I have read two blog posts recently about how there are too many female protagonists in YA literature. That it is in fact “getting annoying” how many women there are in lead roles and how few male main characters there are. I was reminded that “you can write about male characters too”. One blogger pointed out that the reason was probably because all the writers are women and where are all the male authors?
(John Green, Ransom Riggs, Rick Riordan, Eoin Colfer, James Dashner, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman… sorry just the first names that came to mind when answering that question. I don’t think the male authors are in hiding. They seem to being doing pretty well for themselves, creating interesting and new content, making movies, writing best sellers...)
I am appalled. These are female bloggers. Women who are annoyed at how many female main characters there are in YA novels and how few men are taking the lead in the genre. These are women who want to see their sisters thrown back into the boring secondary character pool. The love interest, the sex object, the bitch, the cheerleader, the mean girl, the girl next door.
For so so long, there was no such thing as a female protagonist. For the longest time women weren’t even allowed to be published! Those who did, changed their names, or were considered less respectable for their chosen career. For so long, the few female characters we were given were two dimensional, weak, or love interests for the strapping male hero.
For the first time in a long time, we have strong, complex, interesting female characters who save the world, who lead the charge, who sit on the throne, who overthrow the government, who make the jokes, who save the guy. And the minute it happens, we are subjected to the complaint that there are too many. Too many strong women, too many interesting women, too many women who don’t need a man’s help, who don’t need to be saved.
JK Rowling was told to change her name because “boys don’t read books by female authors”. That was less than twenty years ago! Do you really want to tell the female writers seeing success today that you are sick of seeing their names in bookstores? That we need more men in a male dominated career?
We aren’t writing from a female perspective because it’s what “all the cool kids are doing”, we are writing women’s stories because they deserve to be told. Because we are sick of sitting at home and waiting for the hero to come back to us, waiting in the tower to be saved, waiting for the world to end with wrung hands and anxious brows.
These arguments are the same ones that fuel the anger that the new Ghostbusters movie is all women. Sure there can be women in the movie, but why did they ALL have to be women? Couldn't there have been one? Wouldn’t that have been enough representation?
No. Being the token woman is not enough to make up for years of being ignored or stereotyped or abused.
Fifteen years of successful female authors writing interesting female characters does not make up for the hundreds of years when their stories were considered second class.
The solution is not to move backwards, but to keep moving forward. Keep writing strong characters and make their gender the least exciting or important thing about them. Leave romance out of the quest to save the world. Turn the gender roles on their head, upside down, sideways, backwards. Read books by people different than you, read about people different than you. Write books about women that appeal to all people, write books about men that appeal to all people.
And in the meantime, let’s not forget to mention that diversity that we drastically need. LIke the fact that more than 95% of the main characters in novels in the last two years were white. That only 4% of characters were black, 1% were latino. When is the last time you read a book about someone who was less than what we consider “able-bodied”? There are so many stories to be told and we are stuck telling the same one over and over again and complaining at the perceived lack of white boys at the helm.
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