By: Samantha Anderson

At a truckstop diner two men discuss the shortcomings of women affected by misogyny:

“Yeah, I’ve dated one of those…they have trouble in relationships.”

He takes a sip of his coffee looking down at his plate of hamburger steak, “there are so many messed up women out there, who’ve been like, sexually abused…I think over 50 per cent.”

His colleague concurs.

“Yeah, you can tell right away.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” he says, looking out the window, “it’s sad…all these messed up girls…”

The men continue eating.

But what happens when a “messed up girl” becomes the driving force behind one of the most popular crime series to date?

Steig Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest have sold over 20 million copies in 41 countries.

There is no question Larsson’s trilogy addresses the subject; the Swedish title of the first novel translates literally into “Men who hate women.”

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, first published in 2005 in Sweden, has allowed everyone to become intrigued with one character: Lisbeth Salander, who does things on her own terms.  Salander does illegal things. Salander does criminal things. She is a talented computer hacker with a photographic memory. She drives a motorcycle and is all black leather and black ink, her piercings just one indication that she doesn’t give a shit about convention. The real indication being she does whatever she wants.

Mikael Blomkvist, the disgraced journalist in Larsson’s book (Larsson himself being a retired journalist before his death in 2004), could not go about trying to investigate the disappearance of Harriet Vanger 40 years earlier without 24 year-old Lisbeth’s fast, problem-solving and mathematically-inclined mind.

Having been under the care of the state most of her life, Salander faced abuse regularly but never took it sitting down for very long.

Salander operated under a guise of mistrust; mistrust of authority, mistrust of intimacy and even mistrust of herself.

However, Salander holds no guilt in the reprisal of those who had done her wrong.

She is, by any definition, ok with revenge, inflicting pain and shame on moral-less people and institutions.

But is Larsson’s Salander a feminist creation?

Melissa Silverstein, in ForbesWoman wrote in her article, “The Girl Who Started A Feminist Franchise,” that the fascinating thing about the character of Salander is that a man imagined her.

Silverstein is convinced that had the novels been written by a female author they would not be as popular as they are and Salander would be dismissed as an item of “crazy-chick lit.”

Silverstein says if men and women are willing to pay money to see a female heroine kicking ass and not looking like your stereotypical babe in the process then she undoubtedly would be the girl who started a feminist franchise.

Ian Daffern of the Globe and Mail calls Salander  a “pint-sized death-pixie on wheels…an archetype of the angry woman that runs through culture from ancient Greece through to Veronica Mars and Xena, the warrior princess.”

But just because Salander isn’t out to make anyone else happy doesn’t mean she’s angry.

It means she does things at her own discretion, having been placed outside of perceived “normal” and feeling below the bright light of female expectation, a light that is , too often than not, hard to dodge.

This could be what places Salander in feminist territory; the challenge she gives to what some think women should be and the challenge she gives to the rapists and liars she encounters.

After all, you can tell right away.

Yet it’s not only women who are depreciated by misogyny. And those truckers at the truck stop may feel helpless. And maybe Larsson did too.

But for now, we’ll never know.