Even my very young students notice that the middle-aged female characters of recent works of fiction act in extremely infantile ways. I don’t bring up this topic at all to preserve the cleanliness of the experiment. The students notice and bring it up. This is especially clear in courses where we begin by reading 19th-century fiction where the heroines are strong, mature and make fun of lisping overgrown baby females.
We are reading a recent play where the female character is a 48-year-old woman who acts like an innocent, blushing ingenue. I didn’t choose the play for that reason. I’d be hard-pressed to find one where the female lead isn’t like that.
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