On role models, and what makes a hero.
Unless you’ve been marooned in a different dimension all this week, you’ll have heard about the casting of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor. The ripples of outrage among certain groups; the cries of triumph among others. It sparked a discussion on Twitter, which escalated gradually into a heated debate about male and female role models, during which a group of (mostly) men asked me repeatedly why girls couldn’t be satisfied with Wonder Woman, Cagney & Lacey, Minnie Mouse and Miss Marple, rather than trying to muscle in on the Dr Who clubhouse.
Well, it’s a fair question. Why do we need specifically female role models? My daughter spent her childhood playing at Harry Potter, wearing my old academic gown, liberally splashed with fake blood. I myself spent much of my own childhood pretending to be Kwai Chang Caine, or the Doctor (mine was Jon Pertwee), or Marine Boy, or the Six Million Dollar Man. It never occurred to either of us to feel that we were missing out on heroes of our own gender. But here’s the thing. Over the centuries, girls have become used to the fact that most of their favourite heroes are male. As a child, I wanted to be a boy, because boys seemed to get all the best parts in the stories I liked to read. My daughter was the same; after all, who wouldn’t rather be Harry than Ginny or Hermione?
Boys have no such problem. Even now, children of both sexes tend to assume that the lead role in any story will be taken by a boy. Boys have twelve Doctors of their own gender, but still manage to feel threatened when girls claim just one for themselves. Boys have hundreds of superheroes; detectives, action heroes, spies, wizards, knights and cool villains. And yes, girls do have those things too, but in far smaller numbers, and with the unspoken assumption that female heroes are somehow less interesting to boys than they would be to girls. Girls are happy to dress up as characters of both genders, from Captain America to James Bond, but how many little boys would dare to dress up as Wonder Woman?
Let’s face it: most little boys (with the help of the toy and game industry) find it easier to identify with a cartoon dog, or a robot, or an anthropomorphic car, or a two-headed alien, or a villain who wants to blow up the world than a female human being. Why? Because they’ve been taught from the earliest age that behaving like a girl is the most shameful thing a boy can do. If a boy cries, he’s being a girl. If he shows vulnerability, he’s being a girl. If he’s afraid, he’s being a girl. No boy wants to run like a girl, it means not being able to run properly. Same with fighting like a girl: it means not knowing how to fight. And by dint of being told that being like a girl means being silly, and weak, and afraid, those boys will grow up into men who look down on women, and who find it impossible to believe that a woman could be their equal in any way.
And yet, you could argue that this is precisely why little boys need female role models. Boys need female role models to teach them how to identify with women, rather than just see them in terms of attractiveness or unattractiveness. And there’s no reason that a boy shouldn’t be able to identify with a female character as easily as a male one – as long as that character displays qualities to aspire to.
Which brings us to the crux of the thing. What qualities make a hero?
Opinions differ, but most agree that courage is essential. And courage comes in many forms, none of which are restricted to a single gender. One man on Twitter, sneering at the thought that women could ever show real heroism, implied that giving birth was the closest a woman could get. Well, childbirth is certainly painful and hard, especially in those parts of the world in which women are more likely to die in childbirth than from any other cause; where women are forced into marriages at the age of twelve or thirteen, and forced to give birth time and time again. Yes, that takes courage. And so does enduring rape, or FGM, or war, or displacement, or the kind of oppression forced upon women in countries all around the world. But courage and heroism aren’t the same thing. The courage of the oppressed and downtrodden, though real, is not a courage young boys are encouraged to aspire to. It’s a passive kind of courage, a courage based on endurance, rather than action. And to dwell upon the courage of oppressed women is to feed into a narrative that says: women are weak, women are helpless, women need the protection of men. In short, it’s a narrative that casts the men as heroes, and the women as those in need of rescuing. Casting women as heroes challenges that narrative. It suggests that, in some cases, at least, women can be their own saviours – or even save men from oppression, instead of it being the other way round.
But the idea that courage, like Lego, comes in two colours – the passive, “feminine” courage of childbirth and bringing up kids on a shoestring, and the active, “masculine” heroism of going to war, driving fighter planes or risking your life working with power cables – is ultimately toxic, feeding the idea that men and women’s bodies and minds are radically different. They’re not: and courage, like human beings, is a complex and personal thing, spanning a whole spectrum of colours. Here are just a few of them, challenging the narratives of what makes a woman and what makes a man, but all of them showing courage:
The all-women Kurdish groups of soldiers fighting ISIS
The Nigerian girls, risking their lives to go to school in defiance of Boko Haram
Those who challenge the stigma of mental illness
Those who come out as gay or trans
Those who find the courage to leave their abusive partners
Those who stand up for their beliefs in the face of their peer group
Those who fight for justice against brutal or oppressive regimes
Those who fight to overcome fear, anxiety or depression
The aid workers and peacemakers who risk their lives in war zones
But action isn’t the only way to show courage. It is also:
That time you thought you couldn’t go on, but did
That time you stood up for yourself when you didn’t know you could
That time you intervened when someone was bullying somebody else
That time you faced your deepest fear
That time you dared to be yourself
That time you were brave enough to apologize, or admit you were wrong
All the times you kept going in the face of failure
All those times, whatever your gender, you were a hero. Remember that. You were a fucking hero.
