Imagine a world where you hurry along the street, past wolf-whistling workwomen, pausing at the traffic light for the red woman to turn green before rushing to make your ‘Father and Baby’ class where you’ll join the men (and perhaps one or two token women) in sitting on the floor listening to the story of Sleeping Handsome being kissed without consent by a brave Princess to all the tiny, wide-eyed girls and boys on the floor. Imagine a world turned on its head.
Now let’s journey back to our real world. Back to 2017 when a man named Jonathan Plackett noticed something odd while looking at a newspaper stand. He saw lots of the papers covering the meeting between Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon but was surprised to see many focused on the shoes the two politicians were wearing. He imagined a gender swapped world - much like the one described earlier - where Obama met Cameron and the tabloids were full of close-up shots of their shiny brogues. A world where the shoe was literally on the other foot.
Jonathan had just become a father to a daughter and was starting to think about the world she would grow up in. As a ‘digital inventor’, he wondered if he could invent something that would allow people to see the world in a different light and expose the power imbalances ingrained in our society. He set about creating a computer algorithm that swapped all the gender of any text - turning ‘he’ to ‘she’, ‘Mother’ to ‘Father’ and ‘Hero’ to ‘Heroine’.
My name is Karrie Fransman. I am a comic writer and artist and am married to Jonathan. When he first told me about his marvellous gender-bending machine I was excited. I suggested applying it to public domain fairy tales and illustrating the new stories. And with that our first book, Gender Swapped Fairy Tales, was born. Our books aim to shine a light on the binary concepts of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ that are entrenched in our culture, and to explore the norms, roles and behaviours that separate them. Whether you identify as nonbinary or are someone who has never thought much about your gender, we want to get everyone thinking about how gender defines us all.
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Gender Swapped Fairy Tales was published by Faber & Faber in 2020 and did so well we got to do a second; Gender Swapped Greek Myths. Why myths? Like fairy tales, these stories have stood the test of time – going back about 4,000 years! They are brilliant stories that explore our deepest psychological fears and fantasies. But they are also from a patriarchal culture with toxic heroes and maidens carried off against their will. Even today Greek myths continue to influence us. It is not difficult to spot the hyper-macho Greek heroes like Theseus, Odysseus and Perseus in modern superhero comics and movies.
It did feel a bit sacrilegious, using an algorithm to mess with these ancient texts. But the great thing about myths and fairy tales is that although they are very old, unlike relics in museums they are not untouchable. They come from an oral tradition, with countless versions of each myth shaped by different storytellers and translators. When we first ran these myths through our algorithm, we were amazed by the new stories that emerged. By swapping the whole world, the computer had invented characters no one had ever thought to write, and threw up hidden power dynamics in the text. Simply swapping the genders, rather than rewriting the texts meant that we couldn’t influence the stories with our own prejudices or assumptions about how each character should act. The analysis of the new stories is firmly left in the reader’s hands.
Some changes were obvious, like brave heroines rescuing helpless princes from ferocious monstresses. Mut others were subtle. Women’s names came first in titles or they were described by their professions. One thing we noticed is that the male characters now have ‘feminine’ traits hardly ever represented in today’s media. There is a heart-warming host of loving fathers gracing our pages, rocking their children to sleep while singing lullabies, or mourning the loss of their kidnapped sons instead of getting caught up in acts of vengeance. There are also a lot of tragic male victims suffering at the hands of lustful goddesses.
The characters that struck me the most were the heroines. Their enormous bravery and cunning was often eclipsed by their colossal egos - Odyssea insists on boasting that it was her who blinded the Cyclopess and thus brings a curse, and ultimately death, on all her comrades. There is something shocking and simultaneously exhilarating about seeing women displaying such brazen acts of violence and egotism.
One of our favourite discoveries was the myth of Atalantus (originally Atalanta), which begins with the birth of a baby boy, which so distresses the parents that they attempt infanticide. They leave him in the woods where he is rescued and lovingly raised by a ‘he-bear’. The story in its original form appears almost feminist – a strong girl fighting for her place in a man’s world (a popular modern trope not so dissimilar to Disney’s Brave). But when gender-swapped it becomes a story about a young man who just wants to prove his strength in a matriarchal society that constantly knocks him back. At one point in the story the queen even tells him to put down his spear and go and play ball in the garden with the other boys! Here we see the power of the algorithm swapping the whole world, expectations and all, rather than just individual characters.
It’s important to note that this gender swap does not create a utopian society. This world is merely a reflection of our own with all the same problems and power imbalances, just with the genders reversed. The purpose of this book is to help us see our own world and all its inequalities in a clearer light and hopefully to help us all empathise with ‘the other side’. We hope to break down boundaries, allowing children and adults to explore even more possible roles. To be courageous heroines, loving fathers or even beastly Minoheifers in a less divided world.
Gender Swapped Greek Myths by Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett is published by Faber & Faber
