one the one hand, part of it is it’s simply because this society had more men doing the creative work during our cultural formation periods that you see so few female protagonists: writing believably of the opposite sex is hard at best, so the path of least resistance is the predominantly male protagonist. this gets compounded over the years as lazy writers of male characters have many more tropes to fall back on.

the imbecile media suit sees this state of affairs and makes a pronouncement like the one above, though, because he has that fundamental inability to understand cause and effect that seems to come part and parcel with a business degree nowadays.

put together, laziness and stupidity form a barrier to any sort of change. the only way to fix it is to start making enormous cash in a way the suits haven’t thought of before, and they will then all imitate you.

As to novels, it’s possible that novels featuring females tend to be less well-received because of societal patterns putting women into a shallower category. Other cultures are fully capable of writing novels featuring women, such as Russia (Anna Karinina by Tolstoy, and many of Dostoyevsky’s books feature strong, dominant female characters) and England (Jane Austen is classic).

Many modern novels are trashy attempts to emulate Hollywood films regardless of their main protagonist, so the gender is only coincidental unless it’s a heavily masculinity/femininity-dominated book.

But on the topic of BL, I find it interesting that there is a rapidly growing fanbase of women (at least in Japan, whose popular culture I know better) are drawn to and relate better to characters in a genre of fiction without women. I think it’s generally the ones who feel more restricted by gender who like this sort of fiction, because they tend to be more interested in power dynamics, which can be explored in an all-male genre WITHOUT having to touch upon gender issues and its associated baggage. It also makes me sad, though, that the female character has to be removed rather than redefined.

Absolutely–its the role that sexism and homophobia play in forming socially appropriate heterosexual masculine identities. It’s so confining! Women (TY feminism!) have been able to “break out” of many of the confines of traditional femininity (with exceptions and limitations, of course), but “hegemonic masculinity,” defined by what it is not (feminine/gay), persists.

This kind of reminds me about how kids try to avoid anything that’s “too babyish,” so people will think they’re more mature.

At some point in the process of growing up, that attitude is supposed to be grown out of – the person is supposed to be confident enough in themselves that whether they enjoy something matters more than the category into which it’s placed or the audience it was intended for. But guys just aren’t encouraged to give up the idea that they themselves are somehow defined by those categories, particularly where “feminine” things are concerned (though it can be seen in other ways, as well).

This is probably partly a confidence thing, and partly the fact that – since the attitude is shared by other guys as well – it’s actually seen by their peers as a legitimate standard by which to judge others. In that sense, there would be a stigma against anything judged to be aimed at women, whether they’re women’s stories, or works in traditionally “male” genres that unabashedly seek female attention.

And then there’s the separate issue of people having preconceived notions of what a genre is like, and avoiding it because they genuinely think that they won’t enjoy any work that contains the negative elements they attribute to the genre (rather than because enjoying it would imply anything in particular about themselves), which is probably something that’s impossible not to do. Fortunately, that type can usually be convinced to give something a chance if they’re shown that the elements they dislike won’t be there.

That was my feeling at least.

Can you imagine if the scene where the King is looking out the window with his bare ass in the shadows, and we saw him when he turned around, and DIDN’T see any female nudity during the sex scene?

Heterosexual men are uncomfortable as it is with male nudity (much less in the absence of female nudity and especially with the way the men look in the rest of the film!), in part because they’re used to the target audience being THEM–and this gets back better to the thread topic.

The vast numbers of men who flocked to the Alien series and watched Sarah Connor kick ass and watched Buffy, sometimes on the sly, were “exceptions.” Or it was really the spaceship/Arnold/something else they were enjoying so much they’d put up with the unwanted female in the story’s midst.

So what’s their explanation for men who didn’t want to watch Terminator 3 without Sarah Connor?

A number of film professionals over the years explained it to me this way: young men prefer to picture themselves as the protagonists

Putting that together with this – When men sit down to watch TV or a movie, they’re more likely to be frustrated by real life problems they can’t solve – could easily be seen as drawing men to heroines over heroes. Female characters have been allowed to be Noble Woobies for longer than men have. Horror is meant to be scary and horror heroines are made more scared, thrillers are meant to pressure-cooking, and thriller heroines are made more pressured.

And if you’re not watching to escape from the idea of problems, you’re likely to want to empathise with characters who find their problems as burdensome as you do yours. And when heroines tend to be written as more burdened and hurt by their problems than heroes are, that makes them easier to identify with; and when they overcome anyway, that offers a sense of fulfilled aspiration that a superman never can.

And the same kind of escapism might draw men to identify with rescued heroines, out of a desire to give up “manly stoicism” and get saved.

Women on the other hand are expected to aspire to being as described in the previous paragraph – and are unsurprisingly not satisfied with it – When women sit down to watch, we’re more likely to be frustrated by problems we could fix but aren’t allowed to. Which may draw women to characters in a position to know what needs doing and do it – and in Hollywood, those tend to be men, and thus used to prove that women also want to see heroes rather than heroines (while neither of the other hypotheticals are used to prove that men want to see heroines).

And then of course there will be viewers of both sexes who want to watch characters of their sex being an exemplar of what’s demanded of it.

But really I suspect most viewers have all that going on inside them, and so want a variety of characters – wider than any of them are being credited with wanting.

Bellatrys – “noble woobie”? C’mon, we gotta come up with a better term than that! These are awesome characters, and they deserve a cool name, LOL.

But on a more serious note… human beings who really truly never lose control, even in private, are sociopaths (technically, Anti-Social or Narcissistic Personality Disorder cases). So in addition to the Noble Woobie – the man who has a full range of human feelings and is not so concerned about someone seeing him lose it occasionally – we’re starting to see a revised version of our old leading men. Take James Bond – the Craig version is still frighteningly functional, driven and competent as any other Bond, but we get glimpses of real feelings from him once in a while, so we know for sure he’s a tightly wound Type A personality rather than someone who actually doesn’t have feelings.

This is a really interesting change to track, because it means Hollywood is changing its thinking somewhere. Traditionally, they believed males don’t want to see feelings on screen, only females do. So either they’re courting the female audience with these glimpses of emotion which males aren’t nearly as turned off by as they once feared, and/or they’re thinking men actually want to glimpse humanity in their heroes.