I love reading. 2020 is the second year I have endeavored to accomplish the ambitious challenge to read a hundred books. 2019 I managed to read even more than that (only bragging a little).
Safe to say I enjoy reading a lot. Historically, I especially enjoyed works of fiction. I love to dive deep into different worlds where good things happen to good people and bad thing to the “baddies”. Its just a nice change from the real world and in my opinion a good dose of escapism (read more on escapism as a form of self-care in my published article in The Psychologist “Watching cartoons as self-care“).
Recently however, I have been increasingly drawn to works of non-fiction. Not because I finally consider myself grown-up enough to read books that actually teach me something about the real world, but also because I am in crisis with fiction.
Let me explain: I enjoy all kinds of fiction, but in particular crime and romantic novels. The problem with the latter is however that I have increasingly gotten annoyed by the mostly flat female characters. Extraordinarily womanly cis-women who are extremely good-looking and talented, but for inexplicable reasons have no idea that they are. This is of course something that they have to be informed about by, you guessed it, a man.
This man is then going to describe them in the way that has been noted in the media, which often involves the adjectives “pretty, funny and smart”. Lucy Huber summed this phenomenon up nicely in a tweet saying “Men writing women characters: She was beautiful but didn’t know it. She was 5’7 and 101 pounds. Her feet were size 3. Her hat size was Infant. She’d never thrown up, even once. Her periods lasted 45 minutes. Her top was see-through.”
The tweet pointedly captures the essence of what makes me dread female (often main!) characters in fiction: Women are displayed as blue-eyed and child-like, often sexually in-experienced and generally meek.
I bristle at the injustice of their tales that often involve a minor misunderstanding between the lead female and male character, and could be easily solved within a few minutes of actual communication. I also don’t understand the helplessness of the female characters. How is it possible that a grown-up character made it into adulthood without acquiring at least some back bone and street-wit?
Finally, it is beyond me why they always fall for that arrogant man who treats them like dirt, because of aforementioned misunderstanding and then sweeps them off their feet in an passionate, yet coincidental, encounter. I would love to, for once, read a story in which the female lead is having none of it. I want to see her confront the idiotic male lead and live happily ever after without the restraining confines of a household to run and the 5 children, the male and female lead will have after they marry.
Can you recommend any works of fiction that fit my description?
Photo by bantersnaps on Unsplash
Margaretha Madoures 