Why Should The Boys Have All The Fun?
Undercover Thief
I love a good adventure story, always have and always will. There is nothing more exciting than being hooked to a page, with your mind in a far-flung location experiencing all the thrill and brilliance that this world, or even a new one, has to offer. The best part is you can have it all from the convenience from your very snuggly (and safe) couch.
My other hobby as a hyperactive child was martial arts. As such all my free time was spent flitting between the library and the local dojo. However, growing up glued to books as I was, I couldn’t help but notice a small sticking point that niggled at the back of my mind.
Where were all my kick-ass ladies?
So being the utter nerd that I am, I did some research, and what I found was quite interesting.
A historic gender divide has persisted amongst adventure fiction. Although it has narrowed with time, its remnants are still tangible, perhaps most clearly when comparing the crime and thriller genres. Perhaps at the conception of these genres, in a time where gender experiences and expectations were so drastically different, such a division could be explained or even expected.
If you believe the stories one of the earliest thrillers, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers published in 1903, didn’t have a single female character in it until the publisher insisted a female be added to the mix. After that we had to wait until 1978 for Ken Follett’s best-selling thriller, The Eye of the Needle, for the arrival of the first female protagonist.
Again, this can be explained away. During Thriller’s early years, the first half of the nineteen-hundreds, a majority of readers were men. To capitalise on their male audience, these novels would often idealize traditionally masculine traits, such as strength and bravery in the face of ever mounting threats, often culminating in the ever-cathartic bloodshed and violence.
However, we are no longer living in the previous century. This division, although a facet of it’s time, belongs as a vestige of the past. We are no longer separated so absolutely by our X and Y chromosomes. Traits that were once exclusively male are now exemplified and celebrated in women across the globe. In a modern world, where the genders are steadily working towards true equality, it’s a crying shame that our literature, is struggling to keep up.
Women of today are physically strong as well as being fiercely intelligent. With the right training a woman is perfectly capable of holding her own against a male opponent. The same is true in reverse, a male who’s never thrown a punch would naturally be hesitant when going up against a female martial arts champion (of which I’m not but a girl can dream).
The truth of the matter is that most fiction of any variety, although particularly thriller and adventure novels, are read by women. You could spend an age dissecting the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ of this change, but thriller novels are no longer solely a man’s world. The ladies are here, money in hand, ready for a kick-butt adventure.
Brilliantly, women are more than willing to answer their own demand. Now female authors write nearly half both the Crime and Thriller books on the market. We now have a fantastic selection of physically skilled and aware women ready to go to battle on our pages, and I absolutely love it.
I am sure we can expect to more, capable female protagonists ready to kick butt in books to come, and I’m 100% here for it.