>Female action heroes: An abomination
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| Most 12-year-old girls are not superheroines. |
One of my favorite dopey complaints from the Men’s Rights crowd is that action movies featuring ass-kicking women are “unrealistic” because real women are too dainty to do all that ass-kicking shit. On The Spearhead today, W.F. Price aims his withering contempt at the new film Hanna:
The ass-kicking chick flicks are getting more and more ridiculous as time goes on. In “Hanna” a girl is raised by her father to be a vicious killer somewhere in the arctic. Hanna is played by Saoirse Ronan, an Irish girl with a sweet smile who looks about as tough as a bunny rabbit. Nevertheless, we are supposed to suspend disbelief and accept that this waif is capable of breaking necks with a single blow.
Even worse, in the trailer for the film, young Miss Ronan is depicted doing … pull-ups! “In general, women can’t do pull-ups,” Price complains, “and the vanishingly few who can don’t look much like Saoirse Ronan.”
Price does have a point. Real women can’t do the things that female action heroes do in films. Angelina Jolie may be a deeply scary woman, but I’m pretty sure she can’t take out entire boats full of trained assassins by herself, or jump from truck to truck on the highway to escape pursuers in cars, as she did as super seekret double (triple?) agent Evelyn Salt. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Sarah Michelle Gellar has never really slain even a single vampire. And there is no such thing as an indestructible cheerleader.
But here’s the thing, guys: All that crazy shit that male action stars do? Real men can’t do that either. Matt Damon is pretty buff, and I’m pretty sure he could take Angelina Jolie in a fight, but he’s not actually Jason Bourne. Christian Bale doesn’t put on a batsuit at night and run around town taking out baddies with his bare – well, gloved — hands. Toby Maguire can’t swing from building to building, or stick to walls; if he were bitten by a radioactive spider, he’d need to go to the hospital. Arnold is not the Terminator.
Also, and I hate to be the one who has to break this to you, guys: professional wrestling is fake.
I know it might be tough to take all this in, guys, so here’s Captain Kirk fighting a very slow-moving alien monster on planet Not-Very-Far-From-The-Studio. Kirk has a little trouble with this one but in real life, I’m pretty sure William Shatner could take down an alien monster, provided it moved as slowly as this one.
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Posted on April 10, 2011, in misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, the spearhead. Bookmark the permalink. 158 Comments.
>Did I say safe space, David? No. I'm talking about you hosting a space for misogynists and lumping them in with women who are reacting to misogyny with some sort of toss off remark about how people are behaving.
>In other words, it's flat out bullshit to compare bigots with the people who are the victims of their bigotry. That's what you just did.
>Just to clarify, when I said that "none of this has reached ban-worthy status, at least not yet," I was mostly referring to deleting individual comments, not banning people; no one here is close to being banned, unless they suddenly pull a Discount.
>ginmar, yes, in the interest of encouraging discussion I do allow misogynists to post here, and allow them to say more or less what they want, unless they start resorting to what I've called "gratuitously nasty personal attacks." I hold everyone here to the same standard of behavior in the comments here, though so far only misogynists have gone over the line to the point at which I've banned them.Enforcing the same set of rules for misogynists and feminists alike doesn't mean that I see them as equivalent. Obviously I don't, hence this blog. I'm for a generally open discussion on ideological grounds, even if that means that sometimes some people say obnoxious and bigoted shit. On this blog, the obnoxious stuff (insults, etc) comes from both sides; the bigoted shit almost exclusively from the MRA side. That, I think, is pretty revealing, and honestly, when MRAs and MGTOWers act like assholes and/or spout bigoted shit in the comments here it helps to reinforce and provide evidence for the points I make in my posts, and with the blog overall. I give them the opportunity to hoist themselves by their own petard, and many of them take advantage of that opportunity.
>Enforcing the same set of rules for misogynists and feminists alike doesn't mean that I see them as equivalent. Obviously I don't, hence this blog.(David)lol, just the fact that you need to make this statement is indeed pretty interesting. Dont worry Dave, I dont see you as a misogynist. Though, if you dont watch it, you might be a mansplainer.
>When you treat bigots and their victims the same way, that's inherently wrong.
>I think that the predictable, heavy-handed rejection of action heroines by all those sexist types has a lot to do with their refusal to see women as individuals, instead lumping them all together into a collective. The western consciousness associates individualism with phallic symbolism. As a consequence, individualistic female characters in fiction are viewed with contempt by those who would prefer so-called "phallic" power to be reserved for generic male action heroes.I'm a writer, so I've come to notice some rather disturbing trends in fiction and in audience reactions to said works. There seems to be a huge double standard in play here.For example, has anyone ever noticed how expendable the average femme fatale seems to be? Ever watched a Bond film? Of course you have. How about those male villains? How come they get all the recurring appearances, while the women are nothing more than dime-a-dozen obstacles; mere insignificant roadblocks for 007 to surpass?Also, there seems to be an alarming lack of audience sympathy for villainous females. I mean, who are you more willing to sympathize with? Rosa Klebb and Cruella de Vil, or Draco Malfoy and Anton Chigurh? I mean, they're all reasonably nasty characters in their own right, but the latter two are often lauded as cool and charistmatic, while the former two are treated with near-total contempt. I could name any pair of male or female villains and the same patterns would emerge roughly 80% of the time.I'm in the process of working on a bit of a genre-buster novel myself that features a number of female protagonists who are powerful and ambitious in their own right. Who said that girls always have to play the part of the gentle down-to-earth nature-lover? That's just patronizing bullcrap.Girls can use guns and kick ass too. Ever hear of Lyudmila Pavlichenko or Nancy Wake? The former was a WWII Soviet sniper with a body count greater than Rambo, and the latter was an SOE spy who did badass stuff like killing Nazis with her bare hands and bike-riding hundreds of miles across German-occupied France to deliver updated radio codes.I think a lot of these MRA fellows are ignoring the simple fact that REAL female badasses have existed throughout history. It's hilarious watching them bitch and moan about fictional ones.
>I think at least part of the problem is that there's a generation of younger male writers, who in their zeal to create "strong" women characters, end up making them completely over-the-top, unrealistic, over-sexualized Mary Sues. See Aeon Flux (the movie, not the animated series), Ultraviolet, Sucker Punch, Resident Evil (movies), Tomb Raider and the like. I don't think anyone can really identify with those characters, men or women, because there's nothing to identify with. They're just "butt-kicking action babe #342 who's got superhuman fighting skills for no adequately explained reason". I haven't seen "Hanna" but if there's a good reason for the character being good at fighting (for example being a skilled marksman, not throwing grown men twice her size around like toys or something), and she's actually well-developed as a character, I see no reason to complain.I do agree that there's a lack of sympathetic or memorable female villains. I can't think of one, actually.
>I dislike the term Mary Sue because it has effectively become meaningless. Originally, it referred to self-insert characters in fan fiction created as the perfect, incorruptible love interests for canonical characters; ones that the fanfic's author no doubt had a crush on.Since then, it has become a universally derogatory catch-all for "unrealistic characters", or "characters I don't like/cannot sympathize with/cannot connect with", or "characters who monopolize the plot", or "characters who alter the plot at will".That's just bad writing. Singling out one character as a Mary Sue is pointless. It's like hunting for a dust bunny on a rug that's been through a house fire, or complaining about a bad spark plug in an engine that's tossed a rod. If such a character exists in a work, then the problem isn't with that character. It's with the plot itself.A lot of authors fail to challenge their characters appropriately, and this is especially the case when the character in question is female. Your typical action heroine gets away with things that most male action heroes don't, like going through a massive fight or a gun battle without taking a single hit of any kind and downing more than their fair share of baddies all the same.This is probably because your average audience doesn't have the stomach for seeing a woman in a work of fiction gruesomely injured, whether the medium in question is a book, movie, comic or a video game or anything else. Personally, I think that having strong women in a work of fiction who can take a few licks and keep on ticking makes them more human and easier to relate with. There's no dignity in being magically shielded from all harm or loss or mental trauma as the plot demands, don't you agree?Sadly, the double standard is more pervasive than you'd think. In a work of cinema, a man with blood running down his face after a fight is a proud warrior and a testament to masculine fortitude. A woman with blood running down her face after a fight is victim and a survivor. Regardless of their actions on-screen and whether or not the woman initiated acts of aggression or took a greater share in the violence, these skewed audience perceptions remain. This has some strange side effects. For example, let’s say I were to write a book with a female villain that is not only a mass murderer, a war criminal and a sadist without compare, but she’s also the protagonist of the work. Would that make me a misogynist trying to paint a negative picture of women? Of course not. The character is an individual and part of a fictional plot, not a member of a collective. She does not speak for all women, just as a male character in the same situation would not speak for all men. As the author, I am supposed to remain completely impartial; neither supporting the cause of a given character nor rallying against it. Sometimes, it seems like you just can’t win with action heroines, though. If you make them over-the-top and manly/sadistic, it pisses off the masculists who see them as monopolizing dominant male traits that belong to them and them alone, and it pisses off feminists who see them as a male in disguise attempting to smear their good name. If you make them feminine and endearing, it pisses off masculists who see them as impostors and too incompetent to hold their own in a fight, and it pisses off feminists who want them to be just a little bit stronger.It’s like people just can’t make up their minds. You know what I say to that? To hell with it all. I like a good challenge, and writing convincing action heroines is one of the biggest of all.
>Society doesn't want to see women hurt? Have you been living under a rock? TV shows glory in showing scantily-clad victims getting tortured and raped and killed. Novels are worse. Hell, James Ellroy has made a career out of fetishizing and disparaging his mother, who he sneers at in print. Women getting murdered is a substantial genre. Without it, any number of TV channels would grow out of business.
>I said "average audience", not society at large. By average audience, I meant naive, average folks who would walk out of a theatrical showing of a Saw sequel with their crying kids in tow. In most of those TV shows, the murders are off-screen or otherwise non-graphic. If you're willing to include horror films, avant-garde movies or exploitation flicks that cater to people's sick fetishes, heck, anything's possible.Also, we're talking about two completely different things. I was talking about female action heroines who name themselves among the main roster of protagonists. You mentioned victims that may not even be part of the supporting cast. The writers always treat these two archetypes differently from each other. While some side characters may indeed suffer horrid deaths at the hands of some villain or another, the female protagonists-of-action - if present at all - are often given a heavy-handed, patronizing treatment that sees them effortlessly doing things that a male hero would really have to put themselves out for.Again, this is the double standard at work. Can you imagine Jet Li's character in Unleashed as a female character? How about John McClane from Die Hard? Have you ever seen a typical action heroine get beaten up that badly and manage to pull out ahead in a fight?While female victims in fiction are common, and action heroines are still in the process of gaining ground, rare indeed is the action heroine who actually gets socked in the face a few times, or hit by a car, or reduced to a blood-streaked pulp and - get this - still manages to claim victory in the end. It gets especially strange when they have superpowers like regeneration or nigh-invulnerability and the author still coddles them just the same.Neil Marshall is one of the only directors I can think of in recent memory whose works would count as an exception to this rule. Rhona Mitra's character in Doomsday got smacked around a bit and still managed to kick some ass. Now that's cool.
>This is why I like those old Cynthia Rothrock beat-em-up movies. First, she's an actual martial artist, so no fakery there, and second, although she eventually dealt with the bad guys, she also got her butt kicked from time to time. In other words she wasn't some invincible super-hero, she was human, and I think it made her more sympathetic and a better character.It's funny that in action movies the creators wouldn't want to see women get hurt, whereas in a genre like horror, they seem to have no qualms about it, even taking it to excess in some cases. Different audience or something.
>So let me get this straight. YOu don't find the cheap use of 'anonymous' unimportant female victims being bashed, ogled, tortured, and murdered—-and oh, sometimes subtly slut bashed by the other characters, or found in such compromising positions that it's implied—-to be as important as the fact that you just can't beat up a dame on screen?
>It's not that they aren't important, it's that they're beyond the scope of the discussion. We're talking specifically about female action heroes. As in not-victims. Mostly, anyway.I'm not talking about victims in slasher movies. What I'm talking about is the double standard that perpetuates tropes such as this or this. What I'm talking about is the kind of writing and choreographic sense that leads to your average action heroine in looking less like Jason Bourne and more like Silk Spectre during a fight. I don't want to see a neverending stream of unopposed parries and high kicks from action girls. I want to see them take nearly as much damage as they dish out. I want to see them using parts of the scenery as weapons. There's honestly nothing empowering about handing victories to a female action hero on a silver platter. If you ask me, it's better to make it look as though they've actually earned those victories.Oh, and Ion, I'm with you there on the Cynthia Rothrock thing. It's kinda silly that they have anorexics like Jolie doing those exact same kinds of roles (don't get me wrong; she looked fine in the Tomb Raider movies, but she's lost too much weight since then). Why can't they cast ACTUAL badasses like Lucia Rijker in more movies?
>Have you ever seen a typical action heroine get beaten up that badly and manage to pull out ahead in a fight?All the female "action heroines" (and villains) get beat up pretty badly in the Kill Bill movies. Also, I'm not quite sure why you've declared horror films (which frequently feature female victims-turned-heroines getting pretty badly harmed) somehow off limits here. the line between horror and action is often hard to draw, and in any case lots and lots of people watch horror films.
>Yeah, I was about to mention Kill Bill, but it's been a while since I've seen it, so I don't really remember exactly how a lot of the action sequences went. Okay, so we've got Quentin Tarantino, Neil Marshall, and who else? I think I can name the number of directors that employ that sort of action on one hand.By the way, I never said that horror films were off-limits, Dave (LOL, my name's David too. Yay for all the Davids out there!). Rather, I was merely trying to keep the discussion focused on action heroines. That is, female characters that are placed into roles similar to your average hero played by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis. You're also spot on about the blending between action and horror. Aliens and Predator are two classic examples. Heck, the second Alien movie itself is a perfect example of the double standard in action. IIRC, only the marine dudes actually get seriously injured or killed on-screen. The dropship pilot's death was off-screen, and Newt and Ripley barely get a scratch on them. It's almost like a rule that you don't show it, like how classic sculpture omits detailed female genitalia. Weird, huh?
>Yeah…..Marines? Duh? Any stab at portraying Marins in battle would include a fair amount of injuries. Newt and Ripley were in the rear. Newt's character was depicted as eight. Far from being th3e favoritism shown to women that you imply, this is simply an attempt at realism. You don't want an eight-year-old kid and a civilian mucking up your battle. "Aliens" wasn't marketed as horror, but in horror, the torture and rape-like actions inflicted on women form the basic plot for the genre.
>Oh, and Vasquez too. She and Gorman go out by committing suicide with a hand grenade. We don't even really see anything at all. It seems that whenever the ladies are introduced into an action scene, things usually go a little strange. Very often, an action girl not only avoids virtually all damage in a fight, but avoids dealing lethal damage to her opponents as well, as if she's a pacifist by default. When she hits, it's bloodless. Usually a high kick or karate chop to some weak point that renders the opponent instantly unconscious. When she gets hit, it's often just as bloodless.Everything else aside, can you think of any movie in recent memory where a female that fits the Action Girl archetype gets teeth knocked out, bruises, broken bones, scars, loses an eye, et cetera, while doing the same sort of damage to her opponents and staying alive to the end? In such a case, the violence is used to emphasize the masculinity of the character and her triumph in the face of adversity.Note that this sort of character stands in total contrast to a female victim in a horror movie who gets her head lopped off with a chainsaw. In that case, the violence is used to emphasize her femininity and vulnerability, and her death ultimately spares her any suffering or any further character development at all. One of the few exceptions to this rule that I can think of is in Japanese animation, movies and comics - or Asian films in general. Just look at Battle Angel Alita, Cynthia the Mission, Claymore, Black Lagoon or Battle Royale. Little wonder that a few of the Spearhead's members took part in a spot of anime-bashing. Surprisingly - or perhaps not-so-surprisingly, given the proclivities of a depressingly large number of anime fans - a lot of the comments are defensive in tone. But, to be honest, I think they didn't cover the issue properly. That guy's main complaint was against this trope, which is a slapstick device and has next to nothing to do with female empowerment or action girls in particular. If anything, it's used in a sexist manner to emphasize the "weirdness" or "otherness" of femininity. I wonder how half of those folks commenting on that article would've felt if they'd stumbled across Black Lagoon and seen that part where Revy and Roberta duke it out until they can't even stand, and the guys on the sidelines don't interfere because they're rightly fearful of getting injured.