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A Male Damsel in Distress

posted 8 years ago by jswans01-1
9 replies | jump to latest

Writing a story where a husband has to save his wife who is in extremely dire straits. He has to face many dangers, kill a whole lot of people (not all of them bad) and make other massive sacrifices, up to and including (maybe) his own death all to save her.

One of the things I like to do when I'm writing is to set my default pronoun to the feminine rather than the masculine, not because I'm a feminist or anything (I'm actually pretty sexist, but not really) but because I think it can draw people into the story a little more if you screw with their assumptions. Anyway, midway through the story I started thinking it might be cool to switch the genders and make the girl the hero and the guy the Sleeping Beauty.

I'm trying, but I'm getting to the point where I'm wondering if it can really be done. Like, the plot of the movie 'Taken'. Could it work if you reversed the genders? Could it have worked if the story was a mom who is a former CIA agent and she has to go to Paris to save her son from kidnappers while her former husband stays back in the United States, waiting by the phone to hear his son is safe?

[–] RayRaggy 8 years ago

But that character is a man, or a woman. Men and women act and react differently, they don't think quite the same, feel quite the same, have the same abilities, the same intentions.

That said, an interesting exercise I was turned on to long ago, during a class discussion about the lack of strong female lead roles, is take your male lead character and rewrite him as a female. There is some truth to what you say, that gender can, to a point, be interchangeable.