Flipping the Switch - Are we done with kick-ass women?
Didn’t it feel like a switch got flipped and suddenly, the media fed us a steady diet of women as kick-ass characters? We had Sydney Bristow of Alias, the Stieg Larsson series The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, et al, or Marvel’s Jessica Jones. This next-gen group of flawed and damaged female heroes can shoot, fight, run the corporation, and manage the jury trial. They don’t faint and they give more injuries than they receive. Their stories are all about women taking their power and one-upping any man who dares to stand in their way. They live in a man’s world but operate in their own realm. At least part of their message? Change is gonna come, and fast.
This point was highlighted for me while I was editing essays written by the high school journalists from Teens in Print. One writer, commenting about the need for authors to better represent girls in Middle-grade and Young Adult books, uses the example of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. Katniss can handle a bow and arrow, she’s got steely wits, she follows the hero’s journey. She’s like any male character except -she’s not male. The Teens in Print writer wants to know - What’s wrong with being a girl? She then references a New York Times article: I Don’t Want to be the Strong Female Lead, by Brit Marling, a filmmaker, writer and actor who writes the following:
the more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power.
These are not the top-level attributes that women go to when they want to draw on their own sources of strength. Women are challenged by the idea that the pathways to achievement parallel the aspirations of men. (It should be more fully acknowledged that these pathways bring men their own limitations, burdens and stresses.)
Marling struggles with the question of how to bring truly “free” female characters into being. How do writers write women without objectifying them or co-opting the ill-fitting structure of the male inspired hero’s journey?
Speculative fiction seems a better genre fit, where world building is malleable to the ideas of a new order, one in which the lives of women are not shackled by expectations and constrained by what came before. Women’s lives can be completely reimagined in the context of The Power, or The Handmaid’s Tale because the character is the product of the world the writer creates.
Marling’s Netflix series, The OA, an engrossing show about an empathic young woman, imagines the impact of “feminine” strengths and how these might redefine society’s values around gender roles. Women’s power might one day be derived from the qualities of nurturing, intuitiveness, and empathy, strengths worthy of being elevated to that of a strong female lead.
Catch The OA on Netflix and look for the next issue of Teens In Print here.
