Where were my women who were forced to learn that with great power comes great responsibility? Where were my awkward school girls who were just trying to graduate high school when they found they didn’t need their glasses anymore, but could lift a school bus one-handed? Where were the funny best buddies? It’s not as though we can all be Lara Croft. Yet for a long time, she was all we had: if you were a woman, you had your place, on one end of the spectrum or the other. Why, I still ask every single time the movie is on TV, is it Kick-Ass and not Hit Girl?
Then the recent Marvel films arrived. Pepper Potts came along in her business-wear and skyscraper Louboutins and was unstoppable in her rise to CEO of Stark Industries. Black Widow slunk onto the scene and showed us that we don’t need to choose between sexy and dangerous. Jane Foster, the astrophysicist genius, still blushed when confronted with Thor’s overwhelming good looks, just the way the rest of us would, while Darcy Lewis was as concerned about her iPod as she was about the faceless government organisation behind its theft.
Maria Hill reached the very top of the male-dominated SHIELD organisation, Sif is a fully-fledged goddess of war, and Peggy Carter was a sharp-shooting, red lipstick-wearing female officer at the frontline of WW2. These aren’t the cardboard cut-out women of action movies gone by. They’re more than the girlfriends or relatives or unobtainable dream girls, more than pawns for a hero’s man-pain. They’re definitely more than a gorgeous yet robot-like tomb raider with a penchant for dressing in clothes that are so often inappropriate for the weather.
They’re you, me. The boss you want to be someday, the academic your friend aspires to. The student who just wants to listen to music and have fun. The women who can do battle, run Fortune 500 companies, wield tasers and drive questionably. Girls who can show fear but fight against the bad guys anyway, who flirt just for fun. The brainwashed Russian superspy assassin. (OK, so maybe not that last one. Then again, we do all have that one friend we wonder about.)
Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? – NYTimes.com
Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? – NYTimes.com
Hint: The answer has more to do with “The Big Bang Theory” than longstanding theories about men’s so-called natural aptitude.
i need feminism because a man on tv just said we (the men) are the victims when it comes to cheating because women walk around wearing almost nothing which makes it impossible not to cheat
But you know, my dear ex-girlfriend Olivia, we’re both very good friends still, but I used to berate her for reading Hello and Heat and all those rags, Grazia. I mean, I know why girls read them, of course they f—ing do. She’s a smart one, and she knew to look at it and go, “This is nonsense.” But it was entertaining, you know, hairdressing reading. I quite get why in the handbags of smart, as well as kind of pop culturally hungry girls, they’re great entertainment. But they can be really damaging because people do take them too seriously.
And it also then starts to affect people’s behavior so that this thing of image — even with men now. The pressure is always more on for girls in every sense. You have a really rough ride of it — in every single sense you have a rough ride of it. Seriously, like, actors can’t complain compared to actresses — it’s horrific. I mean, in Hollywood as well, the sanest, smartest people I know are beholden to the body image, to the f—ing aging shit. Of course we’re visual vessels to portray characters and tell stories, so of course people are going to want to see their better reflection or someone who’s dazzling or stunning or attractive. But it’s great when people like Charlize Theron can have “an ugly moment.” Then when people say, “it was just ‘unbeautifying’ her — that’s why she got the Oscar,” I just want to get up and punch them. Not only was it an incredible performance in “Monster” and a really unattractive character in “Young Adult,” where she was extraordinary, but she’s proven that actresses can have more than a shelf life, that they can have careers dependent on where they are and who they are at any given time in their life, not trying to maintain the idealized youth thing.