Another good one from Ammo Grrrll
It’s about one of my pet peeves, the obligatory sinewy cinema heroine who can beat up any guy in the house.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
It’s about one of my pet peeves, the obligatory sinewy cinema heroine who can beat up any guy in the house.
Mary Sue!
avi is correct: It’s so common, it has become an archetype
Mary Sue (n) : (originally in fan fiction) a type of female character who is depicted as unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses.
“She was not a ‘strong woman’ so much as an insufferable Mary Sue”
Rey in the latest Star Wars movies is one example. Batwoman is another.
avi and racy.
It’s beyond Mary Sue. It’s now politics: woman cannot be shown to be weaker than men or ever need their assistance.
Back in the day, before I was a martial arts instructor (jiu jitsu, primarily) I was just a new guy off the street (I spent 20 years studying and 5 teaching as an assistant). We had a senior student at the time I started: she weighed 110 lbs at 5’5”. She considered herself pretty tough.
About two weeks into my training, we had a sparring session. This other guy who joined not too long before I did was picked to spar with her. Being senior, she said she was going to go easy on him. Our actual instructor was not there that night and she was helping. He was a carpenter and weighed 175 lbs at 5’11” tall and had no background in either MA or sports (that matters a lot; athletes learn MA fast).
They put the head gear and gloves on and he hit her twice. She quit the sparring. Then she quit the school the next day. I’m not sure how she made it as far as she did. But it was instructional to everyone and I always keep that in mind as I watch TV and movies. In real life, 99.9999% of the women I encounter in violent situations will always back off of a larger man unless drugs or alcohol are involved.
One quibble with her essay: some of her examples like Buffy and Wonder Woman don’t necessarily apply because there is something supernatural at work with their character’s abilities to allow them to do what they do. It’s far more outrageous in most cop shows where small detective women kick the crap out of biker gangs.
There is also the variation where the male partner is being totally destroyed by the male bad guy only to saved by the female partner who takes out the muscle bound bad guy just like that.
Well, yes, but it can be pulled off without the Mary Sue garbage kicking in. And I don’t just mean making her the daughter of Zeus, like Wonder Woman.
Back in my youth, Emma Peel worked it well, and I was far from the only guy then who was overwhelmed. Of course, the fact that the Avengers was tongue-in-cheek much of the time helped.
(BTW, has the serio-comic adventure form died out? It was a mainstay of Hitchock’s movies, and was common in the 60s and 70s, with comedy combined with real action. UNCLE and Rockford are other examples. The last I recall is Mr and Mrs Smith, where Angelina worked the deadly female pretty well. Not Diana Rigg, but not awful.)
This may be a little off topic, but what gets me about movie fight scenes, especially when it’s all-in and to the death, is that no one ever goes for the eyes. Seriously, you’d rather die than “break the code” and attack the eyes? Is there some reason why people with training don’t do that, maybe because it usually doesn’t work? Anyway, in my opinion that’s at least as unlikely as lightweight young women beating up mobs of heavy-weight thugs.
Oh, it goes beyond that. Almost every TV show these days has the power woman boss with subservient, frequently inept, males; and of course the obligatory ethnic diversity. My wife wonders why I really don’t care about TV drama shows any longer. There are many reasons, but the blatant stereotyping is one.
I am also reminded periodically that I have two professional daughters, and should be pleased to see women successfully attain power positions. My response is that I am pleased to see women enjoy the success they earn.
One of the things I have enjoyed about the lockdown is the pretty immediate disappearance of all things woke in the p.r. that the cultural institutions are putting out while they can’t be open.
My husband and I had a project for the last four or five years to see every Shakespeare play live, and accomplished it with “Titus Andronicus” last October in Cinncinnati. We both agreed that we’d made it just in time. The various Shakespeare companies had started going beyond just some cross-gender casting and a whole lot of Army surplus, to productions where the gender/racial cross-typing was the point: all the Hamlets were women, usually “of color.”
Not content with that, they started changing the titles of the plays (“Cymbeline” has become “Imogene”), and changing the genders of the roles (Henry VI now has female advisors). The Stratford Festival has announced it will rewrite plays to make them more correct. The formerly excellent Staunton, Virginia American Shakespeare Center announced they were commissioning a series of contemporary plays as companion pieces: so far, I think they are all by women, and the few I saw, tedious feminist tales.
The National Gallery would send me various emails and brochures. While they still were hosting some excellent exhibitions, the lectures and films became 100% explorations of gender and slavery.
But with the shutdown, suddenly the stuff that they are live-streaming, etc. is all the classic stuff. From the most cynical of motives, of course (and the motives for the woke stuff was pretty cynical too, I imagine), but it shows that they know they are foisting this on an unwilling public — only stopping when they need that public.
But I have savored the respite from the woke assault greatly.
“Seriously, you’d rather die than “break the code” and attack the eyes?”
You fight the way you train and you can’t really train to attack the eyes. I didn’t watch them myself but I believe that’s why there weren’t a lot of guys going for the groin in the early days of UFC when it was “no holds barred.” Nobody lasts long at the gym if you keep hitting other guys in the junk.
Mike
John McEnroe was once asked where Serena Williams, then number 1 woman tennis player in the world, would rank on the men’s tour. Oh, about 700. The shrieking shattered the chandeliers in every snobby country club in the US. When she was asked how long she’d last against the number 1 men’s player, she said she’d lose the entire match in 20 minutes.
Soooo annoying, I agree. We women are just as smart as men-albeit sometimes in very different areas of study. I am all for a clever heroine, or one that has special marksmanship skills. But the 5’5″, 120 lb gal beating up the 6′ 180 lb guy, not so much. It defies the suspension of belief needed to watch an enjoyable show. Of course this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tv/cinema racial etc manipulation–the poor Bulgarians are always the bad guys; blondes are dumb… stupid sh*t like that.
I always keep that in mind as I watch TV and movies. In real life, 99.9999% of the women I encounter in violent situations will always back off of a larger man unless drugs or alcohol are involved.
My daughter went through the FBI academy when she was about 30 and a lawyer. Toward the end of the course, they had a hand to hand combat exercise. Because she was about 5-8 and in good shape (running 7 miles every day toward the end), they paired her with a little Army Special Forces guy. She said he was throwing her against the wall the whole time. Black and blue at the end. Good sport, though.
Another FBI story. In her class was a woman with a PhD and who spoke a bunch of languages. Kate later kept trying to recruit her sister who reads and speaks Arabic. Anyway, Kate was very intimidated by this woman who seemed so smart and accomplished. The last exercise in the course was a simulated arrest with actors. The problem was that they were arresting him for a white collar crime but he suddenly becomes resistant. I used to conduct these training exercises with medical students. “The Angry Patient,” etc.
When the actor playing the arrestee suddenly starts to resist, the woman with the great resume dissolved into a puddle crying in the corner.
D. Cohen said:
“Seriously, you’d rather die than “break the code” and attack the eyes? Is there some reason why people with training don’t do that, maybe because it usually doesn’t work?”
MBunge is correct. Its not really about code. Its extremely difficult to train to hit those targets (eyes…and other vulnerable spots) in a safe manner that keeps a gym or school capable of being insured.
Also, the big rule of training is this:
You do not rise to the occasion*. You fall back to the level of your training. In the big adrenaline dump, fine motor skills go away and tunnel vision takes over. You’re entire thought process changes and the perception of time seems to flow differently. All that really means is what people think they are going to do when it hits the fan and what they actually do are usually two different things. If you have enough training that the movements become reflex, there’s a chance your body will fall back on them. But it takes a lot of training to get there.
*The other big rule being; The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.
Are there any men above Constable grade in the British police force? Not if you watch any recent crime series. Lotsa young women and a few dowagers direct the traffic figuratively, while the blokes do so literally!
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.
The above quote is often attributed to Damon Runyon but the story, as usual, is more complicated. (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/04/race-swift/)
It’s kind of a horrible day with Minneapolis. Let me offer the following as a pleasant palate cleanser and evidence that sometimes bigger is not always better.
Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Spud Webb, 5’7″, kicking butt and taking names on the basketball court:
_______________________________________
5-foot-7 Spud Webb wins 1986 NBA Slam Dunk Contest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1YRJvFvlgg
_______________________________________
I love Spud. You can cue up his games on YouTube and see what a marvel he was. There was no affirmative action for Spud Webb. He got there because he could do the job.
huxley:
Spud Webb was my favorite basketball player, back when I used to follow it.
Eeyore,
The two “Kingsmen” movies fall into that category. Fun action and more than a bit of an old-style Avengers feel.
I am a tall woman, and strong for my age. I am very much aware that any man my height is stronger than I am, and that in fact men several inches shorter are probably also stronger than I am.
Many times I have read news stories about female police officers being overpowered by male detainees, sometimes with fatal results.
Eeyore: I’ll throw in half the Jason Statham action flicks. There’s not always a woman and she may not be a kung-fu mofo, but if she’s there, she usually provides humor as well as heat. And no one can really believe Statham’s moves anyway.
Try “Parker” or “Transporter 1.”
I have a daughter; I want her to be successful and have all career/life options available to her.
She works out, lifts weights, does cardio, etc.
She is fit.
If she gets into a fight with a guy, she will DIE !!
If with a female, she may survive.
Some time ago I purchased for her several mace/pepper spray self defense “weapons.”
I repeatedly remind her to have it handy and to “practice use it” on some inanimate object so that she knows how to ‘quick draw” if needed.
An aside; she was in London,, UK recently for several months and she snuck into merry ole England one of her mace cans.
She was searched entering a museum there, was forced to turn it over; apparently they are illegal in the UK.
Just so you know.
On physical averages, men are bigger and stronger, with different muscles.
There’s also something about training and willingness to obsess over it.
Women fighters winning physically over men without using tools, like guns, is quite unrealistic. Somehow more than unrealistically skilled men fighting other men. A woman shooting a gun could probably have killed a Bruce Lee type attacker, in reality – but that’s seldom the kind of scene that’s shown.
Why aren’t there more women doing well in e-Sports, like League of Legends (LoL) or DOTA?
Our family plays LoL (I like Dr. Mundo, but am low silver-bronze), and my daughter plays. But she’s not as good as my sons and their friends. And very very women play much – tho there is a lot of Sci-Fi/Fantasy cosplay (with costumes) that women join in with men.
Why are there so few good Fem rock guitar players? There are great violinists and for many other musical instruments.
Where are the great Fem fighter pilots?
I think the Dem Feminist desire to have as many female sports heroes as celebrated as male sports heroes is harming women and will harm them more in the future, as compared to supporting their traditional femininity.
There is something psychological about physical power dominance that is unbalanced in the relations between men and women. An inequality that seems to many women to be Unfair.
But there’s no just way to change this unfairness; the inequality is part of the human reality. Those rejecting the inequality are rejecting reality.
Many of the Jason Stathum movies are fun alt-Bond type masculine action romps. I’ve liked him since Transporter, and have seen many including Parker and Crank – which was on again a couple of nights ago. I thought he would have made a much much better Jack Reacher than Tom Cruise (who is too small. I’m waiting for the next Lee Child installment.)
Real happiness for most happy couples comes from accepting their physical and psychological differences and complimentary traits.
I suspect the Fem push to make sports girls equal to sports boys will result in much less happy couples in the future. Tho, arguably, more equality.
Misery loves company.
huxley,
Have you read, “The Sports Gene,” by David Epstein? You would likely enjoy it. One of the chapters focuses on a young man with supernatural leaping ability, like Spud Webb. Really interesting.
All this reminds me of the old saying;
‘God made men and women. Sam Colt made them equal.’
Very worrisome that young women are being taught that they can defend themselves from a real threat with their feet and their fists. Not happening.
The toughest woman I know was a military helicopter pilot in the early days, BEFORE they were protected from harassment. Then a commercial jet captain with a major airline. How tough? She went for five mile runs after her chemo infusions (it took me months to get back on the trail!), and left the hospital six hours after a mastectomy to go home and feed her dogs. Mentally and physically as tough as they come. And like Ammo Grrrll, she just rolls her eyes at these feminist fantasies.
Speaking of training and reacting, on the internet you can find the body cam footage of a female Napa Sheriffs Deputy returning fire on a suspect. Watch it and ask yourself if you could react that correctly and that fast. Dad and grandfather were both LEOs and took her to the range a lot. It shows.
My daughter starts college in the fall, and she wants to take a self-defense class this summer. I support it – but I want to go too, to make sure that the class is correctly emphasizing avoidance and situational awareness over wading in and punching people.
We just saw a Hallie Berry movie, The Call about 911 operator and a very tense case.
There are realistic struggles by women against the bad guy.