Where are the female adventurers?

Where are the female adventurers?

The television researcher has become a kind of archetype: dashing, fearless, likeable – and almost always male. We ask, where are the female adventurers?

“Have you seen Walking the Himalayas?” Peter's father asked. “The presenter in it reminds me of Pete.”

“Tall dark and handsome?” I asked. “Well, I can certainly agree with that.”

Later that week I started watching the TV series as recommended and was amused to find that host Levison Wood (pictured below) actually looked a bit like Peter.

We watched with interest until, five minutes later, Levison made a meal out of crossing a mere river.

It's true that presenters need to add color and enthusiasm to their travel stories (otherwise we'd just have a guy walking for 45 minutes), but occasionally the drama seems over the top. When Bear Grylls does his Action Man montages with pulsating music and sharp camera angles, you know there's a team of producers standing around, eyeing the lunch buffet and checking the clock.

The television researcher has become a kind of archetype: dashing, fearless, likeable – and almost always male. From Levison Wood and Bear Grylls to Simon Reeve and Ben Fogle, this is apparently what the face of adventure looks like.

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Clockwise from top left: Ben Fogle, Levison Wood, Simon Reeve, Bear Grylls

I wonder: Where are the female adventurers on our televisions? With the exception of Saba Douglas-Hamilton, who I've had a crush on for a decade, I can't name a single woman who hosts her own travel show. And it's not for lack of female adventurers.

We have a whole host of inspiring, courageous women available, from Edurne Pasaban, who has climbed all 14 8,000-meter peaks, to Bonita Norris, the world's youngest person to climb Everest and reach the North Pole (and with presenting experience, no less).

“The television researcher has become a kind of archetype: dashing, fearless, likeable – and almost always male”

The divide between male and female adventurers is also present in literature. Sure, there are best-selling travel books written by women, but they often focus on love, heartbreak, or spirituality. Books like Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Stayed's Wild are marketed as travel literature, but they fit better into straightforward memoirs because they look inward rather than outward.

Some female writers break the mold, but the Dervla Murphys and Freya Starks of the field rarely command the same level of attention as the Bruce Chatwins and Paul Therouxs. It seems that in travel writing there is the greatest appetite for male stories of dare and action and female ones of healing and emotion.

So – who is to blame for the lack of female adventurers on our shelves and screens? Is it the publishers and producers who avoid risks like the plague? Is it the women themselves who are not pushing for recognition? Is it the audience that still prefers its tall, dark and handsome adventurers? Is it a complicated mix of all three?

I asked Peter about these thoughts and his answer hit home: "It could be that explorers are usually male because of the 007 thing: men want to be him and women want him. It might not work so well the other way around."

I wonder if he's right: Do producers and publishers overlook female adventurers because they don't fit their narrow-minded ideals? Perhaps, like so many issues in the gender debate, it boils down to simple desire: female adventurers don't have their own shows because they can't get away with being unwanted, even on the side of a mountain or a swell.

Perhaps that, if true, is the saddest reason of all.

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