When I was very young, I wanted to be a boy. In all the books I read and all the films I watched, boys had such interesting lives, much better than girls. They had adventures, they fought, they changed the world, they protected their beloved. And the girls? Well. They mostly stayed loved and protected, while watching the boys do all those fantastic things.
Now don't get me wrong. I adore a male hero loving and protecting his girl; anybody who's read any of my books will have no doubts about it. But why couldn't those girls from my childhood literature have some adventures, too? It was so unfair. (Here I have to pay homage to great Astrid Lindgren and her unforgettable Pippi, who saved my self-esteem and helped me make peace with my gender.)
When my oldest daughter was little, something started to change. We both watched Mulan a hundred times, and stories with enterprising, spiny, smart heroines popped up on bookstore shelves and on the cinema and TV screens one after another. But they all still carried this note of amazement: look, a girl, and she did THAT! Which basically meant it wasn't normal, nor really recommended for ordinary girls to be so... unfeminine?
But in the following years, girls and young women grabbed at pens and keyboards themselves, en masse, and started creating their own stories with kick-ass heroines, rebel heroines, genius-girl heroines etc. And now the youngest generation reads these books and treats them already as the classic canon. Isn't it marvelous?
I have no illusions. There are still enormous areas of our globe where girls are discouraged or even forbidden from having their own life and their own opinions. Gender discrimination happens on everyday basis even in the developed, allegedly modern societies. But.
All these young girls of today who read their favorite books, and OF COURSE a girl is the protagonist. OF COURSE she has adventures and saves the world, and protects the weak. She decides her own fate, OF COURSE, and becomes the spaceship captain, or the school math champion, or the top sword master, whatever the genre dictates.
Oh, how I love this OF COURSE.
