What the writer misses, and she’s a female, of course, is that it’s not Holmes that was popular, but the MYSTERY STORY and it SOLUTION, 7% or more................The stories would have been just as popular had it been a SHIRLEY HOLMES and not a Sherlock...................
Exactly.
I missed Beth Daley's article on the toxic femininity of Miss Marple, another British crime solver.
Miss Marple, Nancy Drew, and J.B Fletcher come to mind.
Maybe men like the mysteries more than the characters that solve them, but at least some of us females like the combination of the two, since interesting characters make far more interesting stories than just solving a mystery.
Not so, in the case of her actual beef, which was the Cumberbatch series (the first part of which was very well done IMHO). That one had loads of female fans who were interested in - Cumberbatch, and his “bad boy” persona.
Why such a hit among the ladies? Not because of the intellectual game, which, at the risk of annoying all women, is not the sort of thing that grabs a huge female TV audience. This she doesn’t address.
If you want to get the girls, look good and act dominant. Or, even, just act dominant, that is, “toxic”.
There is a very complex psychosexual thing going on, in which all the “toxic” stuff she complains about almost certainly exists because it is hardwired in the human brain, or rather what we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.