Girls rule, boys drool

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

@Kestra

I got the sense that part of the reason for the extent of the vitriol in response to various immature comments made in the thread was that said comments hit the 'Men are troglodytes' trigger.

I agree we should have equal amounts of male and female heroes in film, but I also think that Hollywood's only tool for making women strong is to just masculinize their personality while making sure to still keep them sexy. I'd like to see more strong females who don't clearly spend hours on their hair and aren't necessarily physically attractive, and do more to prove their strength than just acrobatic martial arts.

I think a great example of a strong female in film is the old woman in Night of the Hunter.

We do have characters that are strong but not traditionally masculinized but their strengths are often overlooked or seen as weaknesses. Sansa comes to mind, a survivor on a very steep learning curve who must negotiate her survival in a world that sees her as piece of goods. A lot of younger GoT fans were huge on Arya, she who is disguised as a boy, and down on Sansa. Yet they both survive, they are both brave, they are both young girls who lost everything up against terrible odds.

I love a lot of older woman characters, power behind the throne types. They don't have the hero cachet that a younger woman with a great big sword has but whose fault is that? We have to be willing to see strength and heroism as being about more than the physical strength to do direct violence to your enemies.

 

[Mooch]

Even the majority of movies with female leads still have predominately male casts. I think we have a long way to go before any hand-wringing is justified.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Ellen Ripley is a great example of a female action hero who has to take neither of those roads.

Have to admit Panthosa does have something of a point, though; Ripley is a great character but the "strong female character" is far more often boringly-done and pursued at the expense of the genuinely well-written and interesting female character. As Sophia MacDougall points out in an article that should be must-read on the subject of female heroes.

To name two more prominent counterexamples, I don't consider The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo (heroine of Kill Bill) to be either "masculinized" or over-sexualized, and ditto for Brave's Princess Merida. Granted, I'm approaching film as a male who's over 39 years old, so I'm perfectly willing to admit that my outlook may be tainted by my conditioning in the more savage and archaic periods of my youth.

If JirinPanthosa's point is that Hollywood routinely follows only a few kinds of lowbrow formulas, then that's probably true. All I'm saying in reply is that it's not the case that Hollywood's only way of approaching female action heroes is to masculinize and over-sexualize them, and that's demonstrably so in big, successful films, including contemporary ones.

I agree we should have equal amounts of male and female heroes in film, but I also think that Hollywood's only tool for making women strong is to just masculinize their personality while making sure to still keep them sexy. I'd like to see more strong females who don't clearly spend hours on their hair and aren't necessarily physically attractive, and do more to prove their strength than just acrobatic martial arts.

Oh, and adeptness at martial arts is not an intrinsically male achievement.

I'm averting my eyes from teacake's post, because I still haven't seen The Hunger Games.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

It's not about the Hunger games, it's about Game of Thrones.

 

[BigJake]

To name two more prominent counterexamples, I don't consider The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo (heroine of Kill Bill) to be either "masculinized" or over-sexualized, and ditto for Brave's Princess Merida.

I wouldn't say well-written female characters don't exist. You could add to the above Akeelah from Akeelah and the Bee, Pai from The Whale Rider, Helen and Violet Parr from The Incredibles, and so on, it does happen. The boring "strong female character" or faux-tough "action girl" is still depressingly common, however.

adeptness at martial arts is not an intrinsically male achievement.

Improbable kung fu powers are still a staple of lazily-conceived "strong female character" writing, though.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It's not about the Hunger games, it's about Game of Thrones.

Whew! OK, I'll read it then. I wouldn't want the ending to THG spoiled!

adeptness at martial arts is not an intrinsically male achievement.

Improbable kung fu powers are still a staple of lazily-conceived "strong female character" writing, though.

I'm confused by this. I thought it was a staple of lazily-conceived character writing, period, equally applicable to both male and female characters. Why are improbable kung fu powers somehow less lazily-conceived when male characters possess them, or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?

 

[BigJake]

I'm confused by this. I thought it was a staple of lazily-conceived character writing, period, equally applicable to both male and female characters.

Insofar as the female version frequently involves waifish models throwing down on multiple people twice and three times their size without getting crushed and without the excuse of superpowers, it's often a worse offender for implausibility.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I don't understand how one-man army movies like Rambo III and Commando can get a pass, but fashion models jujitsu-ing supersized wrestlers (like in Charlie's Angels?) can't. How much more implausible than totally implausible can you get?

If the latter is bad, then surely the former is, too, and the problem, as it were, goes beyond stereotypes that moviegoers have about women. It would also have to include stereotypes that moviegoers have about men.

 

[BigJake]

I don't understand how one-man army movies like Rambo III and Commando can get a pass, but fashion models jujitsu-ing supersized wrestlers (like in Charlie's Angels?) can't.

They don't "get a pass." Implausible action is implausible. It's just that the implausibility problem becomes even worse the less able your leads are to physically "sell" the action. (Aside from its being a waste of the opportunity to do something different, interesting or clever with the characters, a waste which is proportionally worse for female characters who don't often enough get that treatment either.)

To give you an example: Ellen Paige in Beyond: Two Souls -- video game, yes, but a "cinematic" one -- has a harder time "selling" the improbable chop-socky elements of the storyline than a Clive Owen or Jason Statham would. This is not a question of its being "realistic" for any of the three of them, just that Ellen's obviously slight frame tossing around groups of large jocks breaks suspension of disbelief more quickly*. OTOH Ellen Paige has convincingly played more interesting types of heroines, cf. Hard Candy**, whose stories and characters don't rely on her having kung fu superpowers.

* This would, incidentally, also apply to attempts to use small and slender male actors the same way in the same circumstances. Except that this is much more rarely attempted.

** Was this post just an excuse to get a plug in for the Best Ellen Paige Movie Evar? Maybe...

 

[Nerys Myk]

Any fictional world were Ralph Macchio can't defeat Billy Zabka is a fictional world I don't want to be part of.

 

[BigJake]

That's different. Ralph Macchio had a superpower.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Of course it's still a fantasy, but, although Daniel was getting fouled, he won on points in sudden death. He didn't have to prove himself outside the ring until the sequel.

 

[Shaka Zulu]

Do we or have had too many male heros at the expense of female heros probably, but the solution is not too to have too many female heroes at the expense of too few male ones. The ideal solution would be for a balance of 1:1 female to male heroes.

Agreed.

The solution is to have whatever amount of male and female heroes are appropriate to the story. And to not always be telling stories that are skewed toward male power fantasies.

The solution is for ladies to get into film and TV more by choosing it as a main career so that they can tell more of said stories.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I don't understand how one-man army movies like Rambo III and Commando can get a pass, but fashion models jujitsu-ing supersized wrestlers (like in Charlie's Angels?) can't. How much more implausible than totally implausible can you get?

If the latter is bad, then surely the former is, too, and the problem, as it were, goes beyond stereotypes that moviegoers have about women. It would also have to include stereotypes that moviegoers have about men.

Both are bad, and both display sexist attitudes: that a man isn't a real man unless he can kick anyone's ass, and a woman isn't a real woman unless everything she does, she does while being sexy.

I certainly wouldn't give one a pass over the other. They both need to go away. In addition to just being lazy, they reinforce negative attitudes about men and women.

 

[Gov Kodos]

I don't understand how one-man army movies like Rambo III and Commando can get a pass, but fashion models jujitsu-ing supersized wrestlers (like in Charlie's Angels?) can't. How much more implausible than totally implausible can you get?

If the latter is bad, then surely the former is, too, and the problem, as it were, goes beyond stereotypes that moviegoers have about women. It would also have to include stereotypes that moviegoers have about men.

...a woman isn't a real woman unless everything she does, she does while being sexy.

There, there is the problem. Commando and Rambo and that genre has always been laughed at, but the laughter never went with rejection of the idea. It's been mocked, arguably Commando is a mockery of the action hero genre though it doesn't really skewer the business in any great way. Women are never taken in any way but to be sexy. They can be desired by folks in the movie and in the audience, but who wants to emulate them either in the movie or the audience? In particular, how many men in the film want to be like the heroine in that film? How many in the audience express such a feeling? That's where I want to see things go.

 

[JarodRussell]

If Rambo wins a fist fight against another dude, it's more believable than a skinny woman winning a fist fight against a 240 lbs guy.

Now the one-man against an army... yeah, it stretches credibility. BUT that's up to chance, not to realism. If Rambo's enemies have bad aim, well yeah. If Rambo has a rocket launcher, he can destroy helicopters. If he has a .50 cal machine gun on an elevated position, he can mow down dozens of surprised soldiers. Rambina, his skinny sister, could do that as just well. That's the important point.

If you get what I mean.


I don't really agree about the sexy argument. Are Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley, and - recently - Neytiri or Ryan Stone sexy?

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I certainly do not think being good at martial arts is a distinctly male trait.

But have you noticed women in films who are good at martial arts are distinctly more acrobatic than men in films who are good at martial arts? And tend to wear distinctly less closing and spend a lot more time in angular poses?

And how many of said strong women actually look like they have muscle tone, and have spent any time at all training for martial arts? They tend to look like they spent more time on their makeup before going into battle than doing pushups. Women who take action roles in films should look just as rough and beat up as the men, they should be just as muscular and, if they know they are going into combat, should not take the time to put on makeup.

And while there certainly are women out there who are super-competitive and violently aggressive, they are statistically less frequent than males possessing the same traits. So just placing those traits on every powerful woman who appears on a screen makes the statement that violence and aggressive competitiveness are the only values that constitute power, which in my opinion, devalues powerful women (And men) who do not possess those traits.

 

[JarodRussell]

I certainly do not think being good at martial arts is a distinctly male trait.

But have you noticed women in films who are good at martial arts are distinctly more acrobatic than men in films who are good at martial arts? And tend to wear distinctly less closing and spend a lot more time in angular poses?

And how many of said strong women actually look like they have muscle tone, and have spent any time at all training for martial arts? They tend to look like they spent more time on their makeup before going into battle than doing pushups. Women who take action roles in films should look just as rough and beat up as the men, they should be just as muscular and, if they know they are going into combat, should not take the time to put on makeup.

And while there certainly are women out there who are super-competitive and violently aggressive, they are statistically less frequent than males possessing the same traits. So just placing those traits on every powerful woman who appears on a screen makes the statement that violence and aggressive competitiveness are the only values that constitute power, which in my opinion, devalues powerful women (And men) who do not possess those traits.

That's a general development. In the 80s, actual martial artists were playing the heroes in action films. Van Damme, Norris, Seagal, Snipes, etc...

Nowadays, actors learn a choreography that makes them look good for the untrained eye. But they don't actually know martial arts.
B movies still have their share of skilled fighters. But not so much the blockbusters.

 

[BigJake]

Women are never taken in any way but to be sexy.

Or rather, with many "action girl" heroines the sexuality comes first and halfway convincing action -- and stories that would showcase it -- still comes second. And even where that isn't the case, the departures from that type mostly just graft male-heroic tropes onto heroines on whom they're ill-fitting instead of actually building the heroine out from the inside as a cohesive character.

That's why Ellen Ripley keeps coming up in these conversations. She's one of far too few examples of the female action heroine really done right, sold as a believable character from the inside out and in just about every action. People admire her regardless of sex because of it.

 

[JarodRussell]

I've watched Commando today again. What a blast.

But isn't the 80s action hero also pretty much a sexual object?
By the end, they all run around oiled up and shirtless. Isn't that somehow equivalent to female action heroes running around in sexy suits or half naked?


From the POV of my girlfriend, films like Thor, Wolverine or Man of Steel are chick flicks. She likes the male form.