The recent release of Disney’s big-budget adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time was a critical and box office disappointment. However, the film, along with Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, have been noted for possibly signaling a shift to more diverse choices among Hollywood decision makers and audiences in what they’ll accept with casting lead roles. The industry is still one where less than a quarter of films have a female lead, and still trying to adjust in a post-Weinstein new #MeToo environment. With A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle’s main theme centers on the triumph of accepting differences over the conformity of what someone, or something, believes life should be. And the main character of Meg does not fit in and accept the social roles expected of being a “girl.” So, with this in mind and the decision to have the character played by Storm Reid, much has been written about not only a movie with a female lead, but also a lead of color, since “black women’s anger is policed even more fiercely and more stringently than the anger of white women.”
The novel has a place in my heart since it was the first work of literature I became aware of as literature, since my fourth grade teacher read from it for an hour a day every day. Little did 9-year-old me know the novel I was listening to had been rejected over two dozen times by publishers before finding a home. According to L’Engle, the general criticism of the story she heard was it was too complex, especially for children, and too uncertain as to what kind of story it is (e.g., science fiction or fantasy). But another aspect of the rejections was the concept of having a female lead character in fictional genres where those characters are expected to be male. Would an audience accept the hopes, dreams and ambitions of a girl?
That was in the 1960s, but much of those biases still plague our society here in the 21st century. The recent concerns over Nancy Pelosi’s impact on Democratic congressional chances has been predicated on the former speaker of the House’s negative public image. But why does that image exist? It would be easy to write it off as just another example of negative Republican media messaging doing its damage, but is it more than just that? Some argue there might be something more ingrained and fundamentally sexist, where visible aspects of female ambition engender negative reactions in contrast to their male counterparts. If true, this not only has implications for women in politics and business, but also perceptions of women throughout society, and how they’re depicted (or wish to be depicted) in media. It also opens up a chicken or egg debate over whether these perceptions are fed by media, or if the media is reflection of those already ingrained biases.
From Peter Beinart at The Atlantic:
In addition to being a masterful legislative tactician, the 77-year-old Pelosi is, in Politico’s words, “the most successful nonpresidential political fundraiser in U.S. history.” Yet many of her colleagues want her gone. In November 2016, almost a third of House Democrats voted to depose her as leader. Another coup attempt erupted last summer. Why so much discontent with a woman who has proved so good at her job? Maybe because many Democrats think Pelosi’s unpopularity undermines their chances of winning back the House. Why is she so unpopular? Because powerful women politicians usually are. Therein lies the tragedy. Nancy Pelosi does her job about as well as anyone could. But because she’s a woman, she may not be doing it well enough.
Gender scholars would not be surprised. For a 2010 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto showed study participants the fictional biographies of two state senators, identical except that one was named John Burr and the other Ann Burr. (I referred to this study in an October 2016 article for this magazine called “Fear of a Female President.”) When quotations were added that described the state senators as “ambitious” and possessing “a strong will to power,” John Burr became more popular. But the changes provoked “moral outrage” toward Ann Burr, whom both men and women became less willing to support.
Nancy Pelosi, by leading her party in Congress, has become Ann Burr. A woman can serve in Congress without being perceived as overly ambitious. By climbing to the top of the greasy pole, however, Pelosi has made her ambition visible. She has gained the power to tell her male colleagues what to do. (The pollster Celinda Lake notes that most ads attacking Pelosi show her speaking, not listening.) She has put herself, to quote the anti-Ossoff ad, “in control.” For John Burr, this wouldn’t be a problem. As the management professors Ekaterina Netchaeva, Maryam Kouchaki, and Leah Sheppard noted in a 2015 paper, Americans generally believe “that leaders must necessarily possess attributes such as competitiveness, self-confidence, objectiveness, aggressiveness, and ambitiousness.” But “these leader attributes, though welcomed in a male, are inconsistent with prescriptive female stereotypes of warmth and communality.” In fact, “the mere indication that a female leader is successful in her position leads to increased ratings of her selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness.”
In almost all respects of life, confidence and strength are character traits people respond to—whether it’s a leader outlining a plan of action, or someone trying to sell their attraction in order to get a date. But for women, show too much strength and get called a bitch, or act too nice and be regarded as weak. People start talking about the right ways to talk and laugh—with no way to please the usually male judges of proper enunciation and chuckling—or deem the style of a woman’s hair as being more important than the substance of the words coming out of her mouth. Of course, we’re also a society that values a pretty face and uses images of women in various states of undress to sell almost everything. Anyone who doesn’t fit the ideal gets comments about their “cankles” in order to devalue and demean. But don’t show too much skin, or be too sexual, otherwise risk being criticized as a slut or a whore.
All of these slights and indignities are meant to keep a segment of the population in what’s thought to be their proper place. And what are those places? I’ve written about this before, but in general women in media tend to be stereotyped in certain archetypes which actresses are relegated to portraying over and over again.
I usually like to reference Star Trek any chance I can get. It’s been a part of popular culture for more than a half century, has been probably one of the most progressive visions of humanity on television and in film during that time, and it’s interesting to see how it reflects the culture at certain points. Star Trek: Voyager was the first instance in the franchise where a female was the lead character, with most of the headlines when the series premiered in the mid 1990s highlighting this fact when considering Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Kathryn Janeway.
Some reviews wondered openly whether having a woman at the center of things might make things too “emotional” or “too soft” for Star Trek fans. And even current evaluations of the show can drift into arguing the Janeway character is a moralizing busy-body as “interested in prancing around in frilly dresses on the holodeck as she is in leading her crew.”
What’s more interesting about Voyager is how it can be seen as a case of good intentions of depicting diversity devolves into something which now comes off as dated and in some ways offensive. The character of Chakotay (Robert Beltran) was the show’s attempt to have a Native American perspective in Star Trek, but in a lot of ways it almost separates Native Americans from humanity, since it depicts the culture as being influenced by ancient aliens and having spiritual powers. Janeway’s characterization is also problematic, since one gets the feeling watching the episodes that the writers involved tried to overcompensate for the potential of the “too soft” criticism by making her almost always right, willing to blow things up and be hard as nails, and always have the characters reflect on how great and right Janeway is. The result is the Janeway character doesn’t really have an arc over the course of the series. Contrast this with how Deep Space Nine treated Avery Brooks’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, the first African-American lead of a Star Trek series, where Sisko has some very notable flaws at given points but his perseverance through them is how the series establishes part of the story’s journey.
All of this becomes a reflection of prevalent attitudes in society and the media we consume. And certain stereotypes take hold.
- The Uptight Bitch: Any female character who’s the counterpoint and main antagonist of the fun-loving guys at the center of a story. In a lot of films from the 1970s and 1980s, there's a weird tendency for the uptight female antagonist to be redeemed through sex. Basically all the female antagonist needs is for someone, usually a manly man, to pleasure her properly and she stops being so mean. If it’s not sex which changes things, then becoming motherly toward a child character will bring out the character’s feminine instincts and mellow her disposition. Similar to the “ugly duckling,” an uptight woman usually is dressed badly or conservatively, hair up in a bun or ponytail, which allows for us to know she’s okay when the hair comes down or a makeover occurs.
- The Seductress: Ever notice the trait usually shared by Femme Fatale killers in thrillers and mysteries? They're sexually aggressive. In most works, if a woman likes to have sex, she will almost always either be vapid, treated like a whore, or ultimately fall into being depicted as the "crazy bitch" in the story. The first time I saw Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction as a teen, I thought Glenn Close's Alex was a monster, and that she's tormenting this poor guy and his family. Now, every time I see it I see how awful Michael Douglas's Dan is, and how he exacerbates the situation. He cheats on his wife, knows on day two that he fucked someone who is very unstable. And when confronted with the knowledge that she's pregnant, he does everything he can to sweep it under the rug and/or browbeat Alex into going away. There's a great case to be made that for the first two-thirds of Fatal Attraction, Alex is a victim of the story. But everything changes after the bunny rabbit on the stove. From that point on, the audience wants her dead.
From Amanda Hess at Slate:
Every era gets the Psycho Bitch it deserves. In the late ‘80s, she was Alex Forrest, the homicidal single career woman of Fatal Attraction. When Glenn Close’s 36-year-old book editor has a one-night fling with Michael Douglas’ happily-married attorney Dan Gallagher, Dan expects the cool, independent Alex to remain discreet. Instead, her biological clock goes berserk. She cuts her wrists, incessantly calls his home, announces she’s pregnant, throws acid on his car, boils his kid’s perfect bunny, abducts his perfect child, and attempts to stab his perfect housewife. At the film’s end, the perfect wife shoots the psycho bitch in the heart. By killing Alex (and her gestating fetus), the film restores the sanctity of the perfect family. Or as Susan Faludi wrote of the message in her 1991 book Backlash: “The best single woman is a dead one.”
- The Final Girl: The term "final girl" was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, And Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The book analyzed the slasher genre from a feminist perspective, and Clover argues that instead of being driven by misogyny and sadism against women, these movies put the male viewer into the mindset of the female protagonist, or the final girl alive. The final girl usually has a unisex name (e.g., Ripley, Sam, etc.) and is usually portrayed as an idealization of female innocence. She's probably not sexually experienced, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't do drugs, and more likely than not is a bit of a Mary Sue. As many have noted, the final girl seems to be based on conservative attitudes of what they think women "should be." On the other hand, the final girl is usually separated emotionally from her parents and the horror of the story tends to be connected to the sins of the parents, which is hidden behind a facade of family values.
- The Fat Girl: Usually the sidekick to the main female lead. She might not even be fat or overweight, and may well be attractive, just not Hollywood attractive (i.e., she’s not thin to the point of being near anorexic). The Fat Girl’s job is to be the exuberant, sassy friend that’s there to dish on guy problems, recommend outlandish sex ideas, and be the shoulder to cry on in any romantic comedy when the relationship goes to shit at the end of the second act.
- Action Girl: An interesting dichotomy of the 1970s and 1980s era of exploitation films. Some feminists saw sexism in the T&A or the acts of violence directed at the female characters. However, the other side of the argument is that some of the exploitation films were also the first films to have strong female characters that weren't dependent on men to "save" them.
From Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times:
"Even in the mid-'70s, the kind of proto-feminist element was being written about," said Kathleen McHugh, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. "Feminist film scholars were writing about Roger Corman and Stephanie Rothman, locating a feminist impulse in the standard plot, where you have these powerful, self-assertive, one might even use the term 'extremely aggressive' women who are wreaking vengeance against forces, people, men who are trying to keep them down."
- Eye Candy: Like the action girl, this character tends to be undressed a lot. Unlike the action girl, an eye candy character exists only to be an attractive sight for teenage boys and 40-year-old teenage boys that need masturbation material. She’s there to either show her breasts and ass, tease showing her breasts and ass, and generally isn’t really a character that bears any substance to the plot. She’s an object that encapsulates sexual fantasies. Many times she’s paired with a man twice her age who might be near Social Security age, and might be in need of Viagra if he actually wanted to sleep with her.
- The Unsatisfied Wife or Girlfriend: A female character that is so unhappy in her marriage she attempts to break out of it, usually in the worst ways imaginable. This tends to include extramarital affair, prostitution and murder, especially if the unhappiness becomes so strong it causes the character to veer into “psycho woman” territory. Whether or not the situation may be partially her doing or no fault of her own doesn’t matter. Most stories are very moralistic and want to end with a happy conclusion. So instead of acknowledging that some people shouldn't be together or the possibility that sometimes people should be with the “other” person, most movies will gravitate toward reuniting couples after their problems, and reaffirming the sanctity of a committed relationship.
- The Ugly Duckling: Any movie in which an obviously attractive teenage girl is asked to portray a role where she’s called ugly for wearing a pair of glasses and having her hair messed up, leading to a makeover montage where someone gets her some decent clothes and contact lenses and combs her hair, which solves her popularity problem. On the one hand, this type of character and story can be seen as a criticism of society’s cruelty toward those that are different, and maybe make a commentary about body image issues as they apply to women. However, when the makeover comes and basically buys into all of those societal standards of what a beautiful woman is supposed to be, any commentary or criticism goes out the window, since the message of the story is no longer about inner beauty. Instead of admiring what’s different, it’s a fantasy about fitting in and how something different wasn’t so different at all when given opportunities.
- The Ingénue and the Free Spirit: A young woman whose innocence or “purity” of spirit is a feature of why she's desired. The woman's innocence is a character attribute which will "save" her male partner from his depression, dysfunction and problems. This is either expressed through a virginal woman who represents a truer path toward love and fulfillment, or a quirky woman living life honestly and to the fullest, who somehow takes a liking to a dull, sad sack guy in need of help. The problem with these types of characters is they only really exist to serve the goals of the men, without any real agency. So many times the characters can fall into being "appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualize."