To explain – In some stories the gender of the main characters matters, mainly those with romance. But, is the main character’s gender important to the enjoyment and understanding of all stories? Does it matter whether the ringbearer was a male or female hobbit? Would the stories of Wizard of Oz or Through the Looking Glass work just as well with boys instead of girls as main characters? How about Willy Wonka’s story ? If Charlie had been a girl would the story have been just as good? The examples I’ve listed are mostly fantasy, but that’s just what I happened to think about just now. Your examples could come from film or TV as well as literature. I’m undecided on the answer to my own question, by the way.
Depends on the universe. Or the character. Or the plotline. Or…
I’m sorry, but I think we need some basic examples to start out with before the thread can get rolling. Let’s take yours:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory–not really. The point of Wonka’s quest was to find a good-hearted, generous, imaginative kid who wouldn’t screw up his factory too badly and keep Wonka’s vision alive after he’s gone. Gender wasn’t all that important, just character. Charlie could have easily been a girl.
Lord of the Rings–hoo, that one’s a doozy. Qadgop will come in and say something much, much better than this, but for the most part Tolkien lays out a fairly medieval-like society with very proscribed, limited roles for women. Galadriel has some measure of power as a sorceress and seer, and Eowyn does get her warrior-fu on, but both end up… well, happily married, domesticated wives. I doubt Tolkien could envision the ringbearer to be a girl. Someone contradict me?
Wizard of Oz–well, boys (at least, the non-fabulous kind) don’t really wear glittering ruby high heels, so that part of the story is kinda moot. 
Through the Looking Glass–Lewis Carroll’s violent loathing of little boys aside, Alice’s transformation from a pawn to a queen at the end would also be kind of wonky if the protagonist was a boy instead. The rest of the tale is fairly non-gender-specific (although boys of that time wouldn’t really speak to enchanted flowers).
There are character archtypes, different from sterotypes. These are gender specific.
In the commentary track for Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster explained the difference between a hero and a heroine.
There is a problem in the village and the hero or heroine ventures out and a hero ultimately must overcome a diffenciy in his own character. The heroine comes to grip with the fact that she is and has always been the hero. Clarice, at a very young age, attempts to save the lambs. She is strong, she just doesn’t know it. Dorethy always had the ability to go home. Maverick must over come his guilt about Goose and his feelings about his father.
Kytheria - some interesting points. responders like you help me think things through. I do hope we get some other opinions re LOTR.
Zebra - fascinating comments. And though I respect Jodie Foster I’m not sure if I agree with those comments about heros and heroines. Granted, I’d want to hear it in context, but what you’ve quoted just doesn’t wash.
I suppose a greater amount of restlessness and adventurousness is permitted in your supposed-to-be-average male in a story, especially a young one. So that might make some difference, but it might have more impact on the way the plot is set in motion than the story itself.
I agree with Kythereia that this is a hard question to answer in the abstract.
Nitpick: In the books, the shoes were silver, not ruby. They became ruby slippers to add more impact in the movie when it went from black and white to “glorious color”. Scroll well down on this page to number 8. in the “Book Related Questions” section.
Miss Foster goes into a deeper explaination of it so you may want to check out that movie.
The other time it is important is when a character is naked.
Only female characters should be naked.
As far the archtypes go, something like an earth mother figure is always a woman.
I ran a movie theatre and in the summer we had these kid shows. Older titles that were for kids and we showed them weekday afternoons. I notice that we had two films that were basically identical but one was for boys and one was for girls. Labyrinth and Time Bandits. Would Time Bandits work with a girl? I don’t think so. Labyrinth would be creepy since Bowie would have to be trying to seduce him.
IMHO, put females protagonists in any role if you want to appeal to both audiences, and male protagonists if you want to appeal to males.
<nitpick>
In the book, the shoes were silver, not ruby.
</nitpick>
In general, I have found that gender matters a lot less to me now than it did before I got over some cultural poisoning. A perfect example would be John Varley’s Steel Beach. About ¼ of the way into the novel, the protagonist changes from Male to Female (science fiction, the tech exists for this and in Varley’s universe this is about as common and accepted as changing your hairstyle).
In any event, when I first read this book I found that at that point in the book I could no longer relate to the character and did not finish the book because of this. The whole thing alienated me. Later, after addressing some of these issues, I re read the book and now find that Varley is one of my favorite authors.
One other thought that is sort of floating around is that with a female character there can be the specter of the threat of rape that can be used to emotionally manipulate or move the reader. Not sure what that means, but it will cause me to react to a character differently.
duh! 
I recently saw a college production of The Tempest in which Prospero was female and Ariel was male. Ariel didn’t matter so much, since s/he is a spirit, but the female Prospero didn’t work at all, since she was mother to Miranda instead of father to Miranda. Prospero’s treatment (read: “hazing”) of Miranda’s suitor Ferdinand made no sense if Propsero was a woman.
I don’t think so; lots of protagonists popular with males are female, like Sarah Conner from Terminator, Honor Harrington from David Weber’s series, Ripley from Alien. As long as she acts like a male hero would, most men I know like them just fine.
Well, excuuuuuuuse me if I haven’t read the book yet. :rolleyes: 
Ariel is supposed to be male. Or at any rate, Shakespeare uses male pronouns for him.
I always thought that Ariel wasn’t supposed to be anything, but I’ve seen The Tempest performed with Ariel as a woman two or three times, including once at the very same college.
Except when he’s Tom Bombadil. 
I will gladly read/watch stories with protagonists of either (or any) gender, and relate to them as well, but I do have a need to know which we’re dealing with. Thefirst few pages of Kite Runner drove me batty because I couldn’t figure out if the first-person narrator was male or female. Then I figured it out and it read much more smoothly.
But I’m intrigued by Ms. Foster’s idea, and just off the top of my head, it does seem to hold true. I must ponder it further.
In film, gender is a lot more complicated than a few SDMB posts can explain. But here is a bit of a shot.
First off, we must understand that cinema is a language. Through time it has developed it’s own sets of metaphors and ways of conveying narrative. For example, when most of us watch a Bollywood movie (India has the largest film industry) and the singing and dancing couple is suddenly transported from the Taj Mahal to the Swiss Alps, most of us go “What the fuck! Why are they even singing and dancing anyway? Isn’t this film a political thriller? And why are they in Switzerland?”, whereas your average Indian wouldn’t blink an eye. India has a different cinematic language than we do- one that demands songs in every movie and uses location during songs to convey emotion rather than actual narrative place.
Anyway, in our cinema, men drive the narrative. It is nearly always men that actually make the narrative move forward. For example, in Silence of the Lambs, it is the police chief that initiates the story by assigning Starling. Then Lector moves the rest of the rest of the story along- that is, it is always his actions that change the narrative direction or cause new things to happen. Even Starling’s main motivator is a male- her dad. Sit down and think about the movies you know. It’s almost universally true. Even in movies with strong female characters, their motivators are men and they are nearly always in roles that are mainly about reaction.
Women, on the other hand, are to be looked at. Really sit down and watch a movie one day with the sound off. The camera treats women differently than men. In cinema, women are largely shown being seen through the eyes of males (film theorists call this the male gaze) and this is seen as a pleasure of it’s own for the audience (known as scopophilia.) There are all sorts of different ways of looking at women that are used in movies, but it all boils down to the same thing.
A good example of all of this is the film of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In this movie, the males always drive the action. The females rarely even do any magic. They are there to be looked at- Fleur’s main attributes are being pretty, Hermione’s big moments are getting her picture taken and wearing a pretty dress, and even Madame Maxine exists largely through Hagrid’s eyes.
Some people argue that this stuff is innate- mostly citing Freud and Lacan. Otheres say it is society’s internalization of the ideas of Freud and Lacan. Others say it’s just part of the trial and error and mutual agreement that occurs when any language is forming.
What does this matter? Well, some feminists want to envision a new kind of cinema that gives women a better shot. Most reject simple role reversal and instead do dumb stuff like make movies with no plots (theorizing that plot must be a male thing and so true feminist cinema would do away with it). This has produced some of the worst film known to man.
Others mess with it. I think the Kill Bill is an example of this. I believe that in Kill Bill the character of the Bride represents the long gazed-at female in all of film history taking control of her story and getting revenge on the director/male gaze and making a new life for young women in film free from that. Of course, YMMV.
The question of “how can we use, question, expand and complicate these tropes” is still being asked in cinema, which is still one of the most male-dominated industries out there. Anyway, there is a lot to say, read, think about and debate.
Oh, he usually is performed as a woman – today. Partly because modern audiences automatically assume that an “airy sprite” by the name of Ariel is female anyway, and partly, I suspect, because of the exigencies of casting, especially in college productions. (Having been part of a short-lived amateur Shakespeare society in college, it’s been my experience that any part that could be played by a girl would be played by a girl, since there were about five times as many females trying out as males.)
And also because in The Tempest, as in many of Shakespeare’s plays, there are way more parts written for men than for women.