The other night, I was watching the Nickelodeon teen show I Carly with my kids. It's usually a pretty decent show, but it has a strain of ugliness in one of its characters that really came out full force in this episode. Carly's best friend, Sam, is a girl who is constantly portrayed as a physical threat to everyone. She is not big. She is thin. She doesn't look to be into bodybuilding at a very early age. In short, it's ludicrous to suggest she could easily beat up almost any male. But that is just what this program regularly shows her doing. In celebration of her birthday, all her friends lovingly recount the past times when she has physically assaulted and/or beaten up someone. Eventually, she begins to feel sad and rather unfeminine, and vows to change. Nice idea, but by the end of the show she attacks and overpowers a much, much larger female bully.
This has been a consistent theme in movies and television for many years now. In fact, I would say that females beating up males has been the single most enduring theme coming out of Hollywood for at least a decade. This isn't played for comedy any longer, as it was in the days when Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble would beat up Fred and Barney, or when Mary Tyler Moore would beat up Dick Van Dyke. In those days, there had to be a "gimmick" utilized to explain the obvious improbability of smaller women overpowering larger men. Usually, as was the case with shows like The Flintstones and The Dick Van Dyke Show, this was because the women had been trained in judo or karate, which was then becoming in vogue.
Now, the female characters simply are able to punch out a larger male, and no questions are asked. The females are almost always the pretty, thin, super model-types Hollywood regularly employs. On the rare occasions when a fat or large boned woman does the beating up, then it is done for comic effect. The females are not merely defending themselves from male ogres, either; more often than not, they appear to actually be looking for a physical fight. They wear the same mean spirited, I-don't-take-any-shit expressions that nearly all actresses seem to wear nowadays, and often they start the fights. Well, it's not usually much of a fight, because the man usually is knocked cold (or at least down) with one mighty feminine blow. The Lois Lane character on the otherwise excellent show Smallville is one such bully character. She has been beating up men, often armed (once she overpowered a huge SWAT team member in full gear), with nothing more than her pretty fists and her magical, flying-Matrix-like drop kicks. This lady looks for trouble, all the time. She is the aggressor, not some neanderthal male trying to paw at her. Despite this disturbing character flaw (which in all reality should cause her to be reported to the authorities as a menace to society), she is well liked by all the other characters on the show. The audience is supposed to like her, too.
This female-as-aggressor campaign has been especially prominent on children's television shows. There are countless examples. On The Rugrats, Angelica was the physically dominant child, always bullying the others. On other nicktoons like Doug, Patti Mayonaise was the best athlete and could clearly beat up the boys, and on Spongebob Squarepants, Sandy Squirrel was the toughest creature in Bikini Bottom. On the otherwise entertaining Nickelodeon teen show Drake And Josh, the same actress who plays the lead in I Carly, Amanda Cosgrove, then a very young girl, bullies and utterly dominates her older teenage brothers. She beats them up frequently, and they are terrified of her. The character is completely odious, with not a single redeeming quality (not to even mention the impossibility of the tiny child being a physical terror to her much older brothers), yet she never gets her comeuppance and is portrayed positively. Again, the audience is supposed to like this little monster.
In the otherwise brilliant Batman The Animated Series and Superman The Animated Series cartoons, these elements were still recurring. The Joker's new female accomplice, Harley Quinn, was an exceptional fighter and in fact can beat up everyone except Batman. Lex Luthor, Superman's arch enemy, actually has a female bodyguard. Since Harley Quinn was, for all intents and purposes, Joker's bodyguard, we have the completely impossible portrayal of two of the world's greatest criminal masterminds hiring small (yes, they are both cartoon versions of the super-model-like actress) females to protect them. I'm sorry, but I don't believe anyone would hire a female bodyguard unless they were forced to. In yet another excellent cartoon series by the same creative team, Justice League, the character of Hawk Girl is ridiculously over the top in terms of aggressiveness and looking for fights (which superheroes are not supposed to be doing). In the short lived television series Birds Of Prey, the female characters, though none possessed true super powers, were so aggressive and unconvincing with their Matrix-like flying drop kicks, and willingness to kick male butt at the drop of a hat, that one invariably ended up rooting for the criminals.
I'm very selective about the new movies I watch, but I see commercials for upcoming films on television all the time. Without fail, almost all of them include the obligatory clip of some 100 lb. actress punching a hapless, much bigger male. Why? What is the sense of pushing this patently absurd notion so consistently for so long? I've greatly enjoyed the Harry Potter films, but in one of them, the lead female character, young Hermione, unleashes a mighty punch at the much bigger and older male teen Malfoy, who falls like he was hit by a ton of bricks. He then whimpers on the ground, as the tiny girl towers over him menacingly. I thought it would have been a bit ridiculous for Harry himself to have punched out the much bigger Malfoy, but apparently it was quite believable for Hermione to do so. I'm all for girl power, and for women being able to defend themselves, but what message are we sending when we all supposedly teach our kids that fighting is wrong, but every girl and woman on television is free to punch men whenever they want?
Another recent episode of I Carly featured the lead character, by some truly ridiculous plot twists, ending up in the ring with a renowned female MMA fighter. What? I didn't even know there was such a thing as mixed martial arts fighting for women, and think the entire phenomenon is just another sick indication of the collapse of civilization, but who in their right mind promotes such a thing on a television show that lots of children watch? But then again, when women aren't punching out men in the movies, they're punching each other out in the ring. Witness the inexplicable popularity of Million Dollar Baby a few years ago. As recently as the 1970s, any woman who made a living as a boxer would have been considered totally uncouth and trashy. Certainly, no one would have considered it sexy, let alone respectable. We ought to be seeking the abolition of brutal "sports" like boxing, not pushing women into it, or creating even bloodier, ultimate fighting games.
Much of this is tied to the dark side of feminism; instead of forcing men to be more sensitive and less brutish and aggressive, we are now seeing more belligerent, in-your-face females. That is hardly a cultural advance, in my view. Aggressiveness is not an attractive quality, and anyone who looks to engage in fisticuffs at any age should be reprimanded. Any grown adult who physically fights others should be shunned as a cretin, not cheered and respected.
Curiously, while female aggressiveness and fighting prowess has been lauded and promoted nonstop onscreen, males are now consistently portrayed as submissive, indecisive wimps. Whether it's a sitcom, where all fathers are dumber than the youngest child and can be beaten up by the youngest female, or the action adventure where any 100 lb. female is a natural leader and able to punch out any male, regardless of size, the message is strong and clear. Males are not as smart or strong as females. That's just as socially damaging as portraying women as scatter brained and unfit for anything other than cooking and housework.
An even more dangerous aspect of all this bizarre propaganda is the new trend of portraying super model-type females as being capable of overpowering and beating up fully armed males. Think of this message; ladies, if someone is holding a gun on you (well, at least if it's a male), you should attempt a flying Matrix-drop kick, which the male will always fall for and result in you being able to then punch him out. If any females out there are swallowing this nonsense, and actually try to disarm males in this way, please remember that things don't work that way in the real world. Maybe if a few women die because of this preposterous message, then Hollywood will ease off a bit.
We've also seen, on You Tube and similar Internet sites, a recent spate of young girls physically attacking each other. My children tell me that physical fights between girls now occur regularly after school. This simply didn't happen in the past. I'm not that old, but any high school girl who fought with another girl in my day would have been ostracized by her peers. She would be shunned by others, and not considered attractive by boys. No parent would consider it appropriate for their child to hang around someone like that. We need to start stigmatizing that kind of behavior again, instead of glorifying it in movies and television. There is no question in my mind that these fights are happening because females have been absorbing all that propaganda from Hollywood for many years.
Positive female role models are a good and necessary thing. Wimpy, indecisive males can be funny. However, there are some males who are smart, strong and able to easily win, in the unlikely (and irrational) event of a physical altercation with a female. Hopefully, there are still a lot of females out there who don't accept the notion that fisticuffs is a viable alternative for them. I don't want to use the antiquated term unladylike, so let's just say that it's uncivilized.
Enjoy your movies and television shows, but recognize the propaganda.
