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[ ... ]
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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