Calling all women

[Lalaith]

I don't care about that, I just want to see the car chase.

Of course, but it would be nice if there were girls doing the driving for a change, rather than squealing in the backseat.

Going back to a point I made earlier, the interesting and unusual thing about Ripley is not that she is a strong female lead character, but that she is one without a "love interest". (At least, if she did have one it was so peripheral that I've forgotten about it.) It is very hard indeed to think of a female heroine who doesn't have some kind of love story attached to her, because women in film and fiction are generally portrayed in the context of their relationship to men.

The reason why we have so many "boys books" like the Hobbit, which don't feature women at all, is that it is easy to imagine men doing exciting interesting things worthy of being written about, entirely independent of women: wars, adventures, and so on.

"Girls books" (other than the school books I mentioned earlier) always have boys in them, because women on their own are not seen as having particularly interesting lives. Single-sex female environments are always 'enclosed' - convents, schools, harems, prisons. When such environments are portrayed in film or literature, it is usually related to a male influence/intruder and the women's reaction to this.