve got a shovel, a map of antipodes, and a desire to visit Australia (rather than Indonesia or Madagascar). So, I think it’s about time to move to Puerto Rico and start diggin’!
“It’s important that it matters to us that women are portrayed in a manner that empowers both boys/men and girls/women to treat their fellow humans as people.”
It is definitely important that how women are portrayed *matters to us*, but I don’t think that’s a commonly-shared idea (or, if it is, it doesn’t seem to mean the same thing to a lot of other people). We are generally passive receptors of information and it affects us in numerous ways (desensitization, “false consensus bias”, expectation setting, etc.). The main problem I’ve always had with this topic are that societal trends/expectations seem to be different. Hence, the crummy programming filling the airwaves rife with all of the problems you mention. It exists because of us. Because we buy it, we watch it, we talk about it. Maybe it’s because nothing else is on, but we could always turn it off, read something else, or listen to something else. We should be very selective in what we take in, particularly what we take in uncritically. And here’s where I feel like I’m beginning to echo some things Anne said much better about parenting, so I’ll leave it at that.
My point is we have to change to make the dominant material change and we have to discriminate against material that offends us. We can’t wait for the material to change us.
“We want to be writers, sure, but we also need to be aware of the responsibility that comes with creation.”
I tend to think that the responsibility here, if there is one, is more about honesty and less about pushing an ideology. In short, I think the problem is the caricature. It’s either being presented as the truth or it’s not being used as a vehicle for the truth. Additionally, consider how much advertising has entwined itself into the entertainment business, and how the whole point behind advertising is to lie. Because, generally, the truth isn’t sexy. The truth doesn’t cause envy or lust. The truth rarely strokes our egos. And the truth can be difficult. Advertising seeks to create a desire where there wasn’t one before or intensify a desire that already exists. Want to sell more comic books to adolescent males? Play on their budding sexual desires to make them want the comic.
I have a friend in theatre who’s fascinated with stage combat. He’s choreographed fights and directed shows that are immensely realistic and gory, so much so he has made people wretch in the theater. The fact is that most people don’t know what real violence looks like. They’ve seen movies of beheadings but are, fortunately, unaware of what an actual beheading entails. The point wasn’t to show the gore — he’s not working on a haunted house. The point was to make people ask whether or not the violence was worth it and the realism (and probably a little bit over-the-top-ness, at times) of the gore brought that question front and center.
I can envision stories with weak female characters, even as caricatures, in them that raise the right questions. I can envision stories with chauvinists that would pump lava through anyone’s veins. Those stories don’t bother me in the least. What bothers me are shows like “Two and a Half Men” that have nothing but two-dimensional characters — none of whom have any redeeming factors — in story lines that were idiotic from their inception, all the while pretending that what it depicts is normative. And those are shows/books/music that I can safely avoid most of the time and lambaste the rest of the time.
All of this is to say that I generally agree with you but still a little bit don’t. Anyone have a new shovel? ;)
I don’t expect everyone to agree with me completely, but I sense that we’re not going to see eye to eye on the pieces you disagree with. Which is fine. =]
That may be, but I’d still be interested in seeing where you disagree and why. Even if we butt head for a bit, I think it’d be worth it for the conversation.
I may be approaching this a bit too broad-scoped. I tried to avoid getting off the subject of women, but I think the same problems play out elsewhere (men, violence, marriage, sex, relationships, etc.) and that the problem is really multi-faceted. To me, the issue is about aggrandizing and fetishizing negative values in a constant media stream. And I think we have generally bought it and our youth are copying us without much context or conversation. (And how much of that is hypocritical?) So, my approach isn’t primarily producer driven and isn’t tailored to young women. It’s primarily consumer driven and tailored to everyone.
But, on the producer side, I think if you write real characters that deal with real problems, it won’t matter if your female characters are strong or weak because your audience will see the consequences of being in either position and because, really, they won’t just be one of the other. Because you didn’t make a caricature of a person, you won’t force the character into being a plastic surgeon’s dream. This is what I think Joss Whedon — who has a bit to say about strong, female characters here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYaczoJMRhs — does fairly well and why it works. And I think real characters will sell far better in a sea of vapid, cardboard cutouts if we give them a chance.
But, if we just make more two-dimensional characters, it doesn’t matter if the females are strong and don’t have/need/use looks. I think we’re just going to have a different problem.
It is not the kind of conversation I am comfortable having on my blog (personally). I am not opposed to others choosing to engage in that kind of discussion on my blog as long as it’s kept polite (and it always is).
I have never once enjoyed this kind of point-counterpoint philosophical discussion, and you are well out of my league when it comes to practice in debating. No offense meant, I just don’t want to get into it.
Fair enough and no offense taken.
I thought about this all weekend. For me, as a non-writer who feels no responsibility about characters I create, I tend to look at the issue from two persepctives.
One is the Charles Barkley perspective. As an author, it is not your job to be a role model. It is your job to be true to yourself and write a story. If others want to idolize you, that is on them, not you. But for you, the role of women is important, and so being true to yourself would mean construction strong, admirable women in your stories. So, more power to ya, sister!!
The other thought that I have is that I am not sure I agree there is an issue. I think that attention is given to the flat, vapid, easily dissected characters. But, honestly, I think that literature is full of wonderful role models for women. (I cannot honestly comment on other media, because unless it is the Simpsons, I have little knowledge of tv, movies, comics, or games.) As I dusted off some shelves this weekend, I tumbled across lots of children’s books that have wonderful female characters, from moms, and girls to tooth fairies and factory workers. And the YA books that fill my shelves have lots of strong, sensible, realistic girls and women protrayed in them. But these books don’t get as widely read as the Twilight series.
The reality is that some girls really identify with the Twilight series. (ahem…I know lots of middle aged women who loved that series as well, because they identified with it.) But not all girls do. And those girls do want someone who can write a character that they love, that inspires them and gives them an ideal to reach. And so, yes, YOU should absolutely write those women. Because someone needs you to.
<3
[...] friend, Tami, was having a great discussion on the The Myth of Strong Female Characters. It’s a great read, you should check it out. Don’t worry, I’ll [...]
Have you read any of the Wheel of Time? I know there is a faction of people out there who think Jordan is sexist because of the way he portrays the relationships of men and women, but there is no denying the strength of his female characters.
In fact, I’d argue the story arc of Moiraine and Siuan are pivotal to the salvation of the world in which they live. They make what can be considered ultimate sacrifices in order for the Dragon to meet his destiny. Sure, you can argue that strong women aren’t supposed to have to only support strong men, but they do as all of our stories are eventually linked.
Then there is Egwene…that’s all that needs said for any fan of the Wheel of Time.
The women who have been empowered for 3k years have made many mistakes as anyone in power does, but they are able to keep the world forever at the ready for the last battle, and that kind of strength shouldn’t be taken lightly.
There are petulant females and males in the story, but Jordan’s portrayal of his strongest women are vastly superior to his male heroes.
Actually, I tried to read the first book and just couldn’t get into it. I have plenty of friends who are horrified to hear I’m not a fan of Wheel of Time. ^_^