Eine interessante Studie:
Previous research has found that the sex of the author can influence the characteristics of their fictional hero and that these differences can be predicted using evolutionary psychology. According to sexual selection theory, males and females evolve different behavioral strategies, and thus different psychologies, in order to maximize reproductive success; thus, humans will have behavioral tendencies influenced by subconscious mechanisms that would have aided fitness in the ancestral environment. This study focuses on how the characteristics of the female hero may differ based on the sex of the author using 30 fantasy series written for children ages 10–17. Male authors are predicted to create female heroes who are more physically powerful and more likely to engage in physical conflicts than female authors, because males benefit more than females from physical battle. Although not all comparisons produced statistically significant differences, all data produced trends in the predicted directions. A closer analysis found that female authors created female heroes who were more likely to be human girls without superhuman abilities, while males created female heroes who were unlikely to be fully human. When examining male–female hero teams, it was found that female authors tended to make the male hero more powerful than his female teammate, which was not true for male authors. This may be because females benefit when their mate can dominate other males. These results suggest that males and females create different traits in their heroes, irrespective of the hero’s sex, and that female-created heroes achieve their goals without resorting to physical violence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
Quelle: Who creates warrior women? An investigation of the warrior characteristics of fictional female heroes based on the sex of the author.
Aus einer Besprechung der Studie:
Male fantasy writers tend to create more powerful female heroes than female fantasy writers, according to new research published in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. The findings suggest that women are more likely to create a hero who uses intellect rather than physical violence and supernatural powers.
Männliche Fantasy Autoren erschaffen also stärkere weibliche Helden als weibliche. Wäre interessant, wie das in feministische Theorien passt. Verinnerlichte Frauenfeindlichkeit? Toxische Männlichkeit führt dazu, dass Männer nur Gewalt schreiben können?
“I am an animal behaviorist, evolutionary biologist, and college professor. After teaching and thinking about biology for 10 or more hours per day, when I come home from school I relax by watching escapist television shows, and in the 1990s that included Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” said study author Victoria Ingalls of the Marist College School of Science.
“I noticed that others started to applaud these characters as new, strong female role models, but I noted that they had all been created by men. The data supporting evolved differences in the behaviors of males and females is substantial, so I wondered if the sex of the creator impacted the traits of their heroes.”
Ingalls systematically analyzed female heroes in 15 children’s fantasy stories written by a male author and 15 children’s fantasy stories written by a female author. She found that most of the female heroes created by female authors did not engage in physical combat and had either weak magical powers or no special powers.
“It is interesting to note that two of the female-created female heroes who do have some special powers either lose that power or find that the power is essentially useless at the end of the series,” Ingalls wrote in her study.
In contrast, many of the female heroes created by men were warriors who engaged in physical battles.
The findings suggest that “the sex of an author does influence the characteristics of their heroes in some interesting ways,” Ingalls told PsyPost.
“Male-created female heroes typically had some superhuman power, were very powerful physically, were quite willing to engage in physical battles, and were not completely human (they could be an alien, a demigod, an elf, etc.), while the female-created feymale heroes were more likely to be normal girls (not superhuman) who were simply dealing with some type of superhuman evil.”
Rather than relying on physical prowess, the female heroes created by women often solved their problems by being clever and finding answers to mysteries.
“If we hold up certain characters as role models for girls, I think it would be valuable to determine if it matters whether that character was created by a male mind or a female mind. Note that female-created heroes are less likely to solve their problems with physical violence than are male-created heroes,” Ingalls remarked.
Wäre interessant, ob sich das auch bei Büchern für Erwachsene zeigt. Game of Thrones hatte immerhin eine starke Kämpferin, Brienne of Tarth.
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Alles Evolution 