Akkana Peck wrote:
Bernhard Krieger writes:
Very often women in this genre of literature do simply not
appear in the stories at all. Or if they do, they get roles and
positions so distinct of the male heroes. I am not at all an expert on
[ ... ]
<snip>
As to how this affects girls growing up, I couldn't say. I was a
"tomboy" (more interested in climbing trees than playing with dolls)
and if a story featured male characters doing all the fun stuff, I
just went ahead and identified with those characters. It never crossed
my mind that being female meant that I should only identify with only
female characters. I know a lot of girls aren't like that and good
female role models are important; but for me it wasn't an issue.
...Akkana
I was/am definitely a tomboy and I also identify mostly with the male
characters (I read a lot of fantasy and SF). I used to identify the
typical female characters as being inherently more boring and weak which
made me spend a lot of my childhood wishing I could have been a boy
instead :-/
It took a long time before I understood that this was the fault of those
particular writers and not an accurate picture of women in real life. So
I'd say that good female rolemodels are very important, to teach young
girls that they are allowed to be strong and do fun stuff. I'm getting
back at the stereotypical gender roles in my favourite genres by playing
strong female characters in tabletop roleplaying games.
This is my first post to the list so here's a quick introduction: I am a
Swedish computer engineer who spends some of her work time
administrating servers running Sarge. I haven't done any open source
development but hope to do so in the future. Hi everyone! <waves>
/Mirjam
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