So. I See I'm A Girl. :/



When I was a teen, I spent a lot of hours wishing I’d been born a boy.

It wasn’t because I wasn’t happy in my own skin. It wasn’t that I looked at my face in the mirror and thought: that’s not me. It was just because I had seen the sort of person I wanted to be when I grew up and none of them were women.

Teen-Maggie loved all sort of books and movies, particularly thrillers and adventure stories. Like most readers and movie-watchers, I had a long list of characters I’d admired for sometimes very shabby reasons: Maverick from Top Gun, Sean Dillon from Jack Higgins’ novels, Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle, Tyler Durden of Fight Club, Athos of The Three Musketeers. The list was longer than that. By a lot. It was also all male. I wasn’t crushing on them. I wanted to be them. I wanted to be the wise-cracking adventurer with hidden depths, fearless and aggressive and bad-ass and car-racing and explosion-making and just . . . sexy.

I spent a lot of time looking for equivalent woman. But in movies, they usually wore spandex. And in fiction, they were called “sassy” instead of “funny.” And in real life . . . well, they didn’t exist in real life. At least not in my rural middle-class part of the world. How could you reconcile a funny, fearless adventurer with a Nurturing Mother Type?

I’ll give you a spoiler, in case you’ve never seen the hundreds of blog posts, articles, and generalized confessions of women feeling guilty about working away from home. You couldn’t.

So here was the moral of the story for teen Maggie: be born a boy, or take your toys and go home.
Don’t get me wrong, there were strong female characters in many of the books I read. They were just strong in different ways. When they appeared as secondary characters, they were the rocks the tempestuous men tied themselves to. They were the helpmeets and the scholars, the ones who did their homework and the ones who appeared with solutions at the last minute. And as narrators, they were often plucky and fearless and capable. But they were never just a female version of any of the people on my list of Dudes I Wished I Was. Where was the woman I wanted to be?

She didn’t seem to exist.

The thing is, girl characters mostly look different than boy characters. Even when written by women. We have hundreds of years of story-telling to tell us what a hero looks like, and what a heroine looks like, and that stuff is ingrained deep. It’s not that we don’t want to write women who are capable in the same way as men. It’s that it requires a helluva lot of imagination to overcome the weight of that narrative history. It’s one thing to write a better version of something you’re already looking at. It’s another thing to write something you haven’t ever seen before.

We talk a lot about strength in women characters, but not so much about the things male characters still have a corner on: humor, aggression, confidence, ambition. Heroes and heroines wear these things so differently still — look at the Avengers. Just look at it, okay! We’re still so stuck on gender roles. I’m reminded of it every time someone asks me about my masculine hobbies.
They’re not masculine hobbies. They are Maggie hobbies, thanks.

I wasn’t born a boy. And it’s taken me 31 years to finally become the person I wanted to be — 31 years to find a way to translate my list of admirable fictional role models into a woman I can actually be in real life. It took me that long to find a way to translate my often "masculine" interests into a "feminine" persona. It meant overcoming quite a bit of failure of imagination. Much of it mine.

Now I’m trying to translate that back into fiction. I really want a future-Maggie to grow up with a list of fictional role-models populated by both genders. I spent so many years depressed that I’d been born into a gender I didn’t seem to belong to. I want future teen me to know that she really can be anything she wants to be . . . and see examples of it all around her.
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Published on November 11, 2013 06:46
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message 1: by el (new)

el What you are talking about is very in grained in our society. A recent opinion piece in the NYT starts with the line "Many found Time magazine’s story on “The Gods of Food” notable for what was missing — goddesses. There were no female chefs among the list of deities or in a graphic of major culinary influences."
These days I think you have a better chance of finding the type of female role models you wanted growing up than you have if you read the daily newspaper.


message 2: by Lizzie (new)

Lizzie I know, sometimes I feel that way too. Like because i'm a girl I can't play videogames obsessively and when I make a funny, sarcastic joke the first thing people do (after they recover from a laughing attack) is to ask me what book/movie I got it from, when I really just made it up myself. And the heroines in books are always serious, experienced and smart. They're consider sometimes witty but never just funny or strong or very confident because for some reason these are all linked in with men. Thanks for addressing and attempting to change this in at least some books.


message 3: by Sarah (new)

Sarah I really can't stand this (being a girl...) sometimes either... Aside from all the tiny facts, in most books and T.V. shows, the boys are the heroes and the girls stand by and are protected and...well that's pretty much my biggest burden.


message 4: by Sarah (new)

Sarah Have you tried Alanna from Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness Quartet…Its fantasy in a medievalesque setting. But really, Alanna was always my role model growing up, a girl who wanted to do what the boys did. She's tough with a fiery red-headed temper, but throughout the series she learns to become comfortable with herself as both the "masculine" fighter and her feminine persona. I've loved it since I was 9.


message 5: by Amy (new)

Amy this was quite true for me growing up, until i realized that being a girl and wanting to be an engineer would actually make life pretty easy for me. so i embraced my love of math and cars, made sure not to lose any of my knowledge of football gained during high school marching band, and strode proudly through college towards working in America's space shuttle and other space flight programs. unfortunately, not all of my male peers had the same realization i did and still treat me as a typical girl who should care about painting my nails and whether my shoes match my outfit. but i have hope for my daughter… one day...


message 6: by [deleted user] (new)

Hi, my name is Maya Bode and I'm thirteen years old; this year I wrote and self-published my novel "Tess Embers," to Amazon.com and the CreateSpace store. I am now a verified author here on Goodreads, and my book is here as well! As an aspiring young author, I really look up to you and admire you and your work. You may not see this comment, but just in case I want to say that I'd be honored if you followed me/became a fan! Of course it would be amazing if you bought/read my book, but I know you are very busy :) Thanks for your time!


message 7: by DJL (new)

DJL After reading your post, I immediately thought of Alanna from The Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce. She was always the heroine I aspired to be, and I still look to those books for inspiration as I write now. But you're right, most protagonists we see are... boys, and it's disheartening that girls are still assigned certain "roles" in both fiction as well as reality.

I will say that currently, I'm seeing more heroines who are strong and funny as well as ambitious while also being concerned about said ambition. My primary example is Yelena Zaltana from Maria V. Snyder's Study books. Granted, while Yelena's past might not be the brightest, she grows into a formidable heroine that shows us her inner ethical struggles. And overall, it made me adore her even more. I do hope there will be a surge of amazing heroines in new books that will hopefully inspire even more young readers.

Thank you for this post, Maggie. :)


message 8: by Xyra (new)

Xyra I don't know... I read this and think of Mae West, Mrs. Peele from the original Avengers TV show, Penelope Pitstop, Hermione Granger, and quite a few others.

However, I see your point about how the awesome, madcap female characters tend to not get written or acknowledged.

Now that you are a well established author, you can write all of them and inspire others to do the same.


message 9: by Maggie (new)

Maggie Stiefvater Xyra wrote: "I don't know... I read this and think of Mae West, Mrs. Peele from the original Avengers TV show, Penelope Pitstop, Hermione Granger, and quite a few others."

How many of those characters were the main character and not just a strong sidekick, though? It's a subtle reinforcement of their not-quite-the-most-interesting status.

Also, to all the nods to strong characters in a secondary fantasy world, it's true, it's much easier to find this sort of female character in a book set in a society that ISN'T ours. What does that say?


message 10: by Xyra (new)

Xyra I think it is a point of perception. No, Hermione Granger was not the main character, but Harry couldn't have gotten along without her. In my mind the earlier ones (Mae West, Penelope Pitstop) overshadowed and outshined whoever the male lead was.

Then we do have the wonderfully strong women of Austen. Are they madcap, no, but brilliant, strong, solid, etc.

Something seems to happen in the transition from children's chapter books to teen, young adult, and adult reading. There are many madcap, female, lead characters in children's chapter books.

Perhaps it is a publisher problem. Authors struggling to find agents and publishers may have a great story about a madcap female lead character and someone above doesn't think it will sell, so she gets moved to a side or forgotten all together.


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Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater
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