: 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

@Pierce369

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Misogynistic or sexist is a soft judgement - there is no clear yes/no criterium. So the answer can't be "yes" or "no", it is more likely that on a spectrum between extreme misogyny and extreme equality of sexes, your work will be somewhere inbetween.

Different people and cultures rate these things very differently. My wife, for example, is a very strong woman who doesn't take shit from anyone, but she loves it when a man holds the door or helps her carry things. In her eyes, these are small priviledges of being a woman. In the eyes of a more feminist person, these things might be patriarchially oppressive behaviour.

There is nothing wrong with a strong male character and a female character in need of rescue. The best test I know for sexist bias is to reverse the roles in your head and check if you would consider that somehow wrong. If the sexes are interchangeable, then you aren't being sexist because your characters need to be one sex or the other and you simply happened to pick them the way you did.

It also helps if secondary characters break up the stereotype. If all the men in your story are strong hero-types and all the women are rescue-me-princesses, you probably have a gender bias issue. If your world is reasonably mixed and believable balanced, and just the main characters happen to be in this particular configuration, you probably don't.

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