Because we at Birds’ Eye View love a good laugh (now more than ever), and are all about RECLAIMING, we thought we’d draw your attention to Lady Sidekick by Anneka Harry.
“LADY SIDEKICK has gathered up all the tired tropes for women so you don’t have to!”
From the Femme Fatale to the Crazy Cat Lady, the Bridezilla to the Girl Next Door, it calls them out and, most importantly, RECLAIMS them. For too long women have been pigeonholed into a handful of tired and basic characters, their personality and behaviour criticised if they don’t fit the role society thinks they should be playing.
Lady Sidekick analyses fifty of the most moth-eaten, antiquated, cookie-cutter females cliches, archetypes and tokens that twenty-first-century women are SO over.
Through hilarious breakdowns, comic illustrations and tongue-firmly-in-cheek-fuelled study, it slow-roasts each trope, sprinkling them with sarcasm, seasoning them with feminism, infusing them with activism, before serving them up ready for the modern masses to enjoy.
It’s time to shove a stick of dynamite up the arse of the out-of-date – and Lady Sidekick is ready to light the wick. Happy trope-spotting!
The gender inequality on our screens and across popular culture is so grim it’s sporting a hooded cloak and clutching a scythe. Women and girls are a mega-ton more than the 2D versions we constantly see portrayed and its ripple effect has got us wading through misogyny-flavoured treacle. Having worked on both sides of the camera (and as a lover and avid consumer of all things arts) I’ve felt this corrosive stick from all angles. It’s damaging and it’s boring.
We need less censorship of female behaviour. We need more women and we need raw women. We need not for personalities to be depicted by skin or hair colour alone. We need for women to stop being used as props or reduced to slabs. We need to say buh-bye to binaries, to mythical beauty standards and to being ‘nice’. We need plots that don’t revolve solely around women’s rape, exploitation and / or death. We need women to no longer be outnumbered by penises or have been written only to have one symbolically, or in actuality, thrust toward her. We need to go back to basics and bust apart the dead horse female character tropes the industry is still tirelessly trotting out and incessantly flogging.
Lady Sidekick has been created with a mind to elevate and disrupt. The case studies are twisted and oversimplified representations because tropes are meant to depower and dehumanize women. If any of the language, terminology or illustrations doth offend, spike your blood pressure or ruin your enjoyment of these extracts, then please remember that it’s sort of the point… Until we can laugh at the mess we’re in, we’ll never get out of it.
Anneka Harry
Anneka is a writer, comedy actor and producer. Her writer/performer work includes series and episodes for BBC, channel 4, ITV, Radio 4 and various online platforms including Stylist and Grazia. Anneka is originally from the Midlands and is a dedicated feminist, LGBTQ rights advocate, gin drinker and sausage-dog mum.
Anneka is represented by UNITED AGENTS
Pub date: 20th October 2020
Title: Lady Side: 50 Tired Tropes for Women
Author: Anneka Harry
Illustrator: Laura Dockrill
Publisher: The History Press
Format: Hardback
Pages: 112 pages, 50 Illustrations, black and white
Price: £9.99
ISBN: 9780750995252
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