Calling all women

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

I still think that a classroom of bright female students, when given a syllabus such as Professor Hedgethistle has apparently organised, will at some point decide to have a bit of sport with the curriculum. Unless of course our esteemed BarrowDowns "pullster" is indeed pulling our legs.

A bit of sport indeed...

To report back: we had a look at Peter Pan and it did much better than TI. The students liked it in part because there were women (girls) in it, which gave me the opening I needed to address these issues head on. I asked them about the roles accorded the women/girls in PP and let the book do the rest: mothers, wives, hangers-on, dependents etc. They pretty quickly began to think how unhappy it was to be a woman or girl in that world. And then they began to confront Peter himself and far from finding him a charming boy, they thought him selfish, cruel, and idiotic. Some even began to think more favourably of Jim Hawkins who at least grew up a bit in the course of the story.

And that's when I sprang! I pointed out how pleasant it had been in TI to see a boy become a man not through the sexual or romantic dominance of a woman/girl. Jim doesn't assert his manhood by becoming powerful over a woman, which is the opposite of Peter, of course, who is doomed to remain a boy forever because he refuses sex/romance. The women began to think how much better it is to have a boy mature who is not dependent for that upon asserting himself over and above women.

And so I have cunningly laid the ground work for The Hobbit, in which we have a male story of male growth that once again is not about the conquest of the female. In fact, in a lot of ways its very much about a male adventure of male growth that leads toward the female (his home/womb/domestic space beneath the earth at the end).

Of course, this all goes only for those few students who had both done all the reading (about half of them) and thought it through carefully (about half of those) -- thankfully, that one quarter did a lot of good stuff for the benefit of the rest.
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[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Bethberry

On the other hand, and not to disparage your experience (I wasn't aware you are a teacher, Lal, or had taught at any rate), the research and the writing I have seen does not suggest that female students write "idealised men/boys" with they write from a male POV (at least in North America). Far from it.

The keyword is that I was a teacher, and I'm not alone on the 'Downs... Bear in mind that I taught teenagers, so the creation of idealised male characters was perhaps not so surprising; girls develop an interest in the opposite sex much sooner and go through the 'idealising' stage much earlier. Though the Byronic figure can linger in the female imagination for many years!

Originally Posted by Lalaith

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.

I have a rather bizarre example of a female centred TV show, set in an enclosed environment which was almost entirely about the women's relationships with one another - the defunct Australian soap Prisoner Cell Block H ! I remember this achieved a high level of cult popularity when I was a student and the blokes all loved it, despite it being an unremittingly grim look at life in a women's prison (with no dolly birds )! It would begin with them laughing at a certain character with an unfortunate nickname and then they'd be hooked on it, presumably because they enjoyed the tales of the women's lives.

[The Saucepan Man]

Getting a bit off topic, I know, but a great example of a female centred television show was the classic 1980s BBC drama, Tenko. It was set in a Japanese PoW camp for women in World War Two (following the fall of Singapore). Although there were male characters, primarily the Japanese prison guards, the storylines was centred on the female prisoners. I was in my early teens when the three series were first shown (1981-1984), and I was hooked.

[Mister Underhill]

Originally Posted by Lal

There are still not that many 'Ripley' figures about though...

Funny, I would have said that "girl power" is stronger than ever these days. Between Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sydney of Alias, Elektra, The Bride of Kill Bill (and all her female antagonists), Jessica Alba in Dark Angel, Alice of Resident Evil and Lara Croft the Tomb Raider, Charlize Theron in the upcoming Aeon Flux, and the soon-to-the-big-screen Wonder Woman, women are kicking butt in record numbers these days. A couple are even complex, fully developed characters.

Now I'm pretty sure that all these characters, including Ripley, were created by men; what that tells us, I don't know.

Also, Ripley did have a love interest, at least in her most iconic appearance in Aliens. Corporal Hicks teaches her how to fire a rifle and then spends the third act passed out on a stretcher.

[Firefoot]

When high school students write poetry, a fair percentage of the female students can write from a male POV, creating a poem whose speaker is a male, imagining his character and getting into his POV. However, teachers report that male students almost never write poems with a female speaker or create/imagine female characters.

A good point. I've had some experience with this in the form of my brother - he finds it extremely strange that I should play male characters in RPG's.

You can argue till your blue in the face about what an author meant by something, but first and foremost should be a good story.

I agree one hundred percent. Of the books I do not read for school, I do not consider the author's intent in writing the book in very many of them. I might think about a book, especially a very good one, but that isn't my goal of reading - I read for enjoyment. If I don't enjoy a book, I will not finish it (prime example: Jane Eyre. Couldn't stand it). And that enjoyment comes primarily from the plot. I hate having to slog through books (*coughGreatExpectationscough*). In my leisure books I rarely go any deeper analytically than plot level.

[Lalaith]

Are we going to sit back and demand that men write books about women?

In the old days, they used to, Fea....there's Hardy, with Tess of the d'Urbervilles. There's one of the (sorry - just my POV) worst books about women ever written, Women in Love by the ghastly DH Lawrence, and in contrast, one of the best novels ever written about a woman, Anna Karenina.

I wonder, incidently, if men are more likely to read Anna Karenina (because it was written by a man) than Jane Eyre? Should Charlotte Bronte have stuck to her original plan and remained Currer Bell?