Body Babes: Gender and Size in the Action Genre
Angelina Jolie as Fox in Wanted/picture from outnow.ch
Everyone can agree that girls who kick ass are awesome. When a heroine in a film knocks out a gang of men or saves her boyfriend from the monster-of-the-week on television, I always get an awe-filled, giddy thrill. These women are empowering and exhilarating, symbolic of the strength and control women can have over their own lives and destinies in real life.
However, I’ve noticed that female machismo has become more and more rigidly confined to women who fit a stereotypical mold of female attractiveness, especially in regards to slenderness. Women who are extremely muscular or heavier set are represented less in the horror/action/sci-fi entertainment circuit than the waif thin, and women who are both heavy and muscular are nonexistent. This provides a very narrow image of what female strength looks like in real life, and sends a conflicting message than can reinforce unrealistic standards.
A recent AskMen.com list, the “Top Ten Action Babes”, consists of heroines such as Carrie Ann Moss, Summer Glau, Halle Berry, Michelle Rodriguez, Kate Beckinsdale, Jessica Alba, Uma Thurman, Milla Jovovich, and Charlize Theron, with Angelina Jolie taking the top spot. The introduction to the list is a study in contrasts (bolding mine):
This way, men get to combine two of their favorite things in one: violence and sex. We’re not sure if we want them to protect us or ravage us. Early vixens like Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman paved the way for Sigourney Weaver to fry facehuggers in Aliens and Linda Hamilton to kill Arnold in Terminator. Now the female action star is a staple in our culture, and we expect at least a few libido-popping action flicks each year.Here are our favorite starlets who have amassed impressive action resumes as well as incredible bodies. If we had our druthers, they would all stop doing “serious” roles and just focus on killing bad guys.
Summer Glau in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
It’s a fascinating dichotomy of respect and dominance, audience identification and objectification. Female strength is “a staple in our culture,” accepted and respected by male viewers. Yet the heroines must adhere to the standards of the male gaze and make sure their bodies are sufficiently “libido-popping.” A woman can’t be too big or too muscular, and has to retain her femininity while venturing into the male sphere. It’s a tug of rope between beauty and believability, and often beauty wins through plot devices and science fiction contrivances. The heroine’s physical power is often explained by an external cause, a force she has usually has no control over. Six of the heroines on this list have portrayed characters with supernatural abilities on more than one occasion, and five have used supernatural or technological means to explain their unusual physical strength. This allows them to believably play the part while remaining thin and lightly muscular, the beauty ideal in modern day entertainment.
Lena Headey and Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connnor
Another example is how the interpretation of Sarah Connor has changed from 1991 to the present day. I appreciate AskMen.com’s mention of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) from Terminator 2. Connor is a personal favorite of mine because she’s one of the few action heroines that I would be afraid to run into in a dark alley. Compared to her successor, Lena Headey of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Ms. Hamilton is skinny but much more muscular, and is more rugged in appearance than Ms. Headey. Because of this, she stands out as a rare type of female heroine that doesn’t exist simply for the male audience to drool over.
It is true that a woman’s body and muscle size does not determine whether she can fight or not. Bulging muscles and a bulky frame are not the only assets a fighter can have, and skinny women can be more than capable of holding their own. The actress herself brings a lot to the table in terms of believability: if she has a tough shine in her eyes and plays a resilient character, I will accept her as an awesome, kickass woman no matter what she looks like. However, these days the only image of female fighters in genre mediums are women who ooze attitude but who don’t uphold an image of physicality or physical toughness, thereby endorsing the beauty status quo for women.
Nick Frost as Ed in Shaun of the Dead
Men, on the other hand, have different beauty standards to fulfill: genre heroes have to be ruggedly handsome as well as heavily muscled, and a towering height can’t hurt. However, they are allowed a space where different body types can kick ass, even if they are sequestered in the realm of action-comedy: Ed (Nick Frost) from Shaun of the Dead was a capable zombie killer, and Dale Denton (Seth Rogen) played the heavy, pot-smoking, reluctant action hero in Pineapple Express. Jack Black, in the form of a rotund panda, became a master of martial arts in the animated Kung Fu Panda, and even before that Chris Farley was Haru in Beverly Hills Ninja.
You can say that Hollywood production studios are simply selling fantasy, giving people the ideals they want even if it hurts believability. However, this is more damaging for genre heroines than heroes: heroines are idolized as the epitome of female empowerment by feminists and the height of female sexuality by male viewers. Those who don’t fit the beauty standards and thus don’t qualify for heroine status lose on both fronts: they are told they can be neither empowered nor attractive. However, there is a silver lining: as more women enter genre fields, we can influence what messages we send. Through our creativity and determination, we can allow a greater diversity of the female image to be seen in horror, action, and science fiction.
(All Terminator images distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Television and Tristar Pictures…Shaun of the Dead distributed by Focus Pictures…Wanted distributed by Universal Studios Home Entertainment)
This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Gender Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 28th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
MEP says:My boyfriend and I went to see Pandorum last night and were comparing the female leads in that film versus Eden Log, an obvious influence of Pandorum. I pretty much expect any big-budget American action film to put a female lead’s tits and ass on display (Pandorum was no exception). But the most marked difference between the two female leads in the films is that in Eden Log, the woman is the brains of the duo, and the man is the brawn. In Pandorum, the woman was street smart, but mostly just ninja muscle with strategically placed holes in her costume. In a visual medium, physical appearance is going to be important; it’s the portrayal of the female intellect I worry about.
October 6th, 2009 at 7:11 am
Big Fat Deal » Why I Love Marge Gunderson says:[...] I don’t have any news about Jim Carrey’s weight gain, although I will keep an eye out for you, many Google searchers. But I did get a hot tip in the comments last week, and I wanted to share it: Jadet Cadet’s post on Gender and Size in the Action Genre. [...]
October 20th, 2009 at 1:26 am
Earl Newton says:It was interesting that all of your examples for differing male body types were primarily comedies whose fundamental plot relies on how completely unsuited the protagonist is to the task at hand (one was a children’s animated cartoon; I don’t know if we should be using those to determine how libido-popping a male protagonist needs to be). So I’m not sure how valid your point is, on differing male body types in action roles, even action-comedies.
It’s not outrageous to suggest the action genre is marketed almost exclusively at men. Why then, have they received nothing but the same old T&A female heroines?
Lack of imagination and short supply in casting, is my guess. Until a woman comes along who can break the stereotypes (be a believable action star, be attractive, and weigh more than 120lbs), men are going to demand what they’ve learned to demand, through society and their own personal desires. People can’t ask for something they don’t know exists, and I think, right now, people can’t imagine what a 120lbs+ female action star would look like. It’s up to someone to change that.
Risking TLDR, there’s another interesting question: if women action stars become more muscled and lose some of the more obvious feminine traits, aren’t they really moving more towards a masculine image? In that sense, is something lost or gained? Is the protagonist freed from her constraining role as a female stereotype, or locked into a downward spiral toward a male stereotype?
October 23rd, 2009 at 11:53 am
jade says:Sorry for the late reply, Earl, and thanks for commenting!
You say that the male protagonists I used were “completely unsuited…to the task at hand” in their prospective movies. That might be the case at the beginning of the movie, but this “unsuitability” is mined for both comedy and sympathy. You’re supposed to sympathize with the fact that they’re black sheep, and in the end, they prove themselves more than capable of bravery, strength and compassion. I wasn’t pointing them out as examples of libido-popping men, but simply the fact that bigger men in action-related genres can be classed as heroic because they overcame the prejudices against them. This occurs in female heroines too, but they have to overcome their slenderness and girliness. It empowers, yes, but it also forces ass-kicking women to become skinnier and smaller so the writers/director/producers can give an easy “yay empowerment” moment without really doing anything.
I think in the last paragraph, you make an assumption that being muscular is a male-exclusive trait. I have problems with that, because it automatically dismisses a portion of the female population as “moving towards a masculine image” simply because they’re doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. A female tennis player or track star shouldn’t be derided for being less feminine when they’re simply striving for their greatest potential in their field. I know you only meant the entertainment field, but it points out a widely held idea that women should fit a cookie cutter image of the “feminine” which is just as wrong as demanding that men should fit the image of a ‘roided out musclehead. Yes, if they’re space marines, muscles are appropriate because of their job. Is it too much to expect that in a female space marine as well?
October 24th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Earl Newton says:Hallo!
Wanted to clarify: when I said muscular, I was really thinking more in terms of a hyper-musclization (body builders, Ahhhnold, etc). I should have been more clear, because I definitely think some building out of female action stars wouldn’t hurt; was just having the discussion with the GF that “slim” does not equal “strong;” lack of fat does not mean more power.
As far as the bigger men being considered heroic, I don’t think it should be overlooked that this is a comedy being sold to men. The characters are “laughable” in their lack of ability. It’s not that men get a free pass to be less-than-Adonis, it’s that these men get away with it because they are putting their own awkward looks up for ridicule.
I imagine the same might happen if women were a demonstrably larger segment of the action/action-comedy demographic, but that isn’t clear yet. As such, action movies seem to represent a hyper-realization of the male fantasy. I don’t know whether that can be labeled “fair” or not (how do you apply fairness to a fantasy?).
Being involved, even peripherally, with the Hollywood system forces me to see it, not as a twisted generator of cliches and harmful stereotypes, but a patently slow-witted mirror of our own desires. If there is a sizable-enough audience for less cookie-cutter images of women, someone will hurry to feed that need. The problem is one of numbers: it isn’t clear yet that enough women would pay to see a less-cliche female stereotype kicking ass. That makes people less inclined to do bet 60 million trying, especially when de-sexualizing the lead is almost certainly going to cut away from your built-in male audience.
The argument can be made that society teaches people what they want in their media, and that Hollywood is partly responsible for that. That said, if it didn’t sell tickets, Hollywood wouldn’t do it. The secret to getting more equal representation, I think, is to represent ourselves more in the audience. I can’t remember how much Long Kiss Goodnight made, but I don’t remember it breaking records.
(that said, I am typing this on my iPhone, and fingers are tired now. Also, I am stealing all this to put Into a script about a regular woman kicking ass)