I started thinking about my own childhood and what kinds of stories I absorbed...
First of all, I just wasn't very interested in movies with "real" actors until after 4th grade. I liked animated movies. I dunno why. Maybe my parents were just really good at convincing me I didn't want to see anything over PG. (Kind of like how they taught me to be excited when the "music truck" went by...it was years before I knew they even carried ice cream in it.)
Then, I grew up with video games, and boys for best friends in my childhood. Our go-to game, on which we based a lot of our make-believe play, was Final Fantasy 2 (or IV in the properly ordered re-releases). I always, always chose to be Rosa or Rydia when we were acting out turn-based combat or whatever other outdoor videogame-based play we did, except when we made up additional characters, and then I'd still play female characters there too. I think we made up families for all the game characters, and those may have had more balanced gender lists.
So, in FF2, there were two playable female characters to, I dunno, at least 6 or 8 male characters. But it was 2/5 of the really important characters you took to the end of the game. But, for me, this wasn't too weird -- because all of my favorite friends (that I played with outside of school) were boys, too. One girl in a group of boys? Well, sure! Nothing wrong with that. (Besides, while in retrospect, Rosa was pretty submissive, Rydia was sassy and opinionated and strong-willed and could put out a lot of firepower and on one occasion single-handedly rescues your entire party.)
Then I think of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I didn't watch it very often on my own, but I picked up on the excitement about it from my guy friends, so I liked the theme song and at some point memorized all the character names. One of my friends had a TMNT themed birthday party, where all the attendees got to dress up. I got to be April, the only girl in the story. My friend's little sister, the only other girl involved, made the generous choice to be a Turtle and let me have the only April costume. I was faintly ashamed that I hadn't been the one to step up and make the sacrifice of a same-gendered identity for her benefit, but also a little relieved, because I liked being a girl character. But it was a really cool party with friends I really liked and some kind of elaborate maze in the garage, so I definitely wanted to be there and participating.
And my own favorite saturday morning cartoon, the one based on Super Mario Bros. 3! I loved Princess Toadstool. I got to be Princess Toadstool for Halloween once. But I don't know if I would have liked her as much if it hadn't been for that show. She probably had to be rescued by Mario and Luigi sometimes, sure. But other times, she was an active participant. I remember a scene where she shows up with vital powerup items -- without her being on the team, Mario and Luigi totally would have lost the fight. And sometimes she gets headstrong and goes off and does her own thing (for some reason I have this picture of her in a swimsuit in my head, hanging out with surfer dudes, but somehow this is associated with her being a free-willed, independent woman. Maybe it's just that it shows she can have more aspects to her personality than only and always "princess".)
In any case, I had plenty of childhood exposure to a skewed gender ratio in my stories, and in my friend base. As an adult, I sometimes crave a more even balance, or even female-centric stories and groups. But at the same time, I'm able to enjoy myself in a group of men, doing a traditionally male-dominated geeky activity. Maybe I learned that this is possible thanks to those token females in the stories. Maybe I'm prepared to dive into these man-groups because I learned early on that it's okay to be the only woman in an otherwise man-group.
So if you're going to make a token female character, please make sure that she pulls her weight as an active part of the team, at least. And remember, I still want more women around me in my geeky groups and my stories, even if I can make do without them.
