I’m a straight male, and I totally identify with Peggy Olsen on Mad Men. She is an outsider trying to break in to the inside, and who can’t identify with that?
I’m a straight man, and I’m confused by the entire idea that I should be having any difficulty identifying with a female protagonist. I love women. I prefer women as friends. Most of the music I listen to is written and performed by women. And I can’t even start listing all the movies that featured a female protagonist with whom I identified.
Honestly, I can think of more movies that featured men behaving in ways that are incomprehensible to me than the reverse. The movie Ghost, for instance; Patrick Swayze’s character was incapable of telling Demi Moore’s character “I love you”? What the hell?!? What sort of utterly dysfunctional asshole cannot tell someone with whom they have a close personal and sexual relationship that they love them? That is weirder and more twisted than most anything I have seen from a female character (except possibly the monstrously ugly purse Sarah Jessica Parker’s character gave Jennifer Hudson in the first Sex and the City movie).
This. Similar to njtt, Harry happens to be the chosen one and shows some brains and skill and bravery, but Hermione is smarter, quicker-thinking, mentally stronger and gets Harry through one scrape after another. I had to laugh one time when some known nothing who hadn’t even read the books said they rejected the HP books out of hand because they contained no strong female characters for her daughter to identify with!
And this.
In fact Hermione and Ellie would be two of my favourite characters, period.
Lisa Simpson is the member of that family I most closely identify with. Also, I occasionally throw out a Buffy Summers quote without thinking about it, like “Wanna see my Gandhi impersonation?”
This pretty much sums up my view. Indeed, I’d go further and suggest that if the reader or viewer (of whichever gender) is unable to identify with the protagonists (of whichever gender), then there’s an issue with the story or performance.
Me too. There’s much more important things than gender for me when it comes to identifying with a character.
Yes, this.
It’s sad because it conflicts with what I consider to be one of my core values: That men and women aren’t so different beyond the physical. Part of me asserts that I should have no more trouble identifying with a woman than I would with a blonde, or a person of color, or an amputee. Physical differences aside, I like to believe that humans in general are more the same than they are different, and that any evidence to the contrary is the result of cultural conditioning. The fact that I myself am conditioned in this way is not surprising, but a bit disheartening.
That makes no sense whatsoever. Nobody is saying they can only identify with such characters, that’s not the issue. A character can be totally feminine and go round shooting bad guys and generally kick ass. Are you saying women shouldn’t be in the army? Was my aunt a man in drag when she joined?
I identify with Clarice in Silence of the Lambs. Oh but wait, she works for the FBI and has a gun, does that mean she’s not a female protagonist? Where the hell do you draw this imaginary line?
If we turn this on its head, am I identifying with a cross dresser if the character is a househusband? I think we need to dispense of these archaic masculine and feminine connotations.
Saw the thread title and immediately said “Ripley” out loud.
I can identify with female characters in much of my fiction. Not all the time, perhaps, for any given character - but that’s true of male characters, as well. Aspects of a character will speak to me, and that’s what fosters the sense of identification. When done well, that identification helps make the aspects that don’t speak to me more immediate.
One of the female characters I’ve recently read that I have identified with strongly is Katniss Everdeen, from The Hunger Games. It’s not that she fights, or fights back, that appeals to me, but rather her bitterness, her anger, and most importantly, her overwhelming sense of compassion - and her need for control.
Which is where I want to start addressing Inner Stickler: Based on that description, if you’ve not read the book/books, yourself, would you code that character as male with a vagina, or female?
ISTM that your comments in this thread can be interpreted in one of two ways - and I’m not sure which I find more appalling.
First, there’s the implication that all characters are male until they’ve been proven, with some stereotypical female gendered behavior to be proven to some standard to be female.
The other possibility is that you’re claiming that stereotypical gender roles trump the character’s gender - unless additional gendered behavior is added to the character to make the character align with your idea of what a real female character should be like. I can’t help thinking of the number of Soviet snipers from WWII who were women, and wonder if you’ve got the chutzpah to tell them that they need to prove to you that they’re really women, and not simply men with vaginas.
I really don’t know which idea you were trying to express - but I reject both of them. I find them annoying, since they’re common enough that I see people in entertainment trying to pander to such ideas.
I don’t want to give the impression that female characters have to be some variety of action girl for me to find aspects that speak to me. One of my favorite characters, and one I identify very strong with, in anime is Kurata Misako, from Kodomo no Omocha/Kodocha, the seemingly manic, and careless mother of the main character. Gender roles don’t define where I find characters that speak to me - far more likely, it’s common ground through flaws, or traits that will have me thinking of a character as a mirror for myself.
Sure. Veronica Mars, Clarice, Lisa Simpson, Liz Lemon, Nikita (La Femme Nikita tv show).
For romance, Miyazawa Yukino (His and Her Circumstances), a girl who works hard to maintain a perfect facade at school while secretly being conniving, sneaky and nerdy. I totally identify with that.
And Cordelia Naismith, too.
I see a lot f myself in Rose from Titanic. Yes, I realize that isn’t a good thing.
you implied you were having sex when you were not?
In Rom-Coms, I’m much more likely to identify with the female lead than the guy - like in The Holidays, I identified with Kate Winslett most of all.
Same here. It’s as simple as that. (Straight male speaking.)
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I find it hard enough to identify with any character, let alone a female one. I think a lot of that is due to the fact that a lot of characters are made to enhance drama, and I’m the least dramatic person I know. Thus I find it hard to identify with the rationale and actions of most characters. That being said I don’t think gender has much to do with who I identify with, it’s more actions and personality.
This thread reminds me of something my wife said which was that the women of Sex In City in the movies not the show reminded her more of men writing women than actual women having girl talk.
That reminds me of a comment my mother made about some movie where the plot was (IIRC, I never saw it myself) about a bunch of men pretending to admire a woman just so they could reveal their true feelings later and make her miserable; “That’s not men acting like men! That’s men acting like nasty high school girls!”