How I take my heroines

Oh man. Look at this. Zero followers to six in a matter of days. Nyes. Everything is falling into place. Today the Internet, tomorrow the world! MUAHAHAHAHA. Well, maybe that's a stretch. I'll pencil world domination in for next week and we'll see how it goes.

Anyway, back in high school, I had an English teacher that used to get mad at me for referring to female protagonists, or female leads as "the heroine." He claimed it was antiquated and sexist. I countered that it was in the interest of preventing confusion since I couldn't refer to two separate characters by the same term and really, is it sexist to call a female monarch a queen? His response was to kick me out of class. What an open minded fellow. In any event, while I stood in the hall I thought about female characters in stories and coined a new term for my own usage...that use being to annoy my pompous teacher. The term was "a man with breasts." I use the term to refer to a female character who never sounds or acts, well, like a woman. A character whose woman-ness doesn't effect the plot in the slightest.

Please note that by this I don't mean that a woman should cry or be helpless or whatever. But men and women do act in different ways. Yet it's really not uncommon to see women acting in an either masculine or neutral fashion in many stories. It leads inexorably to the conclusion that the only reason the character is a woman at all is for the sake of titillation. Allow me to elucidate, and for the sake of making this easy, I'm going to use movies which are more obvious about it, and of which far fewer are produced per year so there will be a greater chance that you'll be familiar with the source material.

Take on the one hand Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux. So, okay, attractive woman wearing skin tight outfits beating the hell out of people. A fine start. Unfortunately, that's about all there is. Gunfire and explosions and stealth and crazy future gadgets. There really isn't a plot for the first half of the movie. When one is introduced, it's dumb. Really dumb. Held together by a thread. Generic dystopian sci-fi world. Last human city. Recycled DNA. Evil dictator. Blah, blah, blah. Not an original thought involved. Information is dropped on you from nowhere, then disappears. And even Charlize, the lead, and her leading man have characters with virtually no personality. Inscrutable. Their actions and their words frequently don't line up and we don't see a reason for either. They attempt to justify everything with "the power of love!" but it never really goes anywhere, hardly effects what they do, and isn't introduced until most of the way through the movie, much of which is spent having Charlize Theron duel other attractive women of various ethnic minorities. I mean, of course she's got the attractive black friend/rival. Some people like chocolate, you know?

On the other hand, consider Lt. Ripley of the original Aliens trilogy. Don't mention Resurrection or I will hurt you. Badly. Those movies make perfectly clear that Ripley is a woman. There's no mystery there. And it actually matters. People who don't want to take her orders because they don't take her seriously. In the third movie, she crash lands on a prison colony, making her the only woman for who knows how many millions of miles. She's not the virtually silent, totally inscrutable super human Charlize was. She has an actual personality. Which is why it's even cooler when she kicks ass. Because when the shit hits the fan, who takes on the aliens? Ripley! Never is this more obvious than in the second movie. There is a male lead of sorts, but he's very much in the background and it's Ripley who saves him, not the other way around. There's a "man with breasts" as a supporting character. I have to believe that was an intentional move to show you just how much more remarkable Ripley is. Then, there's a human child who survives an alien attack who Ripley feels a motherly relation towards. So she charges straight into the alien den like a madwoman and starts ripping up the joint. And in one of the coolest climactic scenes ever filmed in an action movie, Ripley wrestles the queen alien out of an airlock using only her mundane skill at piloting these big exoskeletons they use to move cargo and her determination to protect her leading man and foster daughter.

See, now that's a woman. And one who kicks ass, too. So much the better. If all I wanted was a man with breasts...well, I'm a chubby boy. I can look in the mirror any time. On a related note, coworker and blog followe Linda Epstein specifically requested I talk about wrestling in my next post because she knows I hate it. Well, I'm eager to please, but I'm more Monkey's Paw than Genie of the lamp. Ripley Vs. the Queen Alien is the closest I'm going to get.