Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been keenly aware of female characters in the everything I read or watch. I love a good strong female character, but was always very aware that there just weren’t that many, protagonist or otherwise, in the action series I was fond of.
I was so aware of how few girls there were that by middle school, I was calling characters like Gloria Baker and R.C. “token girls”, a term I still apply to the girl character in a group of guys. I was keenly aware of the token girl in every cartoon I watched or book I read. I resented when Gloria was knocked unconscious and one of the men had to rescue her. When Artemis Entreri took Catti-Brie hostage, I was nearly ready to walk out on IceWind Dale.
Playing with my boy cousins, I was invariably the person who got kidnapped by the “bad guy”. (I was always fairly well-treated by my captor, too.) When I grew up and fell in with a LARP crowd, I often found myself the only girl around and therefore the damsel in distress during games. Sometimes, both as a child an an adult, I didn’t really care because it made sense with the storyline of the game. But then there were times where it was clear that the caveman thinking went: She’s a girl. Girls always get kidnapped by the bad guy. Let’s go to great lengths to kidnap her in favor of a more easily snagged guy. And I protested.
There are plenty of examples where the token girl is allowed to just be part of the team, but there aren’t enough of them to have a strong impact on children, their games, and the stories they create.
