My problem with "Girl Power":
First of all, let me say, I have no problem with Girl Power or Woman Power, only that it doesn’t seem to exist in entertainment, or that it’s never quite “powerful” enough. This post is actually about the fact that trying to pick and choose something that actually makes girls look totally badass in entertainment is pretty much utterly fucking impossible.
Lemme start with animated television, then I’ll move into live-action television, then I’ll move into novels, which basically also includes movies:
Let’s start with anime, because the flaws are generally hyper-embedded because of the objectifying culture they’re in. High School DxD is generally a great example of this. It’s a form of ecchi called a “harem” anime, one dude surrounded by a number of women all vying for his love and attention. Only this show is a caricature of that, instead of being the general “respectful nice guy,” the guy is a boob-obsessed pervert (which had I never been an idiotic high school boy, I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate long enough to get to the good part of the show, the badass demon women who not only fight over him like an object, which is a refreshing change of pace, but who face common enemies as well). The problem isn’t just the main character, but the artists, who seem to actually be just as perverted and objectifying of women. While these girls have more agency than any girl in any “Girl Power” show I’ve ever seen, the fact that the artists basically render them into semi-pornographic shots going to and returning from the commercials tells me one thing: The point of this show was for Japanese men to get their rocks off by fetishizing breasts (which seem to follow the physics of water balloons rather than actual boobs anyway). The agency, awesome attitude, and the fact that the writers have the main character be called out for his idiotic perversion regularly, kind of outweigh the faults of this show long enough for me to get through watching it. The focus on his attention is more angry fist-fight than flirtatious and awkward romance that would seem garish and thrown in next to the kicking ass that generally takes place for the rest of the show. Plus the main love interest actually outranks him and everyone else entirely, so she’s pretty much always in charge anyway.
Next on the list are shows like Date A Live and Heaven’s Lost Property, where perverse main character seems to have been traded for “nice guy catching bad raps and beatings for accidentally walking in on girls at the wrong moment.” Of course, the girls aren’t even from our world, so socially their agency is completely removed. They become entirely helpless and subservient while not engaged in battle. While the artists of Heaven’s Lost Property seem to be the same slobbering Japanese men who have never so much as seen large breasts on a woman in person, the Date A Live artists are a little less boob-obsessed, but for this the main character must go on “dates” with these humanoid inter-dimensional alien girls and seal their powers (thus generally removing their agency) by making them fall for him and kissing them at the height of their emotions. Then they become idiotic and subservient until a fight scene where they try to kill each other or contain the most current threat until he can kiss them before they cause a “spatial quake” to blow up half of a city. The subservience vexes me fiercely, to the point where I have more trouble getting through these shows than I do through a show like High School DxD where the main problem of the show, the perversion, is regularly called out in dialogue, and the girl characters kick ass through their own, unrestrained powers, and their ability to find the good in the guy who they know at his heart is one of the Capital G “Good Guys” even if sexually he’s immature, so he’s not such a lowercase g “good guy.” Eventually you’d think he’d have sex with one of them and calm the eff down, but this doesn’t happen because it keeps his perversion getting him into trouble with the girls, and getting him punished as a constant source of slapstick style comic relief.
If you want to talk about rather semi-flawless execution of this without being overly objectifying, I’d say Freezing Season 1, but the fact that Season 2, Freezing: Vibration, became poorly written trash with boob-obsessed artists, yet again, it kind of killed the first season for me completely because the agency was also semi-removed as far as this one went from the start.
Plus shows about alien-y stuff versus demons, and not being afraid to go too far down the road of legends and “God is Dead” sub-plots, High School DxD is kind of a daring show in the genre of Girl Power, though I’m not denying its obvious issues with sometimes borderline-pornographic all the way to semi-rapey levels of objectification and cartoon breast physics. It’s not exactly for the faint of heart.
Let’s move on to Young Justice. An American show for youth, so sexual elements are quashed down to kissing and shitty immature, high school levels of romance where almost all love interests start out as antagonistic. Girl Power exists in this show in episodes like “Secret” and whichever episode in Season 2 pretty much featured Wonder Girl getting told that she sucked by the rest of the all-girl team. Not that these episodes aren’t few and far between. However, my biggest issue with this show, and this fandom, is Miss Martian.
Apart from lying to her teammates because of her true alien appearance, Conner knew almost the entire time that they were dating, if not before. Then, somewhere in the five year gap, she chops or morphs off all of her hair, virtually mind rapes Superboy to try to make him forget something, and then decides that it’s okay to leave victims of interrogation in a vegetative psychic coma. It makes her no better than a villain, and yet the show and the fandom are expected to sympathize or empathize with this self-righteous bag of trash, and many of them still do.
The rest of the girls, I have to leave out of this one, but it robbed the show of a big Girl Power character, the original Girl Power character, the team’s first girl. I hate Miss Martian from the start of Season 2 onward, end of story. Gimme more Babs, Artemis, Zatanna, anybody but Miss M. Fuck that mind-rapey, torture-interrogating, brain-murderer.
Harley Quinn as a sudden Girl Power character, in comics and otherwise, is fucking stupid. I’ve written entire posts on this, and Talia Al Ghul being a rapist isn’t out of character, moving on.
Supergirl. First of all, lemme start wit this: the fact that she’s under Superman, and isn’t called Superwoman, is kind of ridiculous, but they mention this in the show, so I let it slide. Lesbian romance plugs being used for the sake of inclusion and marketing to the SJW crowd is playing to the cheap seats. It’s a gimmick, and it’s not even an original gimmick, because Orange is the New Black has been using it to draw in viewers for the past few years. Especially when you use two actresses who come off as straight girls badly playing a gay romance where there’s no chemistry. By the way, I hate almost every remaining character on Orange is the New Black short of maybe Red and Nikki. Piper is a self-righteous asshole. Alex is a lying sack of shit. This is also the problem I developed with Kara. Lemme first say: giving us Jimmy as Guardian because the Arrow fandom wanted it to be Diggle was cheap, but I rolled with it. Using it as an opportunity to turn Kara, the main character, into a self-righteous, sanctimonious, hypocrite, a trait I cannot tolerate is bullshit (which is one of the reasons I stopped watching Arrow because of BOTH Oliver and Felicity, and was almost ready to stop watching Flash when Barry didn’t want Wally helping. Instead I’m done with Flash because emo Savitar Barry didn’t just jump the shark for me, it jumped the fucking megalodon).
Hypocrisy, let’s just talk about traits that make characters supremely unsympathetic, and often make villains absolutely hate-able. That’s basically it. It makes real life people easy to hate too.
Nobody’s perfect, fine, but let’s also discuss this outfit. It flattens everything womanly about Supergirl until she’s about as feminine as a twelve year old boy in a wig. The reason why I can usually find a way to forgive the objectification from artists and shows that do so is this: I want men and other women to know that they got their ass kicked by a girl or another woman. In the spirit of Anne Bonnie and Mary Reade, women who ripped off their shirts as they slaughtered their enemies to let them know, “You just got your ass whipped by a pair of boobs,” HELL YEAH, that’s some powerful statement shit right there. All of this “dress them like the men” shit does nothing to make women seem equal in that regard. I want women heroes who are as womanly as fucking possible because I don’t want to see two men, or mentally interpret it as two mannish characters beating the shit out of each other because we’ve made the woman hero too masculine. That’s not Girl Power to me, that’s more boy power. So complain about fantasy and sci-if boob plate armor all you like, but I like my Girl Power with feminine traits because otherwise it’s masculine power, and we have enough of that.
Speaking of things I can do without that make me sick to my fucking stomach in Supergirl: Kara’s awkward stupid love life. It all looks forced, it all seems too “notice me senpai.” It’s shit writing, and if she’s gonna romance someone and be a hardened badass, it should be someone who she can spar with, or at least verbally spar with, without it being super awkward like this bullshit ripoff of Superboy they’ve injected into this show. I want banter, I want witty dialogue. I don’t want “Hello human type person,” it’s awkward, it’s not natural, it doesn’t flow. As a matter of fact fuck the romantic sections of all of the CW shows. They’re all Frankenstein’s monster. They’re not their best versions of themselves because they can’t find their equal. It all sucks, and it’s all Gossip Girl level teenage melodrama. I don’t think Berlanti’s writing teams for CW have ever been on an actual date with someone who wasn’t a totally fucking fake individual, in their entire lives. At least the only socially inadequate people on Gotham are Bruce (whose character staple in the BatFam IS being socially inadequate), Ed, and Oswald (who’re that way because it ups the creep factor). Nobody on any of his CW shows seems to know how to have a conversation that isn’t super fucking awkward and either angst or plot driven.
Now we’ve strayed, back to the issue at hand: Girl Power. Novels. Twilight (the girl who gets too “notice me senpai” about her vampire stalker/abuser), Gone Girl (the girl who’s a fucking creepy villain), Fifty Shades (the bad Twilight ripoff that shows abuse as BDSM, when it definitely isn’t), Beautiful Creatures and Hunger Games. Okay, here’s where we need to talk.
Beautiful Creatures, seemingly written for people like me who like the love stories between the main character and the main love interest in an ecchi harem anime, and who thinks the rest of the characters and side stories can fuck off, who prefers magic and dark and mysterious forces over aliens, and who loves history. So where’s my problem? THE SERIES. This is actually a bigger problem for my fiancée than it is for me, but it was still a problem for me, nonetheless. Book 2, and part of Book 3. I forget their titles, I don’t really care about what they were, if you do, look it up. “Lemme use another guy to push you away, and tell you that I don’t love you, so that I can save you,” THIS. STUPID. FUCKING. SUB-PLOT. CAN. EAT. AN. ENTIRE. BAG. OF. SWEATY. SHIT-STAINED. ASSHOLES. I mean it. Let’s make her do something so unsympathetic, so dumb, that you basically hate her, and he tries to hate her, to betray her in return, and he can’t make himself do it. Like, this dude is a fucking trooper, and while one of the objectives of the authors was to write a book about a nice guy, who wasn’t such an abusive jerk, like Edward Cullen, they wrote a book series with a girl who was an abusive jerk instead. There’s a reason that Ridley and Link continue the story after the good guys win and the bad guys lose beyond there being no story left for Ethan: Lena sucks. Sorry, but her “Girl Power” went out the window the moment she started with that “I’m gonna martyr myself, I’m gonna cheat on you, I’m too weak to fight my dark side” bullshit.
Hunger Games: First of all let’s start with the idea that a girl has to be stripped of agency to be forged in fire into being a badass. Let’s kill her Dad, cripplingly debilitate her Mom. Here’s Katniss Everdeen: Post-Apocalyptic Batman with a bow and arrow. Let’s ignore the need to shove this conversation into the future as well. Let’s also throw in unnecessary Peeta and Gale sub-plots and an epilogue where she bore Peeta children that sounds like it was written by the the same writer as Twilight.
This is my problem: There’s always a problem with “Girl Power” be it objectification (either through too much perverse and rapey fixation on nudity, like High School DxD, or too much covering of feminine traits, like Supergirl), Hypocrisy (Supergirl, Orange is the New Black), removal of Agency (Date A Live, Heaven’s Lost Property, Hunger Games), or idiocy, betrayal, and self-martyrdom (Beautiful Creatures, and at points again, Orange is the New Black). As a writer, I suppose I find the least objectionable of these to be the anime where the perversion is called out, because at least it’s called out with words, in naturally flowing dialogue, with girls who have agency and kick ass, and who generally aren’t unwarrantedly abusive or self-martyring douchebags in other ways. But the fact that I have to watch THROUGH the perversion is still a huge issue.
My problem with Girl Power is that it always has a downfall, though. My problem with Girl Power is that it isn’t powerful enough, or that it ventures into looking and feeling too masculine to rightly be called any type of female or feminine power, or it’s not powerfully written enough, its agency removed, its dialogue forced, its male counterpart an objectifying douchebag, its empowered character a self-righteous hypocrite.
I write because I need Girl Power, real Girl Power, in my life AND in my fiction.
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