Like, I don’t think I have to explain how perfect an analogy lycanthropy is for a period, so why is it that the only real films exploring that are Ginger Snaps and maybe Turning Red if you stretch the definition. I get that there are female werewolves in media but they’re usually side characters with little depth.
I’d also say werewolves are typically presented as a masc thing, like the whole juvenile “dogs are boys, cats are girls” presentation in a lot of media, but even that could lead to some interesting storytelling with typically masc characters having to go through a very fem experience.
Please, we cannot let the only deep exploration of lycanthropy and sexuality in mainstream media be Joannas botched attempts to make it an analogy for aids and then have a character attack and infect children. So I guess this is a stupid question and a call for requests.
Well, I think part of the reason is the target audiences.
In movies, they shoot for general audiences as horror usually, which means you just want big and scary, so the gender of the werewolf doesn’t matter. They’ll just be big and scary with little character development anyway, so the male dominated industry just sticks with the default.
In books, however, the target audience now is the paranormal romance audience, which skews heavily female. You’d think this would result in more werewolf women being the main character, but it’s the opposite. The readers don’t want to be werewolves, they want the fantasy of fucking them and taming the bad boy (the genre is very much a hetero dominated one). So the viewpoint character is most often going to be just some woman drawn into whatever the situation is.
Mind you, we’re talking traditionally published here, there’s plenty of casual writers putting stories out on an archive of our own.
However, the field is not empty! Forgive the source, butGoodreads is still good about being able to find things by topic
The third one on that list, Bitten, is part of a fairly decent series that isn’t just soft core erotica or pure romance. Leans little heavy into the whole “alpha” bullshit with the werewolves, but that’s a matter of taste.
Some of those are even more standard urban fantasy rather than paranormal romance, though I’ve found that any urban fantasy with a female protagonist is usually going to include romance at some point.
Anyway, I still think it comes down to writers/producers having a target audience, and putting out what they think will profit rather than primarily trying to explore a concept in depth. You really don’t see much of that in any genre tbh, what with so many production companies and publishers wanting only to invest in something that sells, and having a narrow view of what that is.
I think the thing that I’m learning is the “male dominated industry” part is a hefty portion of the answer to that question.