The recurring characterization problems with such Strong Female Characters arise in no small measure from the struggle to show that men and women are interchangeable and can compete and cooperate with each other on the same terms. As I have already noted, this falsehood serves no one. It sets women up for frustration and failure as they have to justify their agency on men’s terms and it produces an embarrassment about male strengths that should be celebrated rather than stifled. It reflects a drive towards intense gender integration and de-differentiation in the wider world.
The traditional world of women—typically a different existential and intersubjective mapping of spaces that were shared with men—has been reduced through the migration of work away from the home, the expanding social role of the state and its agencies, the shrinking and contracting of families, the thinning out of neighborhoods, and the removal of much of the burden of domestic labour through technology. One’s value in society has also become increasingly contingent upon advanced educational attainment, career, wealth, and consumption. Within this new situation, women have had to forge new identities within worlds created by men and which play to male strengths. Shrunk to a sentimental reservation of domesticity, there is relatively little dignity to be found in what remains of traditional female worlds in most Western societies.
Often natural differences in tendencies and aptitudes between the sexes (as groups, there is plenty of individual variation and departure from the norm) replicate themselves in the wider economic world. Women are frustrated as their desire to have children and raise families prevents them from earning as much as their male counterparts, or enjoying the same social prominence. Women’s greater natural orientation towards relational and caring activities leads to their underrepresentation within the more lucrative and powerful professions. Women are drawn to subjects and occupations that are more personal, artistic, and relational, while men to those that are more realistic, investigative, and thing-based. Despite the expense of considerable money and effort to change male and female preferences, they are surprisingly resistant to change in many respects.
On men’s part, male dominance in realms of high achievement is frequently and often instinctively characterized as pathological. There is a zero-sum social game being played between the sexes and male privilege is a sign of a great injustice, something about which men should feel guilty. The possibility that men dominate because the realms in which they dominate play to their various strengths as a group or involve areas where they produce the most exceptional performers is not an idea that can be entertained in many quarters.
The push for ‘diversification’ and ‘inclusion’ can be a threat to many male groups because their natural rougher socializing tendencies are stigmatized, they are no longer permitted to play to their strengths, and their shared cultures and cultural products are jeopardized by a sort of gender gentrification imposed upon them. The existence of extreme misogyny in many of their reactions to such developments should not be allowed to disguise the presence of understandable concerns (and definitely vice versa too), even where the appropriate response to these concerns may not be that of wholly rejecting the diversification.
We have moved from a situation with distinct worlds of gendered activity—albeit typically deeply interwoven and involving extensively overlapping spaces—to one in which men and women are being pressed into a single intersubjective and existential world, one that was traditionally male. The result is a stifling of men, as manliness becomes a social threat and male strength a problem to be solved. Male strengths have to be discouraged to give women more scope for expression and achievement. Women, on the other hand, are caught in a world that seems rigged against them. The Strong Female Character is one way in which the anxieties, insecurities, resentments, and embarrassments produced by such a situation register in our imaginary worlds.
It is also a revelation of a failure of imagination. Fictional worlds are places in which we can explore possibilities for identity and agency. The fact that women’s stature as full agents is so consistently treated as contingent upon such things as their physical strength and combat skills, or upon the exaggerated weakness or their one-upping of the men that surround them, is a sign that, even though men may be increasingly stifled within it, women are operating in a realm that plays by men’s rules. The possibility of a world in which women are the weaker sex, yet can still attain to the stature and dignity of full agents and persons—the true counterparts and equals of men—seems to be, for the most part, beyond people’s imaginative grasp. This is a limitation of imagination with painful consequences for the real world, and is one of the causes of the high degree of ressentiment within the feminist movement.
Heroic Women and Good Story Telling
The Bechdel Test originally appeared within the comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. It is an informal test to determine whether or not a film passes the lowest bars for the portrayal of women: 1. Does it have at least two women in it? 2. Do the women talk to each other? 3. Do they talk about something other than a man? It is a helpful heuristic tool for alerting people to the degree to which women and their intersubjective worlds fail to appear within the frame of so many movies and works of fiction. It is far from scientific, nor is it an accurate tool for determining the existence of stunted portrayal of women more generally, but it does often provide an initial indication of limitations or problems.
There is an idea out there that goes something like this: “Hard times produce great men, great men produce good times, good times produce weak men, and weak men produce bad times. Repeat.” While this cycle seems to have some truth in it, this idea is based on a subtle lie.
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