I'll tell you why I'm asking. In the last 3 months I've read 11 books about 30-something females. The stories were varied and the books had been written in various languages of the Western world. What the books had in common was that they were all written by and about contemporary 30+ women, and they all portrayed heroines who were monotonously... stupid.
Don't get me wrong. I don't require my book protagonists to be Nobel-prize material. They don't need university educations or intimate knowledge of astronomy to hold my interest. It's all right if they want to indulge in chocolate when on a strict diet - after all, we're all human. But I draw the line at having my intelligence insulted (by parallel).
Consider the quirky original Stephanie Plum (the invention of writer Janet Evanovich). Stephanie was a failure at school, a failure in her marriage, a failure at her previous job. Now she's a female bounty-hunter, and she's a failure at that too. She keeps her gun unloaded and in a cookie jar, which may be endearing. She cannot make up her mind between two sexy men, which is understandable. And she spends depressed days on her sofa, hating herself, her empty fridge, her fat roll and her saintly sister. Which makes me want to shake her by her always unruly hair and tell her to get off her backside and do something about her life.
In another book (by a Polish author), the woman seems to have everything: a fantastic job, a normal teenage daughter, a husband who adores her. Before we know it, she defrauds all their family savings in an insane get-rich scheme, and when the husband (who finds out but tactfully waits for her to confess) starts taking extra shifts at work to make up for the financial loss, the heroine begins to suspect him of having an affair. Bridget Jones. we won't even go there.
I don't know what happened to the feminist role-models. In the eighties, we fought hard against being portrayed as James Bond girls or damsels in distress. In the nineties, I thought we almost got it right with Madeleine Wickham's strong independent heroines who respect their men yet can happily do without.
Now suddenly we are swamped by images of women who simply cannot get their act together. They wallow in the fact that their flats are a mess, their men pathetic, the future non-existent. They are like lamb dressed as mutton: 16-year olds pretending to be grown-up responsible 30-something women.
Thank goodness for Nick Hornby's "How to be good". Sometimes it takes a man to write about women who have intelligence, a go-get-em attitude and balls.
Which reminds me. This 30-something woman is about to sign off and continue her novel about 3 intelligent 30-something women..
| Tell a Friend About this Article |
