Fear not, fair maiden. A cliché has come to save you.

Recently, I traveled to Edinburgh with a friend.  We'd just done the obligatory Edinburgh Castle tour and were more or less wandering the city on our way to a radical feminist bookstore my friend had read about in my Lonely Planet.  For anyone still reading after that bit about the radical feminist bookstore, there is a lot to see in Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival, which is when we were there.  I think there were more people juggling at any given time than there were people just walking about with no dangerous objects hurtling through the air in front of them.  In some areas you couldn't go ten feet without being handed a flyer by an earnest youth asking you to come see a free comedy show.  Somehow in the midst of all the excitement, my friend spotted another bookstore.  Upon closer inspection, it was a very particular kind of bookstore.  No, not THAT kind of bookstore.  It was all fantasy and scifi books.

So, no beating around the bush: I am totally unable to resist fantasy books.  I started reading them in junior high and even though these days I mostly read what we might call non-genre fiction, if someone hands me a fantasy book, I can't put it down.  I try not to read them too frequently, because honestly it's not very healthy for me.  I will hold off on eating and sleeping in favor of reading and for those not in the know, that is like Sarah Palin being all, I would rather  do that than talk in a folksy way about the liberal elite while an eagle stands next to me.

Knowing I had an exciting night to spend in the airport on the way home from Edinburgh, I figured my best option was a fantasy book to gorge on.  I managed not to buy out the whole store and picked out a nice thick book to read obsessively for a few hours.

I picked it out for two reasons.  One, it clearly had a female lead character, which is always something I like.  Two, it was written by a female author.  While I don't only read books by women, I figured I'd rather support a random female author than a random male author.  Women only make 75 cents to every dollar men make, or something like that.

I read the entire book in one giant gulp.  To be fair, I had hours free, I wasn't that tired, and the book was fun.  Fun enough, anyway, that I may or may not have gobbled up the two sequels as soon as I got home.  But we're nearing my point now.

Much as I enjoyed the book, there was one aspect of it that made me angry.  The story took place in a world in which women were subordinate to men and had traditional, old-fashioned gender roles.  For anyone who is a frequent reader of fantasy books, this is a pretty common situation.  Most of them take place in worlds where medieval society is the norm.  You get swords and sorcery instead of guns and cell phones.  Despite the addition of dragons, fabled swords, and magic, a lot of these books retain the gender roles that were common in medieval society in Europe.  I've been a reader of this kind of books for years and after reading this latest entry, I've come to an important verdict.

Creating a fantasy world where the women are subordinate to the men is complete crap.  It is clichéd and annoying and completely unnecessary.  You are creating an entire world.  Anything is possible in a fantasy book.  Time travel?  Sure.  Using your mind to throw a lightning bolt at your enemy?  That's also fine.  So why do so many of these books insist on using that old trope?  I can't even say that kind of thing is always written by men, because obviously that isn't true.

I know there are plenty of fantasy books out there that don't fall victim to this problem.  But I'm throwing down the gauntlet now for all the fantasy writers out there.

Any book that takes place in a world where the women are subordinate to the men, where the good women tend to be virginal, where the women who break out of those preconceived roles are unusual, is automatically clichéd hackwork.  Usually I'm not one for sweeping generalizations, but here's one I feel pretty firm on: there is nothing new to be said about a fantasy medieval society where the women are supposed to stay at home.  For anyone finishing off a series, fine, go for it.  But any new series that you're contemplating, stop and do some rewriting if you've automatically assumed the women will be second class citizens.

I'm not saying this is the only cliche afflicting fantasy writing.  Frankly, there are quite a lot of them, which I also find frustrating, since, as I said before, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.  Anything.  Literally, anything.

What's the big idea, you killjoy, you say?  To that, I have to admit that I'm just a little disturbed that so many authors, when given the choice, create their new world by putting women in their place.  In your invented world, the women shouldn't still be stuck in the kitchen or the bedroom.  You can still have a delicate flower of womanhood as your female lead, if you have to (even though that is totally lame).  Just give her all of the same opportunities as your male characters.  And while we're at it, let's employ the fantasy novel version of the Bechdel rule here.  Don't let your male characters outnumber your female characters by so much.  There should be women besides the love interest and the mother.  Creating that middle-aged bachelor wizard?  Have it be a woman.  Salt of the earth soldiers to keep your main character grounded?  Throw in a few women.  There is nothing to be lost by letting women play these roles.  This kind of old-fashioned attitude is not helping a genre that often suffers from neglect and condescension from more mainstream readers.  We may not have equality in the real world yet, but if we can't even have it in our fantasy worlds, I'm not sure how much longer I can hold onto my favorite form of comfort food.  Oh, who am I kidding.  I"ll keep reading the damn things.  But some real ingenuity would make those long nights at the airport a lot more enjoyable.