A rampant womanizer, who leaves broken hearts and broken promises littered behind him like rose petals, his name is synonymous with the image of a condescending cad who has utterly no respect for women – dismissing them as silly creatures who should “stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men.” (Casino Royale.)

He certainly seems that way in the movies – perhaps most so when played by Roger Moore in the 1970s, who even sunk so low as to use one willing woman as a human shield in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me.

But true Bond scholars – in other worlds, people who’ve read the books – often claim differently. The character of Bond might be a sexist pig, they’ll admit – but the books are surprisingly ahead of their time in the way they portray women – especially their sexuality.

The literary James Bond was never going to be the poster-child for sexual equality. In his first adventure, Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel Casino Royale, the news that he’s being partnered with a female secret agent leaves him angrily spluttering: “What the hell do they want to send me a woman for? Do they think this is a bloody picnic?’”

Yet Vesper Lynd, the beautiful SIS operative who teams up with him in Royale Les Eaux, turns out to be a tough and capable spy who is every bit the romantic and sexual equal of Bond. They might not appear to make love on equal terms (Bond lasciviously describes their encounters as having “the sweet tang of rape”) but she is definitely topping from the bottom when it comes to their relationship.

007 even goes so far as planning his resignation from the service in order to be with this willful woman – who reveals herself as a double-agent for the Russians in the last few pages of the book.

Another female foil to Fleming’s Bond appears in 1955’s Moonraker.

Going undercover at a rocket research facility on the British coast, the woman he initially dismisses as nothing but a pretty secretary soon reveals herself to be a cool, calculating police officer.

The officer, Gala Brand, is working deep undercover and exposes the villain’s plot to detonate a nuclear warhead in the center of London. She’s then instrumental in helping Bond save the day.

What’s even more surprising? This is one of the rare occasions in which 007 doesn’t ‘get the girl’ afterward. Gala has a fiancé – and despite their undeniable attraction for each other, the novel ends with them sharing a chaste kiss and “turning away from each other and walking off into their different lives.”

The following year, Ian Fleming dreamed up another woman who was every bit the equal of Bond. Diamond-smuggler Tiffany Case was as cold as the precious cargo she smuggled.

“I don’t often date a good-looking Englishman and the dinner’s going to live up to the occasion,” she warns Bond on their first evening together – adding: “It’ll take more than Crabmeat Ravigotte to get me into bed.”

Tiffany’s icy demeanor stemmed from her childhood, when mobsters fishing for protection money dragged her into the back room of her mother’s brothel and brutally gang-raped her.  That horrific experience colored her outlook on life and men, but made her a cynical match for the equally ‘broken’ Bond.

Despite warning him that “relationships don’t add two people together; they subtract one from the other” the book ends with Bond airing out his spare room and inviting her to live with him in London. “You can’t be complete by yourself.”

And despite the popular impression that Bond’s the one who ‘loves them and leaves them,’ it’s Tiffany who leaves Bond broken-hearted by the beginning of the next novel, 1957’s From Russia With Love. She even goes so far as to cuckold Britain’s most legendary secret agent – entering into a love affair with a U.S. Marine she meets at the embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Although a distraught Bond initially sets out to “shoot the man” when her affair comes to light, when he finally meets Tiffany’s lover, he realizes that she can offer him what he can’t and leaves “wanting to buy the man a drink.”

One of the more controversial female characters Bond runs into is the infamous Pussy Galore. A black-haired, trench-coated mobster who enters into a contract with the titular bad guy of 1959’s Goldfinger, Pussy Galore is so named because she heads up an all-lesbian gang in New York City called The Cement Mixers.

She’s so much the equal of James Bond that she even steals Bond’s girl, Tilly Masterson, away from him – although real-life lesbians will probably wail in anguish when James Bond ‘cures her’ of her lesbianism in the final chapter.

The most famous woman in Bond’s life, however, was the one he’d end up marrying – Contessa Teresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo. A truly wild women, she’d left behind her a string of scandalous love-affairs and entered into Bond’s life whizzing past him on the road to Deauville in an open-topped Lancia.

“If there was one thing that set James Bond really moving, it was being passed at speed by a pretty girl.”

After surviving a deadly plot to poison Britain’s agricultural infrastructure, James Bond finally realized he’d met the woman he hoped to spend the rest of his life with – as independent and willful as he was.

Bond admitted: “I’ll never find another girl like this one. She’s got everything I’ve looked for in a woman. She’s beautiful, in bed and out. She’s adventurous, brave, resourceful. She’s exciting always. She seems to love me. She’d let me go on with my life. She’s a lone girl, not cluttered up with friends, relations, belongings…”

Of course, like all of Bond’s love affairs, that one doesn’t end so well…

Regardless of the outcome, Tracy was just the most significant in a long line of strong, smart and sexually independent women that Bond encountered in his adventures. While Bond himself was conservative and condescending, Ian Fleming seemed to have a genuine interest in creating female characters that were more than just the prerequisite arm-candy of action heroes, as was the norm in the 1950s and 1960s.

What was perhaps most progressive was the fact that none of the Bond girls (with the exception of Solitaire, from 1954’s Live and Let Die) were virginal and innocent – each had established sexual histories even during a time in which most women were expected to be virgins on their wedding nights. What’s more, Fleming didn’t judge these women for having a past – in fact; it was an important part of making them come to life on the page. They were, for want of a better description, real – and instantly relatable to real women back then, and even today.

It’s ironic that the name James Bond has become synonymous with sexism and misogyny, when the source material upon which the franchise is based was perhaps the exact opposite of that.