{"id":12910,"date":"2016-08-10T21:19:29","date_gmt":"2016-08-11T01:19:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/?p=12910"},"modified":"2016-08-10T21:19:29","modified_gmt":"2016-08-11T01:19:29","slug":"female-protagonists-and-the-lack-thereof-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/archives\/12910","title":{"rendered":"Female Protagonists and the Lack Thereof (or Not)"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I was pointed to this article on the lack of female protaginists<\/a> (more specifically in childrens and YA lit) by NeuronDoc.<\/p>\n

I was name-checked in the discussion by Shawn, because I read and recommend a lot of books with female protagonists (especially YA<\/a>).<\/p>\n

So I decided to put my own reading habits to the test. I went through the books I’ve read since Jan 2015 (6) and looked at whether the protagonist of the story was male or female.<\/p>\n

However, I’ve been reading a not insignificant amount of historical romance, so to be fair, I did not count romance books in this tally. (5)<\/p>\n

I divided the books into three categories: books with male protagonists, books with female protagonists, and books where the narrative is split between male and female characters (this also concludes short story anthologies).<\/p>\n

In the year and a half, I read 199 books that were not romances and here’s how the main characters fell out.<\/p>\n

Male: 43% (86)
\nFemale: 46% (91)
\nSplit: 11% (22)<\/p>\n

Now here is where it gets interesting. As you may well know, I track the gender of the authors of the books. So here’s the gender of the authors I’ve read since Jan 2015. (4)<\/p>\n

Male: 23% (57)
\nFemale: 70% (173)<\/p>\n

But you excluded romance! That must account for it!<\/p>\n

Nope.<\/p>\n

Fantasy 34% (114)
\nMystery 33% (112)
\nRomance 18% (59)
\nYA 7% (25)
\nComic 4% (15)
\nAnthology 3% (9)<\/p>\n

Do I purposely choose authors because they are female? Not really. In fact, 6% of those female authors are writing under a male pseudonym or initials. (To be honest, that’s the real reason I started tracking author sex, because I was curious as to the number of women writing under male pseudonyms.)<\/p>\n

It just happens that I tend to prefer female characters and the writing of female authors. Not heavily, after all, some years I read more male authors than female (like when I re-read the Spenser<\/a> mysteries) (3). But in general, I prefer strong female characters, and the male authors I love tend to write strong female characters (See: Charles de Lint<\/a>)<\/p>\n

What does this mean? Not a whole lot, unless you’ve been listening to people who claim there aren’t any good female authors out there. (2)<\/p>\n

I suppose my point is that I could–theoretically–subsist solely upon female authors of I so chose and not feel deprived of quality writing.<\/p>\n

But why would I want to? I like reading about male AND female protagonists AND books where the narrative is split between the male and female characters. Because I like reading a variety of viewpoints. (1) But a variety is not a 30\/70 split in favor of one gender or the other. <\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

(6) I could have gone back further, but I got bored.
\n(5) Solely because I wanted to head of claims that my numbers are biased, since romance is dominated by female authors.
\n(4) For those curious, since 2004 (when I started keeping track) I’ve read 42% male to 50% female authors.
\n(3) I’m a sucker for private detective mysteries, unless the detective is a sexist pig. Then not so much.
\n(2) This may be a genre issue–at least that’s where I’ve read the complaints.
\n(1) See also my current love of Daniel Jose Older<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I was pointed to this article on the lack of female protaginists (more specifically in childrens and YA lit) by NeuronDoc. I was name-checked in the discussion by Shawn, because I read and recommend a lot of books with female protagonists (especially YA). So I decided to put my own reading habits to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reading"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pefxA-3me","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12910\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}