My hero?
There’s a great post today on Guys Lit Wire, a blog about books for boys. Do teenage boys need books with weak female characters? links to a YouTube discussion where two older males bemoan that boys can’t be heroes any more. In praising a new title, Nick of Time by Ted Bell, the speakers make a point of saying how great it is that the female characters are passive so that the boys can rescue them.
This discussion is rebutted confidently by ‘Colleen’:
‘There are a couple of things that bother me about this discussion (between two adult men without a teenager in sight by the way). First it is that for a boy to feel heroic he must rescue a girl - and the girl also needs to be rescued. I’m sure the sociologists would have a field day over all this but I can’t believe that anyone in the 21st century would believe that such antiquated notions of what it means to be a hero have any place in a worthwhile discussion. Save the world - yes! Save the animals, save the environment, save whatever needs saving in your books. But the girl MUST be saved by the boy for the boy to feel powerful? How do these gentlemen think it makes the girl feel to have to wait to be saved? Have they ever thought about that at all?’
Colleen also provides a ‘top of the head’ list of titles where boys are both strong and heroic.
It’s a terrific discussion for a boys’ lit blog, with plenty of comments coming in.
