On this episode of the Hero Report podcast, Matt Langdon and I try to figure out what it means to be a heroic woman.

At one point, I think we boil this down to its essence:

Matt makes the important point about daughters pretending to be knights in shining armor rather than princesses in need of rescue. And while this surely represents a great progress, I wonder why we’ve given up entirely — perhaps without ever even thinking about it — on the idea of heroic princesses.

In other words, the central questions that animate our discussion this week are 1) whether or not women are expected to act like men in order to be heroic, and 2) if there might be (or ought to be) a different set of actions that describe feminine heroics?