Cedars, Spring 2021

Spring 2020 15 loved for their strength. Tony Stark is not compelling as a character primarily because of his billionaire empire or epic superpowers. He’s compelling because of who he is: intelligent, narcissistic, irreverent, damaged. His suit gives him power, but his choices give him agency. His physical abilities are incidental, not essential. The story of Tony Stark is defined by his character flaws and personal growth. His superpowers are just the context that allows that growth to occur. The “Strong Male Character” box is far too small for all but the blandest characters — early iterations of Superman come to mind. And yet the SFC is marketed as expanding the catalog of female roles. My point isn’t that female characters shouldn’t be physically strong, that the trait in itself is either demeaning or unrealistic. It’s that when we’re looking to celebrate feminism in film, we should evaluate whether portrayals of women are truly representative of the nuanced, complex, lived experiences of real humans, or are just hollow avatars “courageously” subverting stereotypes that were already outdated in the 1960s. Ultimately, the problem here is not that movie studios haven’t “gone far enough” to undermine female stereotypes. The problem is that they’re going about it in entirely the wrong way. Female representation doesn’t mean a woman gets her picture on a poster. It means her story gets told. That requires developing characters, not just including them. So if all this is actually the fault of crazy far-far-left sixth-and-a-half-wave feminists pressuring movie executives into creating only the strongest version of female characters, what’s the solution? Avoiding feminism altogether? Gender-blind casting? Maybe it involves understanding what feminism, at its core, really means. Equality doesn’t necessarily mean sameness, but it d o e s mean ... well, equality. It means giving female characters agency and nuance and identities and arcs, and yes, even weaknesses. Here’s a secret, Holly- wood: the more women you have, in as many diverse and varied roles, personalities, and situations as possible, the less one single character has to bear the weight of being the perfect ambassador for femaleness in a sea of men and the less you have to worry about whether she specifically will be perceived as sufficiently “strong.” I’m not trying to contend that fewer characters that look like me on screen is some form of oppression. But this deficit is both revealing and shaping: revealing of the latent concept of womanhood in broader culture and shaping the minds of viewers to reinforce those ideas. I’m all for more princesses who know kung fu, as long as they’re also surrounded by teachers and rivals and villains and mentors and artists and moms and scientists and businesswomen and travelers and sisters who don’t have to. Breanna Beers is a senior Molecular Biology major and the Editor-in-Chief of Cedars. She loves exercising curiosity, hiking new trails, and citrus tea. By contrast, real feminism creates a richer vision of womanhood, not a more limited one. Having women in your movies is a step in the right direction, but real representation is more than just female presence. Falling back on this shorthand to prove how progressive your movie is isn’t empowering; it’s just lazy. It implies, as critic Carina Chocano wrote for the NewYork Times, that “unless a female character is ‘strong,’ she’s not interesting or worth identifying with.” The condescension of the SFC “feminism” becomes painfully obvious contrasted against the marketing of male characters. No one ever asks if a male lead is “strong.” As McDougall astutely points out, this may partly be becausemale strength is assumed. “Part of the patronising promise of the Strong Female Character is that she’s anomalous,” she writes. “Of course, normal women are weak and boring and can’t do anything worthwhile. But this one is different. She is strong! See, she roundhouses people in the face.” Yet the excuse that strength is the male default tells an incomplete story. Our best-loved male characters are not necessarily strong (McDougall uses the example of Sherlock Holmes) and even those that are strong are not best