Calling all Writers

I saw a video on Facebook yesterday.  The video was trying to sell books to parents with girl children.  The book was filled with biographies about women that succeeded and were scientists and were not recognized.  But the way they started the ad was great and the way they finished it was weak.  

The ad started with a parent and a little girl going through her bookshelf and removing all the books that did not have girls in them.  Next they went through and removed all the books that had a female character in them, but they did not speak.  Next they removed the books where females characters spoke only bit parts.  Next they removed the books about Princesses waiting to meet their Prince.  The bookcase was nearly empty. From there they could separate all the books that only had female characters and the ones that have strong equal characters; two small piles.  That was the strong, potent statement that the ad made.  It failed when they offered a book of one page biographies and called it a book of rebels.  Rebels, meaning what ever you want to mean when you say rebels.

But is it?  It is and it isn't.  There are a lot of books out there with strong female role models for girls.  A lot of the characters are animals, gendered animals but still role models for children.  This child and mother team pulling books from a shelf, may be pulling books from her shelf or they may be people pulling books from a shelf.  The girl, might have an older brother and those were his books first.  There is so much that there is not known from the ad.  And it IS an ad, the shelves might have been stacked to reflect the result that they wanted to show, or since we never saw the titles removed from the shelf, we don't know if this is a true reflection of the way things are.  So we don't know anything more from this ad than we knew coming in for sure.  

Just saw the movie, Hidden Figures, about the women of African descent behind the Space Program.  Three in particular.  Three women, 40 minutes apiece to tell their stories on film, for one or two years.  Really it is not the size of their contribution that should be emphasized—don't get me wrong, they were very important in the entire process, they contributed a lot.  They contributed a life's worth of things, maybe more than a life's worth of contributions.  They were Pioneers and they broke barriers and that was great, no IS great.  That is not the issue.  The issue is that we are only talking about them now.  

But, back to the original thought, the book these women are flouting, is not the solution for the problem that they say they are trying to address.  It is meant for children, this book, but it is a book of page long biographies.  What children want to read and be read to are stories.  Like the once that were removed from the child's bookshelf.  It is a fact that women read more than men.  Girls read sooner on average than boys and they read more than boys too.  The take away is that most books for children only have male characters or bit parts for girls; most books are written for boys.  Of the rest, most of those books are girls waiting for their life to be completed by a man, and that their life is incomplete without men.  Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Jasmine, Ariel and all the rest, waiting.  For the man and when he comes, they live happily eve after.  Except the Paper Bag Princess, she goes out and rescues her Prince, then when he is found wanting, she leaves him on the spot.  Do you see?  

When I grew up I was a reader, a late blooming reader, but when I got into it I was a determined reader and a stubborn reader.  But my reading experience was different from what a girls might have been, because I was not a girl.  My mother read to my sister every night while my father read the newspaper in the living room.  Great practice btw, it is called scaffolding, you tell your children what is important by showing them that it is important to you.  I digress.  Most of the Narnia series was a mix, but centered around male characters.  Lloyd Alexander's series was male centered.  Bridge of Tabathia, was a male narrator but a female central character.   The Druid's Tune, was two characters, brother and sister, with story that was more male centered with a mix of secondary characters.  The story was male centered to me as a boy.  Novels written before 1950 were almost all male centered.  Jules Verne, with Around the Moon and Back Again and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, no female characters.  Guliver's Travels, Robinson Caruso, Treasure Island, Call of the Wild, The Tales of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn all female void books.  Frankenstein.  War and Peace.  Shogun, was mostly about a man, it was a love story, but it was male perspective.  Lord of the Rings.  All of Tolkien.  Science Fiction mostly male centered.  Fantasy books, mostly male characters.  Even SciFi/Fantasy Written by women tends to be male centered, Robin Hobbs.  Star Trek.  Only one captain a woman and she is often said to be the worst one, not by me, I really liked Voyager.  Most women in Star Trek are sexualized to appeal to male viewers (tight fitting unitards fake boob enhancers)   The one problem I have with Roleplaying groups is the number of women involved, but is that really a surprise?  There is little appeal for most women in the genre, where women are absent or sexualized at best mostly.

I feel that it needs to change.  There have been women SciFi writers who have written strong Female characters and I read those, they are awesome.  There is even a SciFi series that is genderless and that is awesome too, written by Ann Leckie.  The pronoun used for every gender is female, so it feels that everyone is a woman and although you are trying to figure out our binary genders.  It was very interesting by-the-way.  Brandon Sanderson, I have noticed that he is good at making strong female characters, but there are more male characters.  

If I were to suggest an area for people to write in, I would suggest that they write about strong female characters who push against a male dominated society, who suffer, but knuckle down to succeed and when they succeed they are recognized.  Because we all have women in our lives and all our future women are going to be children first and we need them to feel they have a right to contribute in our society because they are needed.  Because they are half of the population and they are important.  They need to know that any role is possible for a woman, not just the ones that men want them to fill.  They can be the lead warrior with the magic sword that slays the dragon.  Ideally, they need to feel that they with their male friend are a team that can tackle any problem that is before them and at their ideas are just as important as the ideas of the man beside them, that they are equals, or that they could be equals.  

What the books our children read at all ages should reflect the place that we want our society to reflect.  Our boys need to see girls as equals and that they need to rely on them as leaders and contributors as often as they see them as helpers and wives.  And our girls need to see that there are Princes out there that at not for them and they don't need to settle for anyone.  The Paper Bag Princess saved her Prince from the dragon and then left him to find the Prince that would treat her as well as she deserved, when she found him wanting, maybe even another Princess.  Robert Munsch.