Recent decades brought us many “female heroes” or “kickass warrior girls” in the shape of Wonder Woman, Xena, Sydney Bristow, Buffy, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, Katniss Everdeen, River Tam, Jessica Jones, Black Widow, and most recently, Queen Latifah’s Equalizer. These are women who take on the archetypal hero role, using force and their wits to defeat the bad guys and protect the community. We’re seeing them because gender roles are becoming more and more fluid in our culture, and pop culture is as ever riding the latest wave in social attitudes.

Does this mean that we’re seeing a corresponding shift in roles for men? We’ve certainly been seeing lots of men taking on the caretaking role–but still, often while being heroic, like the Mandalorian. Like fathers who say they are “babysitting” when taking care of their own kids, men who see parenting as something they do in addition to their career aren’t evidence of a real societal shift in my book.

But as I re-watched “Ted Lasso” for the fourth time, it dawned on me that Ted is, in fact, a masculine version of the wandering heroines I wrote about in my book Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story. Like those heroines, Ted is forced to leave his familial home and has to travel far away, seeking he-does-not-know-what. He is accompanied by a “sister-friend,” his buddy Coach Beard, who offers support and understanding. He meets the woman of power–Rebecca, the goddess-like owner of the football team she’s hired Ted to coach–and has to earn her respect; he also has to learn objective discernment (the rules of football as she is played everywhere but the USA). He encounters the Mean Girl in the person of Rupert Mannion, Rebecca’s ex and owner of a rival team, and briefly considers but ends up rejecting the Wrong Husband in the form of Rebecca’s friend Sassy. Over time he creates something unique and beautiful that others recognize as special: a new approach to coaching; and in the process, he draws together a community of people, widely disparate individuals who learn by his role model how to respect each other and work as a team–and better yet, love each other warts and all.

Ted eventually moves home again to his old family, but all of them are changed for the better. He leaves a legacy, a vibrant community that is ready to blossom in new directions as Rebecca, in one of the last scenes, reads a proposal to start a women’s football league.

And then there’s Murderbot–the rogue security cyborg, or SecUnit, genderless hero/ine of Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries, now a Netflix series starring Alexander Skarsgård as the titular character. Murderbot has successfully hacked its own governor module, the fail-safe installed in the extremely dangerous SecUnits to keep them from disobeying orders. But it doesn’t dare let anyone know, so continues to allow the company that owns it to send it on assignments and obeys orders. Inevitably it is “outed,” but fortunately, while employed by a group of freethinkers who detest what they see as enslavement, buy its contract, and emancipate it. They offer it a home on their own planet, but Murderbot hates planets, preferring the freedom of space. Murderbot takes off to wander the galaxy. Yet it feels driven to prove its worth to the woman of power, the leader of the freethinkers, Dr. Mensah. It acquires a sister-friend in the shape of sentient ship who aids and abets its quests, it proves just how much others can trust it; and over time, a community grows around Murderbot, free to wander wherever but always at home with each other.
I’ll be looking for other examples of a gender-swapped/genderless wandering heroine . . .