Here are the things I learned about being a woman from reading high fantasy:
- I should wear long dresses at all times, even when harvesting a field or birthing a pig (helping a pig give birth, not literally birthing a pig. I don't read those sorts of books)
- I will, at least once but probably more, need to be rescued by a man
- If I don't need to be rescued then I am probably one of those kind of women who wear leather corsets and knee-high boots
- I will be in love with one of the lead characters in my life. It will be either unrequited, leading me to do something silly which he then rescues me from (see above), or so passionate that he will do something silly in defence of me and need rescuing himself
My lead character is a woman who leads an army and rescues herself. This is not because I hate men, the partiarchy, and the fact that trageted advertising online keeps trying to sell me a pink i-Pad, but because I wanted to see if there was a reason for the male-centric focus of the fantasty genre.
Turns out there really isn't.
I hope I have wirtten a strong and interesting character who just happens to be female, rather than 'a strong female lead'. Similarly, it doesn't twist the human language too much to refer to her army as 'troops' instead of 'men'. In fact I only use gender-specific terms (witch, bitch etc.) as a form of insult, because really indicating that someone's gender is the only way of identifying them is an insult. In my novel there are no gender roles and the work people do is based on their abilities, not two of their chromosomes.
I've kept gender-specific pronouns though. I'm a fantasy writer, not a linguist with an inventive turn of mind.
I'd love to know who else is writing in this way in the fantasy and sci-fi genres? Or in any genre? Just think, if everyone did it then we could have twice as many interesting characters to read about!
