June 11, 2013

Female heroines are boring who lack maternal motivation

Via Steve Sailer, here is an NYT article by some clueless queer about persistent sexism in American culture. He thought things would have changed so much in the past 20 years, i.e. as men cut off their balls and began to let pushy women get their way.

But what about movies? It was all the way back in 1986 that Sigourney Weaver trounced “Aliens” and landed on the cover of Time, supposedly presaging an era of action heroines. But there haven’t been so many: Angelina Jolie in the “Tomb Raider” adventures, “Salt” and a few other hectic flicks; Jennifer Lawrence in the unfolding “Hunger Games” serial. Last summer Kristen Stewart’s “Snow White” needed a “Huntsman” at her side, and this summer? I see an “Iron Man,” a “Man of Steel” and Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Channing Tatum all shouldering the weight of civilization’s future. I see no comparable crew of warrior goddesses.

Heroines fare better on TV, but even there I’m struck by the persistent stereotype of a woman whose career devotion is both seed and flower of a tortured private life. Claire Danes in “Homeland,” Mireille Enos in “The Killing,” Dana Delany in “Body of Proof” and even Mariska Hargitay in “Law & Order: SVU” all fit this bill.

All of the lame female lead characters fail to resonate with us (unless we're social retards) because they don't provide a convincing motivation for why a woman is so gung-ho and daring, when they typically are non-confrontational and cautious.

Perhaps the strongest motivation a woman might have to assert herself in a confrontation is her maternal instinct. In the feminized and faggotized culture of the past 20 years, that simple insight has vanished from common understanding. Hence she's given motives that are typical of men and totally out of character for women, like bold exploration for its own sake (Tomb Raider), honor and vengeance (Kill Bill), exercising authority to uphold justice (Olivia Benson from Law & Order: SVU, who should have been a social worker), et ceteraaaaaaa...

The most believable and memorable female characters who risk violence in pursuit of their goals are all motivated by maternal instinct, whether toward their own offspring or toward others who push their maternal instinct buttons. Most notably, the Faye Dunaway and Isabella Rossellini characters from Chinatown and Blue Velvet. They represent a skillful and humbling subversion of the femme fatale archetype, where we're led to believe that she's going to be yet another one of those destructively self-focused women we've seen so many times from mid-century film noir. Yet it turns out that they are among the most praiseworthy characters in the movie, and have been acting all along out of a drive to protect their children -- among other, more questionable motives, of course. Wouldn't be interesting if their motives had no complexity and contradictions, would it?

The Rachel Ward character from After Dark, My Sweet is an interesting, though less successful example of this subverted femme fatale type. She hasn't been motivated by maternal instinct all along, indeed she feels callously toward a child she has helped to kidnap and hold for ransom. However, she does have a change of heart that introduces new tension among the criminal characters, and her change is believable because it stems from an irrepressible maternal instinct. This movie was made a bit too late within the heyday of neo-noir movies, 1990, to have been executed as well as Chinatown (1974) or Blue Velvet (1986), but the character is not unconvincing.

In fact, Ripley from Aliens doesn't feel so outrageously unbelievable because there's such a strong maternal motivation driving her to do anything in order to protect a small orphan girl whose entire family and community have been destroyed.

Even when they are not the lead characters and do not face so much danger, a mother whose child has been taken from her can still deliver a convincing damn-the-torpedoes approach to action, such as those from Poltergeist and Child's Play.

And then there are the female characters who are motivated to protect and mother those who are not their own offspring, but who they feel a big sisterly or surrogate motherly relationship with. Sarah Connor nurses Kyle Reese in The Terminator, where she is also motivated to violently confront an enemy that wants to kill her unborn son. The "final girl" archetype who survives at the end of the slasher flicks tends to be a babysitter (Halloween), camp counselor (the Friday the 13th series), and so on. The female protagonist in Labyrinth is driven to rescue her baby brother from a goblin king before it's too late.

The only real counter-example of a convincing female character who doggedly risks violence to pursue her goals, without maternal motivation, is Princess Leia from the Star Wars movies. She isn't acting on behalf of her kin, or to protect surrogate children. The character succeeds, though, because she isn't the primary or even secondary line of defense -- that would be all the male warrior types from those movies. And she relies less on physical strength or prowess with weaponry, and more on the forcefulness of her personality. Women have been known to be pushy and aggressive when you give them power.

And with human beings, it's not like with gorillas where it all comes down to brute strength -- having social influence and a dominant personality can take you pretty far without having to back it up with the threat of personal violent retaliation. Humans are more like chimpanzees, where politicking plays a much greater role than violent confrontation. And women have been known to be good at politicking.

Perhaps most importantly for the success of that character, Leia never reduces herself to petty cattiness, bitchiness, and pissiness. Getting easily offended, showing thin skin, and generally getting all huffy when something thwarts her goals would mark her as an immature middle school girl, incapable of rising to a position of power. No, she's more like the bossy Catholic school nun who ain't gonna take any shit from you buncha brats.

Although half-Jewish, Carrie Fisher did not tap into that side of her personality by portraying a guilt-tripping and castrating Jewish mother type, but something closer to a dominant Irish or Italian martinet mama bear. She's also part Scotch-Irish, so I'm guessing that's where she summoned that forceful rather than bitchy attitude from.

Well, now we're getting off onto another post altogether, so I'll end it there. But you get the idea: female characters who risk extreme violence must have some kind of strong maternal motivation, or else it will fail to convince an audience. I mean, an audience that isn't retarded about what men and women are like.

With higher levels of social isolation, more and more of the society is totally clueless about what women are like, and has no trouble consuming cultural products that feature butt-kicking babe types. That's just as true in our cocooning Millennial era as it was during the asocial mid-century, when butt-kicking babes were a staple of popular culture, most notably in the widespread comic book and pulp fiction media, and to a lesser extent in film noir. Once people start to come out of their shells again, they'll learn more about basic truths of human nature and find it unappealing and even off-putting to see warrior princess schlock.

31 comments:

  1. By the way, conservative commentator Ann Coulter is a fag hag. She hangs out not only with this guy but with Matt Drudge as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Bride in "Kill Bill" was motivated by maternal instinct---she wanted to find her baby (and in the end, she did).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hard to think of too many action girls from 70s to 80s films, what springs to mind are:

    - Red Sonja (kind of pulp 30s derived like the whole 80s Sword and Sorcery mini-boom)
    - Charlie's Angels
    - Bond girls
    - Bionic Woman (and other 70s or 80s TV sci-fi heroines like in Buck Rogers)
    - Various 60s - 70s lewd exploitation / pulp rubbish that Tarantino admires and is often the signature for the 60s - 70s in the modern mind ("Pam Grier is... Foxy Brown!", "Faster Pussycat! Kill, Kill!") but wasn't necessarily mainstream at the time (with even stuff like the dominant dull disaster movies being more mainstream)

    But quite scanty compared to today.
    Comparing to the 30s to 50s, they may have been present in comic books, but seem totally absent from the cinema of the day (noir females seem quite different as an archetype).

    Seem rather more prominent in 1980s cartoons for kids compared to my impression of kid aimed comics and pulps of the 50s, but perhaps this exploits that children are not as differentiated as adults (so it seems almost as plausible to little girls to take Teela or She Ra or Cheetara or GI Joe girl or whatever as a role model, or at least to little boys). Also true for 1980s comics, but maybe those were less popular relative to other media in the 1980s.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "The Bride in "Kill Bill" was motivated by maternal instinct"

    She was a long-time member of an elite assassination team, so what led her to become the butt-kicking babe type was not maternal instinct. She supposedly had the same drives to join the team that the male members did. The other female assassins do not have maternal motives either.

    It's a straightforward revenge movie against those who dishonored her and tried to kill her, with the kidnapping tacked on as an afterthought.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Barbara Hambly does the best Princess Leia stories. Chicks don't think about chicks the way you do, and she's all chick, but-

    ReplyDelete
  6. What do you think of the original Alien film?

    Bruni mentioned "Hunger Games" but not "Winter's Bone". That is an excellent Jennifer Lawrence movie, where she has to act as the parent for her younger siblings.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "Perhaps the strongest motivation a woman might have to assert herself in a confrontation is her maternal instinct. In the feminized and faggotized culture of the past 20 years, that simple insight has vanished from common understanding."

    if only... the "mama bear" concept the women have continuously gotten credit for is such a farce. All the time I see stories of kids being saved in some river or building by a GUY. Rarely have I ever heard stories of a woman taking action, putting herself in danger, and saving a kid who she knows or doesn't know.

    If we actually want to see some validity to this maternal instinct then we need to stop grouping "women and children". A woman on the Titanic was significantly more likely to survive than a child (even when we only look at the third class). They just took spots over the children... WTF? If there is any serious meaning to the maternal instinct women need to act like adults and the children first when the time comes. Otherwise, its a pathetic farce.

    ReplyDelete
  8. "eem rather more prominent in 1980s cartoons for kids compared to my impression of kid aimed comics and pulps of the 50s, but perhaps this exploits that children are not as differentiated as adults (so it seems almost as plausible to little girls to take Teela or She Ra or Cheetara or GI Joe girl or whatever as a role model, or at least to little boys). Also true for 1980s comics, but maybe those were less popular relative to other media in the 1980s."

    From what I can remember, though, those cartoon girls were drawn sexy and had conventionally feminine personalities when they weren't taking on baddies. Plus, the men were tougher(He-man, etc.)

    -Curtis

    ReplyDelete
  9. That's worth a blog post - how girl cartoon characters have become progressively more androgynous and less sexy.

    -Curtis

    ReplyDelete
  10. I've been thinking more about crime rates and generational theory. I don't think that the coming years will be similar to the Jazz Age. I think they will be more similar to the Civil War era, the times portrayed in "Gangs of New York".

    -Curtis

    ReplyDelete
  11. Has the way people take photographs changed?

    It seems at every family function I attend, there's this constant and sometimes obstrusive taking of photos. Sometimes the photo shoot, as for a wedding, seems to last forever. And they have photo shoots for everything these days, like pregnancy.

    And I don't know who actually looks at these photos. I know I don't. There are too many.

    ReplyDelete
  12. "From what I can remember, though, those cartoon girls were drawn sexy and had conventionally feminine personalities when they weren't taking on baddies."

    Ever play Street Fighter? (1992, the very end of the crime wave) If you beat the game using the Chinese warrior girl, at the end she says "now that I have avenged my father's death, I can be a normal girl" and puts on short shorts and a tank top. Here's a link:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IQZd2bfDKU

    -Curtis

    ReplyDelete
  13. "how girl cartoon characters have become progressively more androgynous and less sexy"

    It seems like more of an age thing than a sex thing. Characters in children's culture today are all very kiddie. So that makes them look more androgynous, before there's much secondary sex development, and ditto for why they don't look sexy.

    So I don't think the androgyny and blandness is intentional, but a side effect of infantilization. Parents don't want their kids to develop -- um, AWKWARD -- and they're willing to pay the price of making their kids androgynous and dull if that's how it goes.

    I can't imagine a hit cartoon for small children today starring male role models in their 20s and 30s like He-Man, or new wave babes from Jem who were in their late teens or early 20s.

    ReplyDelete
  14. "What do you think of the original Alien film?"

    Way better than the second, especially the visual style -- shot with an anamorphic lens, for example. Aliens is an awesome kickass action movie, and has great one-liners, but doesn't touch too much on sci-fi like the first one did.

    In particular, it doesn't create as much of a sense of mystery, danger, and the sublime. It's kind of assumed that there are aliens, that they prey on humans, etc., and treats them as the violent out-group du jour of the 20-whatever century that it's set in.

    And Ripley wasn't a butt-kicking babe in the first one. I think it works better to have a woman be the survivor in a horror movie (the "final girl") because they're generally more fearful, cautious, and self-preserving rather than sacrificing. So they tend not to put themselves in harm's way, whether out of recklessness or altruism.

    Ripley's character is a by-the-book / wet blanket type in the first one, which makes her survival seem more natural than if she'd been portrayed as a butt-kicking babe like in the second one. Though I think the character works in the sequel as well because of her extreme maternal drive. It just feels more natural still in the first movie because women do tend to be such sticklers about following rules and taking precautions.

    ReplyDelete
  15. "Has the way people take photographs changed?"

    It feels like more of a chore or a procedure these days. You stand here, all right now you come in a little closer there, and wait all of you move just a little bit to the right to avoid the shadow. How about you put your arm around her, and you down there turn just a bit toward him....

    Take the fucking picture already, man.

    Pictures from the '70s and '80s show such impromptu attitudes. There's no posing and choreography before the flash goes off.

    Even candid pictures today are so fake-looking. Hold your camera at some extreme angle, put on your harshest kabuki mask, and snap away.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Perhaps most importantly for the success of that character, Leia never reduces herself to petty cattiness, bitchiness, and pissiness.

    That's because there were virtually no other female characters in the original films.

    Put a hot babe on the Millennium Falcon and see what happens.

    ReplyDelete
  17. To elaborate, imagine an office full of men with only one female employee. Because she's the only girl in the game, she's free to be what men consider "the cool chick," i.e. laid back and free from the catty, bitchy, gossipy traits men associate with most females. She's showered with male attention by default and doesn't need to deploy the tried and tested weapons of female competition (derogation and rumor spreading).

    But as soon as Hot New Chick walks into the office, the claws are out.

    Speaking of which, as I asked on the Mean Girls review post, how are women supposed to protect themselves from attacks by other females? With guys it's pretty simple. Some guy comes at you, you either fight him off or you don't. You can carry a gun for extra deterrence.

    With girls. there's no protection from rumor and gossip. Is this just something that they'll have to live with?

    ReplyDelete
  18. Women can get pretty pissy even when there's only one, especially one who's trying to climb the status ladder. The default female assumption is that pissiness wins an argument, and that callous and brusque treatment is the way to the top.

    Leia doesn't get all easily offended, huffy, panties-in-a-wad etc. around men, when a woman easily could have. And she's more to-the-point than callous when dealing with others.

    No idea how girls are supposed to protect themselves from gossip.

    ReplyDelete
  19. I would think callousness & brusqueness is negatively correlated with Agreeableness, and women are more agreeable. Even when they are putting others down it tends to be behind their enemy's back with an ally who feels similarly, often putting on a false front of niceness.

    ReplyDelete
  20. "and women are more agreeable. "

    Only on context-free personality questionnaires. Ditto for "women are more empathetic".

    In the real world, people treat others differently depending on who the other person is. Women are more agreeable and empathetic with others in the narrow kinship sphere, particularly the nuclear family.

    But men are more agreeable and empathetic with others who are far away in social space. Women are more xenophobic and less willing to give money to strangers in person, for example. And most diplomats are men, not women.

    Averaging over all possible others within a neighborhood or community, men are more agreeable and empathetic.

    ReplyDelete
  21. A more relevant example: women regularly report that their female bosses are way harsher than their male bosses.

    ReplyDelete
  22. A more relevant example: women regularly report that their female bosses are way harsher than their male bosses

    That's an outcome of female social dynamics (which are ill-suited for the professional world). Whilst men swiftly form fairly rigid hierarchies and get on with the job at hand, female groups experience very high turnover of power possession (all while telling each other that there's no hierarchy at all).

    As such, women positively bristle at taking direct orders from another female, and they'll undermine a female boss at every possible opportunity.

    I suspect that female bosses aren't, in general, any harsher than male bosses.

    ReplyDelete
  23. ""and women are more agreeable. ""

    As I recall from the Big Five study once posted here, Agreeableness is more of a cultural thing than a gender thing. For instance, Asian male and female college students tend to score Disagreeable, while Persian college students, of both genders, tend to score Agreeable.

    -Curtis

    ReplyDelete
  24. "That's an outcome of female social dynamics"

    Girls say the same thing about their female teachers / professors treating them worse, and that's not related to cohort social dynamics. Boys too have worse memories of martinet lady teachers.

    Both sexes have memories of the handful of cool, open, informal teachers, and they're almost always male.

    ReplyDelete
  25. I would think callousness & brusqueness is negatively correlated with Agreeableness, and women are more agreeable. Even when they are putting others down it tends to be behind their enemy's back with an ally who feels similarly, often putting on a false front of niceness.

    Agreeableness probably tends to measure how agreeable people tend to be in an emotionless state, whereas Neuroticism has more to do with anger (and distress).

    Women are more emotional than men, but the gap is widest for sadness (and related emotions) and less wide for anger and for joy. That's why when women get angry they are often distressed at the same time, while when men are angry its more often "pure" anger.

    Men's lower levels of fear and higher unemotional competitiveness and antagonism as measured by agreeable (think psychopath traits - fearless dominance) cause the difference in how they take vengeance (since their antagonism isn't just short lived with the anger and kept in check by fear). Men aren't really more angry than women, but their other traits effect what they do with anger (google "trait anger" and male and female - you'll see confirmation of this).

    Possibly some degree of brusqueness or callousness could be due to women's greater fear and cautiousness causing avoidant or preoccupied behavior.

    (note neurotic avoidance is probably pretty different to introversion, which is more of a preference for reflection, organizing memories, reading, solitary behavior and self talk over socialising and sensation seeking).

    ReplyDelete
  26. Yeah, Agnostic is completely correct on this. I remember reading once that, in a study, most women walked out of an interview on realizing the boss was a woman.

    Falling-crime creates matriarchal societies. My guess is that a reclusive society means there's less opportunity for men to form alliances with each other, so they get rolled over.

    -Curtis





    ReplyDelete
  27. "That's why when women get angry they are often distressed at the same time, while when men are angry its more often "pure" anger."

    The reason is that women are not subject to violence. A woman can treat someone rudely and know that she's not going to get hurt.

    But if a man gets angry, he knows that it better be against someone that he can take on. So when men get angry, they do so expecting a fight. This is why their anger is "pure" and goes all the way.

    -Curtis

    ReplyDelete
  28. "(since their antagonism isn't just short lived with the anger and kept in check by fear)."

    Because they are subject to violence, which women aren't. Men get angry when they should get angry, i.e. when they are more powerful than their opponent.

    -Curtis

    ReplyDelete
  29. "Women are more emotional than men, but the gap is widest for sadness (and related emotions) and less wide for anger and for joy. That's why when women get angry they are often distressed at the same time, while when men are angry its more often "pure" anger".

    no, men are the ones who show more devotion and hurt in a marriage. Men are the ones who commit suicide over consuming sorrow, and men are willing to help a stranger because they invest themselves in people around them.

    "Men's lower levels of fear and higher unemotional competitivenes"

    oxymoron, or better yet a contradiction... competitiveness is emotional.

    ReplyDelete
  30. just realize that there is a big difference between crying and being in sorrow.

    to add to the list boys take diverse worse than girls.

    from what I gather, men are very susceptible to their social environment. give them a good one and they'll do good. give them a bad one and they'll likely do worse. put them in a tight situation and they'll for the strongest of bonds.

    ReplyDelete
  31. Re: responses from Curtis and Ted

    I haven't really noticed that men only get angry in a position of strength to be perfectly honest or "when appropriate".

    Women being more emotional and specifically more having a particularly cautious and fearful style, but similar levels of anger and lower levels of antagonism is something which is supported by both psychology (e.g. higher rates of syndromes which involve depression and lower levels of conduct disorders) and social observations. I think our host here has also said things to this effect (for instance in this post).

    Male suicide rates are not really necessarily due to feeling more negative emotions more keenly and I don't think there is any support for the idea that men specifically feel their marriage bonds more intensely (women certainly seem to talk about their marriages a lot more).

    Also, relative to how often they win or benefit from conflicts and risk, women are subject to a lot of violence (whether they actually are subject to more violence overall or not - women are beaten often, largely by men, even in our society, let alone the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness), so it makes sense for them to be risk and violent conflict averse.

    I am not saying competitiveness is purely unemotional per se (for some psychos it is), but that there is a cognitive and non-emotional element to that behaviour, which women lack compared to men and perhaps has to "team up" with emotion.

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."