by black lily (Tue Jan 12, 2010)
Little girls growing up in a
world full of gender inequities don't always have the same, immediate access to
powerful images of our strength as our male counterparts. Don't get me
wrong - sheroes are out there, if we look for them. One of my most
treasured personal possessions is a children's book called ‘Changing Woman and Her Sisters: Stories of
Goddesses from Around the World.' In this collection, bold
author Katrin Hyman Tchana, shares inspiring tales
of strong women from both real and mythological history. Stories that make
little girls sit up straighter and feel their innate worth. But I want more.
What we don't have with very much
frequency or depth, are female action heroes. The sort of pop culture,
blockbuster, ‘she just saved the day' (or the world) type of validation that
boys get all day, every day. It can make a girl so hungry for confirmation of
the existence of feminine power that she blindly gobbles up the few, flawed
images available to her; images which are often cheesy, sexist or blatantly
misogynist. But, they're all we have and, if you're hungry for validation of
female strength (and, oh - I am, I am), you end up taking what you can get.
For me, it meant that, as a
little girl, I lived for shows like ‘Charlie's
Angels,' ‘Wonder Woman'
and ‘The Bionic Woman.' Sure it
bothered me that these sheroes didn't look much like the women I knew, but they
were the only thing going, so I held onto Jaime Sommers like a life raft. As I
got older, the women's movement began to have more influence on the culture at
large, and more subtle, complex images of female power hit the screen; films
like ‘Girlfight' and ‘Alien' definitely changed the game and became essential
to my personal canon of faves. But, as far as most blockbuster flicks
went? There was usually a ‘catch' that came along with the enjoyment. Either
the heroine had to be fetishized in a slightly, or overtly misogynistic way -
with sexploitative costuming adorning
the perfect bods of Cat Woman, Elektra, Aeon Flux, Bandidas, Lara Croft and La
Femme Nikita, or she had to be ‘Pseudo
Dude,' a muscle-bound, thinly disguised copy of male power and
testosterone-ridden action stars (‘G.I. Jane' and ‘Terminator 2'). What was
missing for me from the sheroe game, especially in the big-time movie biz, were
images of women whose strength emanated from their femaleness.
That is........until I recently went
to see ‘Avatar'
and, let me tell you, I was knocked off my stilettos, girls. I'd heard the
buzz, so I was expecting great special effects and the big-budget, Hollywood ‘shock
and awe' thing. What I wasn't expecting was to find such a beautiful depiction
of female strength and power, which rang true to my own experiences and
beliefs. I'm not suggesting that the sheroe Neytiri is a ‘realistic'
character, by any means (she's a 10-foot tall, blue-skinned, extra-terrestrial
who rides flying dragons, for crying out loud). But, I am saying that the
qualities that make her admirable, noble and powerful are the same
qualities that I associate with true female strength.
Look, it may be reductive, but I
definitely think that women's strength is forged from a very different kind of
metal than that of men. The women I've known, loved, watched and admired have a
quiet strength which emanates from compassion, love and interconnectedness. It's
wise, it's intuitive, it's soft, but it's super-fierce and it's strong, all the
same. Believe that! The women I call role models have been truly human
warriors; women who work two and three jobs to feed their children when ‘daddy'
disappears into the ether, women who take suicidal, sexually abused children
into their homes and love them back into
life again. I'm a witness. So, thanks to Neytiri for representing us properly
and for reminding us that the ultimate in feminine strength comes from the
courage to love and to honor the inter-connectedness of all things.
Oh yeah, and the girlie is pretty handy with
a bow and arrow too!
