Category: Sexual Politics

I was inspired to muse on the changing way we depict women when my family went to see the most recent Star Wars film. The previews, of course, were geared toward audiences that might see a Star Wars film. Given the new emphasis in the Star Wars series on female characters, we got an ample preview of action movies featuring “strong” women.

Women shooting, women fighting, women yelling, women killing.

Now, please don’t get me wrong: I love seeing physically strong, active women on screen. The days of helpless women being tied to train tracks and dancing on chairs in fear of a mouse are over, and good riddance. Women’s bodies should be valued and celebrated as much as men’s.

However, these suddenly ubiquitous depictions of “strong” women have a problem:

Women aren’t the same as men.

The Star Wars movie progressed as they always do, and our heroine was pitted against a pack of weapon-wielding guards. Yes, I know that this is movie violence and that she was assisted by The Force, but she was depicted as resisting several large, well-trained male fighters with the force in her rather small, light-boned female body.

In She’s Not There, Jennifer Finley Boylan’s memoir about her transition from male to female, she writes that as her body’s testosterone was suppressed and she added estrogen, she could see daily changes in her body. She started to lose upper body strength and needed men in her band to help load her amp into the van.

This was a woman who had spent decades as a male. She has the heavy bone structure that testosterone created, the larger, stronger muscles. But within months, she started to experience the reality of being a woman:

Women are equal to men, but we are not the same.

I’m not sure why this concept is a problem for the human brain to grasp. We can offer equal opportunity to all people at the same time as acknowledging that we are different. For example, people with African ancestors have a higher risk of sickle cell anemia. To say so is not racism. To deny them healthcare—equal treatment—is racism.

It is not sexist to say that women are generally physically weaker than men. Yes, there are physically weak men and physically strong women within the spectrum of humanity. But in general, if you give a physically average woman and a physically average man the same martial arts training, the woman will have no chance in a test of pure physical strength. It is not sexist to say this. It is, however, sexist to deny women the opportunity to use their bodies however they wish, including training to be Jedi warriors.

So what’s the problem with showing women as physically equal to men? These are just movies, right?

The problem is that when we insert women into roles that are basically written for men, we depict them in the same violent way we depict our male “heroes.”

We should celebrate women and the strengths we bring.

Here are some facts about how violence breaks down by sex:

• Nearly all stranger-on-stranger murders are committed by men.
• Mass murders are overwhelmingly committed by men.
• When women do kill, they are most likely to kill in self-defense.

When we create movies showing women acting like men, is it equality? Or is it another way of putting on our cultural blinders?

Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, the essay and then the book of the same name, hit people with its bluntness about the problem: Our culture doesn’t face and name the real issue. We don’t have a problem with violence. We have a problem with male violence. If we suddenly only had the violence that women commit, we’d feel we had been transported to some sort of pie-in-the-sky utopia.

Everyone from historians to social scientists to biologists offer partial explanations for this state of affairs, but devising a solution seems beyond us. And one reason we haven’t found a solution is that we’ve gone from ignoring male violence to pretending that violence has no gender. We put an automatic weapon in the hands of a female action hero and call it “equality.”

We need to depict women’s real stories, even when they are fictional.

What we can gain from seriously depicting women’s stories is the experience of people who have spent their lives with less physical power than half of the human race. When you know that other stronger, more violent human beings could be targeting you on a daily basis, it changes your relationship to the world. I know some males who would disagree with this, but remember: they’ve never lived as women. If you’re male and you don’t believe me, ask a few transgender women, and you’ll hear the same story. We have an undeniably different relationship to the world than cisgender men do.

What if women suddenly had more physical power?

In her novel The Power, Naomi Alderman posits a near future in which girls start to be born with the power to kill anyone without using brute physical force. In other words, suddenly the balance is shifted. The world we live in is one where if an average male gets his hands around the neck of an average woman, the fight is over. But what if she could zap him with an electrical charge strong enough to stop his heart before his hands can even get near?

In Alderman’s fictional world, the power shifts everything, and women start to behave like men. But in our real world, no such power exists. Yes, on screen Rae may be able to throw a 6-foot, 200-pound male off of her small female body, but in our real world, that’s not the usual end to things.

We have to work with what we’ve got, which is that women are not the same as men.

But we are equal.

Luckily, Star Wars didn’t stop there. In the movie, an incredibly tall, long-necked, purple-haired Laura Dern actually does show that women are different—and equal. Instead of blasting back at a bigger, stronger opponent, she tries to outfox them. It’s the hotheaded “flyboy” at her side who foils her plan, which is beautifully female while also demonstrating strong leadership.

When the time comes for violence as a last resort, Dern’s character does what women have done throughout the ages when a stronger aggressor won’t let her have agency over her own body. She turns her body into a weapon.

Solnit writes, “…Violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins wth this premise: I have the right to control you.”

Giving women physical power over other human beings is no sort of equality.

These depictions simply extend the problem of male violence with a fantasy that female violence is some sort of parity.

The reality is the women are not men, and that’s good. Diversity makes us strong. Our value as human beings should not be measured on the basis of our physical strength alone. It’s not progress to get more women in movies if they are simply acting in parts written for men.