Wanted: Weak Females
by Terry on Mar.07, 2010, under Tom Lloyd and Joel Shepherd
Before we leave the topic of gender and sexual politics entirely, I thought I would bring up a link that was submitted by a Babel Clash reader a few months ago. The author makes some very good points about difference between strong - physically speaking - female characters and strong characters who happen to be female. I particularly enjoyed the idea that “the feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.” They should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.” Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.” “Weak” meaning “flawed.”” Anyway, check it out.
Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad for Women
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March 8th, 2010 on 11:44 am
That’s a good post, and I mostly agree. I think the term missing is ‘point of view’ characters. Hollywood does a lot of ’strong women’ but very few female point of view characters, particularly in big budget shoot ‘em ups.
The point of view means everything, because that’s the character whose goals and internal conflicts control the entire direction of the plot. If the film has just one central point of view character, then every other character will be a satellite in his or her orbit — the whole protagonist/antagonist thing. It’s very hard for any character, reduced to a satellite, to be three dimensional. If the main character is male, then odds are his female satellite will be there for the love interest, and will fulfill that purpose only, to the detriment of anything else, because the satellite characters only exist in order to fill some dramatic arc of the POV character.
Books don’t quite suffer from this problem because a novelist has more space to develop a number of main characters simultaneously than a screen writer does. Neither does TV.