Women Leads

Two weeks ago, our son started junior high.

Junior high, people. Heaven help us!

And so we’ve been adjusting to this new experience, including the academic step (or two) up. For instance, last week he brought home his English reading list. And let’s just say it’s full of some pretty fun books. Like Lemony Snicket. Or The Maze Runner. Or a couple of Lois Lowry titles. Heck, forget the DMiss, sign me up English Composition!

One other book on the list bears mention:

The Hunger Games.

It’s where he wanted to start, so we recently hit up the library for a copy.

And, of course, he’s been eating it up. The other day we drove from our house to Jamba Juice, a trip of all of 3 minutes. Yep, he brought the book. Or the other day the family van suffered a blowout on the side of the freeway. The wait for AAA was at least 55 minutes. Did Josh notice? I think not. His head never surfaced from the pages. In fact, I think 8 tributes died while we waited for the tire change…

One of the distinctive things about The Hunger Games is the female lead Katniss. Actually, maybe that’s not particularly “distinctive.” After all, there’s Tris from Divergent and Cassia from Matched. Come to think of it, if you’re going to endure a dystopian future, you probably want to be a young woman!

The other day a friend sent me the following meme depicting Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon:

I like the answer. Perhaps because it’s similar to my answer to the question “why are you blogging about male privilege all the time?”

And here’s the caption, from A Mighty Girl:

Although there has been some progress, the need for prominent female characters in TV and films is still huge. According to a study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, only 29.2% of 5,554 speaking characters in 122 family films they recently analyzed were female — the same 3 to 1 male/female ratio that existed in 1946.

Friends, that’s not good enough.

In the end, I’m grateful for strong women in media, in books and on the screen. For our girls for sure.

But also for our junior higher.

Want a bit more of Joss Whedon on writing strong women characters? Try this link.