Is protagonist identification/empathy influenced by the reader's gender?
I had a discussion with someone who claimed she'd once read (though she couldn't remember the source) that men can identify and empathize with male as well as female protagonists, while women identify better with female protagonists (the claim being, they can certainly sympathize with male protagonists, but identification is harder).
To me, this seems like a gross and peculiar generalization (though it's hard to say more about it without knowing the source). Still, if it's hypothetically valid, it would create some odd dynamics in stories with a male protagonist and a female antagonist.
I was wondering if anyone has heard of anything related to that - if you also remember any possible source, it'd be a bonus.
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men can identify and empathize with male as well as female protagonists, while women identify better with female protagonists (the claim being, they can certainly sympathize with male protagonists, but identification is harder).
Anecdotally, I would consider the reactions of a percentage of male fans to the all-female Ghostbusters, Daisy Ripley's Rey in The Force Awakens, and the female lead of Rogue One, just in the past year, to refute this assertion.
Obviously I am also speaking in gross generalities, but seriously: male leads have dominated fiction in most media for, like, millennia. American fiction is finally reaching a point where female leads are starting to show up more often in bigger-impact works, and a certain subsection of the audience is losing their tiny bigoted minds. These men don't want women to be protagonists in the entertainment they interact with because they cannot empathize or identify with female protagonists. Those female-led stories are outside their experiences, and it makes them uncomfortable and upset when they, and their stories, are not the focus of the tale being told.
There have primarily been male protagonists for a significant majority of time and fiction, so by default, any female readers would only have had male protagonists to emphathize and identify with. Women simply haven't had the option of a woman being the main character driving the story in a Star Wars movie before now. Not that Leia didn't kick ass and keep her head, but the journey was clearly Luke's. So little girls had the option of playing "Leia, the sidekick and love interest," or pretending to be the hero, Luke who is male. (Or Han, the snarky sidekick. I confess I never met anyone who wanted to be Chewie.) Now little girls can be Rey.
I have no particular statistics to back up my assertions either. I think the answer to your question may be yes, but in the opposite way your friend claimed.
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The opposite of this rule, that both men and women identify with a male protagonist, but only women can identify with a female protagonist, has long been used as a standard pretext for focusing exclusively on male protagonists in movies and books. The logic is that you halve your audience with a woman in the lead. Similar arguments are often made against films with black and other minority leads.
However, the science indicates this is entirely spurious folk wisdom invented to justify internalized prejudices.
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