Women and Entertainment
By Hervé St-Louis
April 1, 2007 - 12:20
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The Girl
Years ago, in an old Marvel Year in Review, or some magazine like that, I read a description of the Fantastic Four that went like this. The Fantastic Four are, the fearless leader, the monstrosity, the young hot head and, the girl . . . Sue Richard, the Invisible Woman was only relevant because of her sex. And of course, she dated one of the three men, while another one on the team was partially jealous of the guy.
Over the years, she has been captured so many times by villains as a bait to attract the other Fantastic Four that she literally became a damsel in distress, until her powers were reexamined and she was given more importance in the team. Yet, I still don’t know who Sue Richard is. I don’t know what makes her special as a person, as opposed as the woman of the Fantastic Four.
The same can be said for various other female leads in the entertainment industry. Recently, several people have complained about the role Storm of the X-Men has been playing since marrying the Black Panther. Has she become his sidekick or does she really share the comic book with him? Was the wedding a forced event to unite two of Marvel’s longstanding heroes? Will the pairing survive? Will Storm survive?
The pairing of women characters with a male lead is frequent in entertainment. Hawkgirl was for years, Hawkman’s sidekick. Although she started independently and took over Johnny Thunder’s own comic strips, Black Canary was reinvented as the girlfriend of Green Arrow. It took years for the character to recover from this association, and it seems that DC Comics will reignite it again.
A Male Clone with Breasts?
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Creating original women characters that are strong on their own and independent has always been a problem. Wonder Woman, the best known original comic book woman, keeps on getting redefined. No matter what they try, DC Comics’ writers have problems making her anything but a superwoman. What originally defined her was her gender. Although she has a personality, if Wonder Woman was turned into a man, she would no longer be relevant to DC Comics. I don’t feel that there is anything about Wonder Woman, as a character that makes more than being a woman.
Perhaps it is the formulaic nature of niche entertainment that makes women’ gender their only defining traits? However, this is not true. There have been strong women in which have eclipse the popularity of their male collaborators. For example, Death, from the Sandman’s comic book series, was, in the 1990s more popular than her brother. She had a definite personality.
The Virgin and The Temptress
Women are often expected to play specific roles in entertainment. They are often, either pure and motherly or temptresses of men. Often they are portrayed as tough or soft. It seems that there is no middle ground. There is, and thanks to women who work in the entertainment industry, the portrayal of women is changing beyond being defined by their relationships with men.
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