We need another kind of heroine

Little girls need role models. So do grown women. Instead, they get characters like Katniss Everdeen.

Katniss, in case you haven't heard, is the bow-and-arrow-wielding teenage heroine of the film The Hunger Games, based on a best-selling young-adult trilogy that is deeply adored by teenage girls and substantially older women. In cultural terms, it's the successor to the Twilight series of vampire romances.

By most accounts, Katniss is the opposite of Bella, the protagonist of Twilight. Bella is the classic damsel in distress; Katniss is strong and strong-willed, capable of more than being swept away by a handsome boy.

But if girls on movie screens are metaphors, Katniss is a problematic heroine, too: yet another young woman who fulfills others' desires instead of bending the world to her will.

Suzanne Collins, who wrote The Hunger Games, was struck by the juxtaposition of real wars and reality TV. So she concocted a dystopian future in which teens are chosen by lottery and forced to fight in an annual televised death match. Katniss becomes a fighter when she volunteers to take her younger sister's place.

The books are deeply violent; the movie sometimes feels like a horror flick. Katniss stays alive through her skill and her ability to be what others want. She wears a flaming dress at her stylist's request. Over the course of the games, she reluctantly plays up a budding romance, knowing viewers will lap it up. Though two boys vie for her affections, Katniss barely cares; she's too busy surviving. If she feels a surge of love, she promptly pushes it away.

In this way, she's a far cry from Bella and the loosely literary figure she inspired: Ana Steele, the protagonist of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which has been topping the bestseller list. Fifty Shades, which started as Twilight fan fiction, transforms the Twilight metaphor into something literal: Instead of a bloodthirsty vampire to represent male sexuality, we get a handsome billionaire who happens to be into bondage.

That these books are written by women, and that women are lapping them up, speaks to a deep ambivalence about women's role in the modern workplace, political debate, and domestic arena. Fifty Shades takes imbalance to a carnal extreme: Ana is literally the submissive in the relationship. At the end of the book, she gets spanked with a belt as punishment for back talk.

This is an old idea - that men's desire is a burden women must endure - and it's the same one that leaves erectile-dysfunction drugs untouched amid efforts to curb coverage of birth-control pills. Props to the Ohio state senator who introduced a bill forcing men who want Viagra to provide an affidavit from a sexual partner, submit to a cardiac test, and listen to lectures on the dangers of four-hour erections. I'd like to say she pulled a Katniss move.

But, sadly, I doubt Katniss would have put up the same fight. She's too much like Bella and Ana in a crucial way: She's oddly under-confident. She's not fomenting revolution or following a master plan; she's just reacting to circumstance. If she's stirring, it's not by design. If she's an object of desire, it's because other people are telling her what to wear.

This is the easy way to draw a likable heroine. As countless political campaigns have shown, a woman who's constantly fighting runs the risk of looking shrill. On the other hand, the ongoing political assaults on women's health have unleashed an angry spark among activists and voters, something that's noticeably absent in the Katnisses of the world. Maybe the next hot trilogy will feature girls who are true leaders - and send the passive heroines to the cultural remainder bin.

Joanna Weiss writes for the Boston Globe.