: Re: Is the "hero guy saves girl" trope misogynistic? (Question about my hacker (hacking??) novel.) Just an FYI, I am a woman. Edward is a cyber spy and works with an organization named Vox Populi

@Speyer920

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The scenario is not misogynistic. People need saving--sometimes those people are women. It also doesn't matter whether she "fights back" against her captors. The most realistic scenario of an everyday person being kidnapped by trained professionals is that they're going to sit there and do nothing. They're outnumbered, outmatched, and probably restrained--what are they going to do? What you want to avoid is not misogyny, but bad writing. That is, writing that makes the audience not care what happens.

See, a lot of claimed "misogyny" in media is just bad writing, but the character is a woman. Consider the damsel in distress trope we're talking about here. If a woman is introduced who has no purpose but to be rescued, the question I'm asking isn't "Why does the author hate women?" but "Why do I care what happens to her?" Well, I might care indirectly because the protagonist cares and I (hopefully) care about him, and perhaps in an abstract sense of not wanting bad things to happen to people. But it's going to be a lot more effective if I also care about the woman herself. And that's why it's important to flesh out her character--not anything about her sex. After all, an agender person who has no character other than being rescued by the transman protagonist would be just as uninteresting, albeit considerably less common.

(At this point someone will jump in saying that female characters are more commonly poorly-written than male characters. That's probably true, but also irrelevant. This is your work--what other people do is on them.)

Now don't get me wrong, you can totally go beyond bad writing to do this trope in a misogynistic manner. Probably the most common is a sort of subtle victim-blaming in how the scenario is presented. "Of course she got kidnapped--she's a woman. A man would never be so weak and foolish as to allow himself to be kidnapped, but women, well, they just can't help it." But you don't seem like the kind of person who would write like this, so I wouldn't worry about it much.

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