Even more is my aghastness at the idea that a woman must be raped in order to grow. That said, I would agree that the growth of anyone – male, female, or otherwise – is at least partly dependant on hardship in some form. As I have heard you yourself quote, among others, 'we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes'. Everyone undergoes stresses and conflicts of varying types, and varying levels of pain. That does not make the utter violation and victimization of rape necessary in the slighest, especially since this can be a shaping event that can do untold amounts of lasting mental damage and social stigmatism.

And as for the last piece, I'd have to agree that a journey of a hero, or heroine, or even merely a person, does not have to have any specific differences between genders, because the qualities that make us human are also not gender specific. We are all capable of great good and great evil, and the compartmentalization of male and female qualities only hinders this truth. Dualism is all well and good, but I think this is a dualism whose time has long passed, and if there is ever going to be true equality in how we percieve women, it has to be abandoned. Not male first and not female first – human first.