Are female protagonists over done or just difficult to write?

But none of these things are dramatic enough to make a character of either sex unlikely. No one is going to say, "That woman is focusing on a task and resisting interruptions! That man is shifting between tasks! That man REMEMBERED A SONG?! NO! NO! That's totally unrealistic!"

I just don't see how they're at all useful in creating a character. Now, if YOU find them useful, that's fine; you can use whatever you want. But I've never seen the advice, "Now, whatever you do, NEVER create a character that isn't statistically average in every attribute." So I just don't see the relevance.

 

I, for one, would love to read a story with an albino, hermaphroditic, left-handed, polyglot, little person with Tourette's. He/she sounds like an interesting character indeed. Though I'd imagine s/he'd be interesting in the context of the story, not just who he/she is and what he/she looks like.

 

Great, now you've got me imagining my albino female Boss from Saints Row. The 'Glorious Ass-Kicker' I like to call her.

Dammit, now I want to boot up Saints Row 2.

 

Lucas didn't try to imply that Chewie is realistic.

There's all kinds of ways to make a character realistic and interesting. In fact, realistic helps build tension (because the reader will better understand the character) which helps make characters interesting.

 

Heheh, in my fantasy novel about two characters from a non-human race, the traditional gender roles is that females are usually more aggressive and males passive (quite passive actually). Although so far my beta readers have commented that they don't like the male MC because they consider him too passive/weakly (which has gotten me to thinking of shifting the focus of the narrative to the female MC who is a much stronger (mentally and physically) character).

 

In humans, females are more likely than males to be violent towards children, the elderly, other women, and non-violent males. source

 

But what does that tell you about an individual female protagonist?

Fuck all, that's what.

If you have her randomly attacking children and old, defenceless people, your readers are not going to think "that is so realistic, I read all about that in The Journal of Family Violence in 1993!" They're going to think "What the hell? Why is she attacking this person? She's supposed to be a protagonist? Ugh. Let's look for another book." She either needs a realistic motivation to be attacking people, which is sod all to do with her gender, or she doesn't do it at all.

Sitting down and saying "what does science say women are more likely to do than men?" and building a character based on that is going to give you someone so far from realistic that nobody is going to relate to her.

 

The place at which to start is "what does my experience tell me is realistic/believable?" Then, realize that our experience falls into two different categories; tacit and explicit. Explicit experience is what we can readily talk about. Tacit experience is what we recall more as a gut feeling. We can use science to turn tacit experience into explicit experience (for example, "I never noticed that, but now that I've read that scientific research, it makes a lot of sense"). We can also use science to help us escape political muckraking (for example, "I know everybody is saying men are more violent in the home, but that's not my experience and now I'm vindicated with this new research").
Science helps turn tacit experience into explicit experience and have more confidence in our experience. So, when we read about a character, that part of our brain which is asking, "do I trust this book enough to suspend my disbelief?" is getting reassurances from that part of the brain which is saying "based on my experience, this character is believable."

 

Public vs domestic domaines? Do you know how they defined said violence?

Male violence apologetics looks to equate violence that doesn't actually inflict injury with violence that does. A woman yelling, hitting and throwing an object is equated with a man beating the crap out of his girlfriend or wife. Slamming a door is counted as violence equal to kicking a door in to get to the female on the other side.

There is an important aspect to female violence which is, when physical violence escalates in a domestic dispute, especially when alcohol is involved, more often than not the female is involved in the escalation. From the aspect of intervention, it is an important factor. But one has to be careful not to blame the victim of a vicious beating because she cursed or threw a plate at the perpetrator.

The bottom line is, morbidity and mortality statistics is an objective measure which shows very clearly that female violence is not equal to male violence. It's similar to comparing statutory rape between consenting teens to forcible rape, or kidnapping in a custody dispute to stranger kidnapping. Giving the same label to disparate things does not make those things equal.

 

I repeat: what does that tell you about an individual female protagonist?

Fuck all.

 

Because it is. A woman hitting a man with a thrown hammer, steam iron, pewter (or similar) table ornament, skillet, etc. is beating the crap out of the man. But, it doesn't even have to be heavy. A tactic mentioned is throwing boiling water in the victim's face. Sure, it doesn't count as "beating the crap out of" the victim (though that might come next), but the damage is just as significant.

No, its not. Morbidity and mortality statistics are a windsock telling us how the political winds are blowing (because the same act can be described in multiple ways based on unspoken politically-based motivations). A defender may well harm the one attacking them. I'm trained (a couple of decades of training in a lot of different martial arts), so I know how to do it consistently when I want to, but I'm also very aware of how easy it is for the defender to harm the attacker by total accident.

Anyway, if you care to learn more, here's an article from Time magazine that references the source I posted earlier.

 

How well an author grasps the biological and cultural differences between men and women determines the believability of that character.
"what does that tell you about an individual female protagonist?" How believable she is as a female character.

 

You maybe didn't notice I'm very familiar with the subject. I've looked at the studies themselves. A Time Magazine article is not going to add to what I've already read.

This is off topic so I'm not going to argue with you. Do you know what morbidity and mortality statistics are? There's nothing political about ED and death statistics. I'm pretty sure there's only one way to record a homicide.

If anything is political it's trying to equate female violence to male violence. A number of men's rights groups would like to do just that for example, promoting tax dollars to be equally invested in things like men's shelters for domestic violence threats.

Bottom line, believe what you want to.

 

No. How well the author understands people in general helps to determine the believability of the character. Biological and cultural differences between men and women isn't the overriding factor that you seem to feel that it is.

 

Do you really need biology, science, or psychology to figure out why a female friend/sister/mother does what she does? Maybe if you were a psychologist then I could understand all the profound digging. But for the average person? Shouldn't listening to them, watching them, seeing them operate in relationships give you enough details to understand why they do what they do.
Same goes for characters - build enough details and how they react will not only be believable but create an understanding with your reader. They'll get it.

 

I haven't read most of the posts - but I'll take a crack at the original question.

I don't think female protagonists are overdone - females are roughly half of the human race and as such should take up about half of the total population of protagonists.

Whether they're easier or harder to write depends on the author (and not just on their gender - I'm a dude and I write strictly female protagonists...for no reason other than because they're easier for me to write).

The industry right now is working to correct a historical imbalance in this respect, and so I do think there more demand for female protagonists at the agent/publisher level (at least based on my unscientific stalking following a number of agents and publishers on Twitter). This is part of a larger demand for more diverse fiction in general - not just with regard to gender but also ethnicity and sexuality. But that doesn't mean you have to write one. A good story is a good story and plenty of stories are being published with male protags.

That said, because of this increased demand - and people writing to it - there are a few tropes that seem to be emerging, and like all tropes they can be grating if overdone. For me, these include the sterotypical "strong feminist woman" action hero who has all the same problems as the stereotypical male action hero. Then there's the "let's make the otherwise-straight female protagonist bisexual so we check the LGBT box" trick - thus allowing the author to basically write a book about a straight girl who just happens to have sex with other women every now and then as fanservice (to male readers). Also, there's the "check all your diversity boxes in one protagonist" problem - which can work...I'm reading a book now with a bisexual Hispanic female protagonist - but I think that might get to the level where it becomes a trope in that people feel compelled to do it rather than it occurring naturally.

So like everything - do what you like and try to be original. I like my female protag a lot because she's purposefully modeled on the "plucky, young, inexperienced girl" archetype who often shows up as a side character in ensemble casts - almost always short and with dark hair by the way. Elevating that person to the level of heroine is what makes it fun for me.

 

You should have noticed that I already provided a link to a peer-reviewed journal article.

Yes there are. I don't know what your education in this topic is, I took several medical anthropology graduate classes. We, apparently, weren't taught the same thing. In my classes, we covered cultural epistemology, the embodied self, and Haraway's idea of the human body as cyborg. Not only are human bodies labelled and those labels under conflict, but so too, is sickness and death.

When a person dies, the details of that death aren't always clear. We might say that a person was pushed and struck their head against something, but they may have been pushed by a person trying to defend themselves. Where morbidity and mortality statistics become politicized is in how, with all the data (or lack of it) surrounding the death, people come up with "just so" stories which coincide with their pre-existing metanarratives.

 

You posted a link to an abstract to which I replied: "Public vs domestic domaines? Do you know how they defined said violence?"

You can't seriously be claiming all the stats on male on female/female on male violence are slanted by political influence on the data?

 

I already told you that I'm talking about domestic violence.

With regards to definitions, they say,

Yes, I am saying that. I don't know why you find this so hard to believe. When feminism started, feminists were well aware of political influence on domestic violence data. We've seen this slant before (such as the metanarrative which says that women are far more likely to be raped).

 

Did you not even read your own citation? Those were the terms used in the abstract. They did not define the terms and it costs $39 to access the paper.

Like I said, they put slapping in the same category as murder.

When someone hits someone there is a certain amount of restraint. A person who would slap someone is not as violent as someone who would crack you over the head with a baseball bat.

Those studies equate restrained violence with unrestrained serious injury violence.

I don't find it hard to believe, I find it impossible to believe. I've been in health care for almost 40 years. I've seen the results of domestic violence and I know first hand the injuries are overwhelmingly male on female violence.

I also have a very good understanding of the argument you are making. I said as much but you seem to want to make men victims of all those awful slaps and slammed doors.

The evidence in the morgues and in the ED records beg to differ. You are conflating public health data collection with the misuse of statistics by people with political agendas.

Consider the men's rights groups pushing the women are just as violent agenda - that's a political distortion of the data.

The public health agencies responsible for most morbidity and mortality data collection are neutral. They are just reporting the data.

 

Justin, it seems to me that you're arguing against your own premise here. The stereotype is that men cause most of the violence in the home. You're saying that women also cause violence in the home. I doubt that you're saying that female violence is such an overwhelming majority that the very idea that a male character would ever be violent in the home is wildly, unthinkably unrealistic.

So if male OR female characters might commit domestic violence, that means that differences between the sexes don't determine what a character will do with regard to domestic violence. It comes down to the character, not the gender.

So you seem to be arguing on my side.

 

From the files of 'this is a no brainer':

Men, women, and murder: gender-specific differences in rates of fatal violence and victimization.

Gender differences in homicide in Contra Costa County, California: 1982-1993.

 

And is it your belief that in a culture which heavily ridicules male victims far worse than female victims, in which it wasn't even possible for men to be raped until 2013 (that's right, 2013, which means that, for the overwhelming majority of your 40 years of experience, no matter how violent, sick, and degrading the act a man endured, it wasn't counted as rape) - rape being perhaps the most heinous act of violence, where a slap is dismissed unless it is against a woman, .. is it your contention that in such a culture men are just as likely to report when they are victims of domestic violence as women are?

*before then, the FBI defined rape as the “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will"