Simpering misses and damsels in distress seem to be out of fashion these days. Rarely do I pick up a book and read about a heroine who is sickly, pale, and teary-eyed all the time. Instead, strong female leads—some magical mixture of Lara Croft, Mother Teresa, and Maya Angelou—populate our fiction.
While I’m all for strengthening our reader’s views of females, is there such a thing as overdoing it? Can your heroine be too strong?
Dominance in the psychology world is on a continuum, low to high. Abraham Maslow did a lot of research in the 1930s and 40s, and he concluded that this continuum exists due to similar batches of traits he found in the women he interviewed. His findings were that High Dominance women were attracted to High Dominance men—aggressive, self-confident, highly masculine, and self-assured. Low Dominance women were attracted to men who were kind, friendly, gentle, faithful and showed a love for children. Medium Dominance women fell in between, as you might conclude, but they made up Maslow’s largest group. These are your romantics. They want love to find them coming from a white knight. Flowers, chocolates, moonlit walks—these are the things they live for. In short, they want Mr. Right.
But without fail, the women in all three groups were attracted to men more dominant than they were. A woman is rarely attracted to someone who seems to be her “equal.” She wants someone more than her—someone to make her feel feminine. It doesn’t matter how dominant you make your heroine. She will just look for a man even more dominant than she is.
Why is this important for writers?
The more dominant your heroine is, your hero will have to be even more so.
This fact might cause you to pause and worry over the feasibility of the attraction between your lead characters. Good. But don’t fret if you’ve got to firecrackers lighting up the pages, either.
While it’s true that most woman are not High Dominance (in reality, they make up the outlying five percent on the Bell Curve in Maslow’s research), most readers wants to read about main characters who are more dominant than they are.
This dominance could take several manifestations, so you can be creative. We want to read about people who are smarter, faster, wittier, and stronger than we are. We like to imagine ourselves in their shoes and fantasize that we are taking down the bad guy.
I’ll leave you with two equations to keep in the back of your mind when writing:
Female Reader Dominance < Heroine Dominance < Hero Dominance
Male Reader Dominance < Hero Dominance
I hope I’ll get a chance to connect with many of you over at my new website, The Character Therapist and my blog. Be sure to sign up for my newsletter and receive the Writer’s Guide to Character Motivation for free!
