The other night, watching one of these feminist infused action shows with yet another tiny female adept at taking down a room full of men twice her size, inspired this social media status:
The proliferation of these female-driven over-the-top action movies/shows surely increased the female stunt double industry to never before achieved job opportunities!
#feminismofthenewmillenneum 🤦♀️
#getwoke 🙄
#theyaintgoingbroke 🤑
To be clear, I am a huge action fan and I have been for as long as I can remember. As a youth, I loved watching Batman, The 6 million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dukes of Hazzard, Kung Fu, Knight Rider, The A-Team, MacGyver, and a slew of other 70s and 80s shows that largely featured women as either the damsel in distress, the honey pot, the love interest and/or some combination of all of those. Now I’ll grant you Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman were three notable TV exceptions and a standing ovation for how they developed Sarah Conner’s character in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (although by the time that happened it was already the 90s) — as they said back then, “you’ve come a long way, baby!*” and she did evolve in T2 from the sweet Sarah we saw in the original The Terminator.
Sarah Conner may well be the first, biggest, realistic female action hero to hit the big screens who had no magic or super powers and was grounded in an earthly sense of genuine human actions, although Ripley, who came earlier, surely was a badass except Alien is more a horror movie than an action movie and while the sequel Aliens was more action than horror, it grossed 1/4 of T2. Along with a few additional super heroines littered in various Saturday morning cartoons, as an avid Star Wars fan, I’ll give a nod to the meager efforts they made with Leia. I never saw her as an action hero, rather, an empowered female which is different for me, and frankly, if they wanted her to be an action hero in the Star Wars galaxy they could have done so much more with the story line and made her a Jedi as opposed to a few scenes where she played a strong female like the famous escape into the garbage disposal or when, scantily clad in Return of the Jedi, she strangles Jabba the Hutt. Sorry Leia, I love you, but you’re not much of an action hero particularly whilst being slut shamed by Jabba. (How long will it take cancel culture to ban that, I have to wonder.)
Still, we have come a long way in these last 40 years! These days it’s tough to turn on a show or watch a movie where the female lead is anything other than empowered — so much so, it’s almost embarrassing for the men. (In some cases, I think the male characters are embarrassing, but that’s a post for another day.) Along with the proliferation of these increasingly common tiny women who are somehow alleged to be masterful enough fighters to take down gangs of people on their own are a slew of shows portraying teens who occur to me as pawns of woke culture where the dialogue seems to touch on issues facing adult situations more than teen reality. Then again, maybe I’m out of touch and shows where high school juniors have sex regularly represents the norm, woke culture is part of freshman life, and girls and women really don’t need men for anything other than sperm donation. If that’s really so, we’ve got a grim future ahead of us, methinks.
As a kid, I didn’t think too much about watching more male action stars than females and I didn’t look at it as sexism because back then, women were still learning how to come to terms with the liberty the Civil Rights movement garnered them. Madonna showing her midriff was scandalous when the Like a Virgin video premiered and society was distinctly different back then. People were more modest — in their attire, their language and I dare say their interpersonal connections. Back then, women didn’t assume a man to be sexist for opening a door for them. In fact, it was considered polite and a woman might opt to not relate with a man if he didn’t open a door because it showed he lacked the necessary pedigree to truly respect a woman. Oh how times have changed!
Women asked for it, and we got it. We got our shorter skirts, plunging shirts, increased paying jobs and our independence. Along with that came the need for better self care and self defense, a tough subject addressed with the critically acclaimed late 80s Jodie Foster movie, The Accused. Not for the faint of heart, this movie, loosely based on a true story, portrays the story of a woman, played by Foster, gang raped and the consequences that follow the graphically portrayed incident that takes place in a bar over a pinball machine. The performance brought to the forefront some of the harsh reality of being a single woman in this new era of women’s liberation, especially in a time where crime was higher in places like New York City.
A few days ago, I was looking at a meme where it outlined a series of safety precautions that women are trained to take when moving through the world like holding their keys between their fingers and being prepared to key the face of an attacker. The person who shared it conveyed upset that it was necessary. I, on the other hand, felt a relief in seeing it. My friend’s objection seemed to stem from the fact that it was addressed towards women and that men didn’t need to take the same precautions, as if to indicate some sort of sexism in that.
I however view this quite differently. We have become so complacent in our cushy first world lives in this incredible time of history that we take for granted humans are all part animal. We may want to act like we’ve collectively transcended our very base nature but it’s not hard to imagine that all falling away and society devolving into a Mad Max kind of world. We have now reached the point where humans currently are the undeniable apex predator on the planet which means that while the vast majority of us act in a civilized manner, some percentage of us do act like the predators that we are. Perhaps that’s an uncomfortable thought, yet, it’s accurate.
What’s a human to do? I for one had to come to terms with the reality that it was my responsibility to defend my life. That may seem like an outlier sentiment yet it reflects the truth of what I’ve seen in this life. None of us know when a predator is going to come for us, be it over a pinball machine in a bar, a dark street at 10 PM while walking to your car, or a home invasion.
There’s a reason we are the apex predators on the planet: predation is part of the human condition. We, like all animals, must consume life to live life which means we must kill to survive. Sure, the vegans can claim they only kill plants so that might feel a lot less predacious than killing animals, and, it’s still predatory in nature. (The poor plants can’t even run away, after all.) As such, I think what a human benefits in reconciling is to get in right relationship with the reality that it is their responsibility to defend their own lives which, in a very morbid sense, could mean killing another human to live on. Yes, that sounds extreme and more and more so each day as the world becomes more civilized overall… and, when it comes down to it, we all have to ask ourselves:
Would I kill another human to defend my life if that level of force was necessary?
For me it was a huge milestone in my development to recognize that truth — not just the wisdom of asking the question, but the deeper truth: that I would kill another human to defend my life if I needed. I certainly don’t want to extinguish another human’s life. That said, I feel incredibly clear I would fight to my dying breath to prevent myself from being raped again… even if that meant having to extinguish their life in the process.
Grim? Maybe. Realistic? Absolutely. And owning that has empowered me moving through the world more than I could have possibly imagined as a younger, more innocent version of myself.
Having said all this, I would think I would be excited to see the proliferation of female action stars. And, for a time I absolutely was. When it seemed like the characters made sense and the action scenes didn’t seem overly exaggerated, I found it fun and engaging. However, over the last few years, I’ve seen an increasing number of shows and movies where it seems a little too contrived and designed to push a narrative that leaves me curious about the impact to young women especially and society as a whole. Frankly, I find myself left with a series of questions:
- Do women think they need to be superheroes in order to take care of themselves?
- Will these portrayals leave women thinking they have a capacity that most do not as women on average, are the smaller, slower, and weaker sex?
- Do they feel more empowered seeing scenes that make no sense where 120 pound women are regularly fighting off four or more 200 pound man who have more size, strength, and speed?
- Is this realistic in any way?
- Is it supposed to be realistic?
- Is this in some way more destructive to women’s culture by presenting a sense of combat that is nonsensical?
- Are we capable, as a society, of recognizing biological differences do separate the sexes and that is perfectly acceptable?
- Will this sometimes pathological desire to create equality lead to harmful results if we continue to deny the reality of biological differences?
- Is this really just a question of where one’s uncanny valley lies?
I don’t have the answers to all these questions. What I do know is that I’m not enjoying this trend overall that seems to be disproportionately boasting the capabilities of women in ways that often make me roll my eyes and laugh and not because it’s supposed to be a comedy. Sure, as a bisexual woman, I do get a thrill watching fantastical, cheesy shows like Wynona Earp where, like so many other hip shows, there’s an increasing number of lipstick lesbian action characters. At the same time, all too often I find myself cringing at the near impossibility of what I’m witnessing on screen where the show or movie becomes more of a joke than a joy. Maybe I haven’t gotten with the woke programming like the cultural prescription dictates. Or, maybe — and to my mind, more likely — they don’t portray all these characters as well as they did with The Old Guard’s Andromache of Scythia. Maybe it’s closed minded of me to think a female warrior at least 2300 years old with multiple millennium of experience has the capacity to take out groups of armed fighters, usually with trained warriors at her side, as compared to, say, the mother turned vigilante in Peppermint who single handedly enacted revenge upon countless “bad guys” with 5 years of training. Maybe that’s closed minded… or… maybe it’s logical.
Meanwhile, back to the original status up top… I was disappointed when I realized that this get woke culture sadly hasn’t done as much for the female stunt double industry as I had thought especially given my belief that it was the biggest saving grace of this woke feminism infecting entertainment media. It turns out that while these opportunities may be proliferating as the female action roles increase, women aren’t always getting the parts because opportunities for women stunt doubles have been hindered by the practice of men donning wigs and doing the stunts themselves. The wigging article is a few years old and the ruling was in favor of the women but as you can see from the numbers, there’s still a lot of room for women.
Since then, I hope the trend of the past few years in media has helped swell the ranks of female stunt doubles. At least one positive inspiration emerged in this amazing performance on American Ninja Warrior where the extraordinary stunt performer Jessie Graff (who is the stunt double for Supergirl) made history as the first woman to complete the course.
*I can’t not comment on the Virginia Slims ad I referenced above: do you know they used to run cigarette ads on TV? If you didn’t peek above, check out this sexist ad — for a woman’s cigarette — which I’d bet by most women’s measure back then was quite progressive. Of course the right might have said progressive as an accusation while the left might have seen it as hip. Fascinating how culture changes, isn’t it? Not to mention the fact that they don’t run cigarette ads on TV anymore.