Miscellaneous Mondays: Strong Women

I’m a fan of superhero comics, so, although we spend most of our time talking about strength of character, I have a special place in my heart for women who display great physical strength. That’s one of the reasons why my collectible Wonder Woman figurine shares a shelf with my Virginia Woolf plushie.

It’s also the reason for the focus of this post. Superhero comics are well-known for their portrayal of impossible women’s bodies. These women often have the kind of statuesque physiques that could only exist on an actual statue, with torsos so narrow it seems as if they’ve had some vital organs removed. As if these women weren’t already in danger of snapping at the waist, they all seem to possess the most common superpower. Perhaps the (usually male) artists are operating under the assumption that women can relocate their internal organs to protrude from their chests.

The most obvious example of this phenomenon is Power Girl, a superhero so well-endowed that her insignia is a boob window. There is a story, circulated through the comics-reading community and addressed by blogger Ragnell, that the character’s impressive cup size is the fault of Wally Wood, the artist who drew the character when she was first created. Wood supposedly decided to see if the editors were paying attention to his work by increasing Power Girl’s bust size every issue. Unfortunately, it took several issues for anyone to notice, so she’s been stuck with gravity-defying, back-breaking breasts ever since.

While the unrealistic breast size of these characters is certainly indicative of their over-sexualization, I would argue that there’s another aspect to this decision. In order to perform acts of tremendous physical strength, female superheroes need to have a well-defined musculature. However, because physical strength is so thoroughly associated with masculinity, the artists feel that they need to over-enhance the character’s feminine appearance. What’s the best way to do this? Long, flowing, easily-pulled-in-hand-to-hand-combat hair and fabric-straining breasts.

So it was with delight that I found this review of Venus with Biceps: A Pictorial History of Muscular Women by David L. Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky. Although I haven’t yet purchased a copy for myself, I’m more than willing to get the word out about what looks to be a very interesting work, that not only discusses issues of gender identity, but also collects a number of images of unrepentantly strong women.

Perhaps even better than knowing that this book exists, however, is seeing similar images make their way back into popular culture. MAC has recently launched a new cosmetics line called “Strength,” and its advertising is a thing of beauty. Not only is the face of the line a bodybuilder, Jelena Abbou, but the tagline of the campaign is the greatest I’ve read outside of that amazing 1980s Lego ad: “Flex your femininity with a colour collection that’s fearless, elegant and strong. Strike a powerful pose, stand out, redefine the notion of beauty -- and do it with strength too irresistible to ignore.” That’s advertising even Wonder Woman would love.

The Shift Matron and the War Widow

Canada is known for many things: breathtaking natural beauty, an over-dependence on maple syrup, and a population whose famous humility makes way for brief bouts of patriotism only once every four years, when we cheer for the gifted athletes we usually ignore and the professional hockey players we watch almost constantly. We are not, as a rule, celebrated as the home of fantastic feminist television shows.

However, with the international success of the homegrown drama Bomb Girls, that’s beginning to change. Set during the Second World War, Bomb Girls chronicles the trials and tribulations of life on the home front for the women of Victory Munitions, a bomb factory in Toronto. At work, at home, and at play, these women simultaneously struggle with the sexist standards of their time and bask in the new freedom allowed them while the men fight overseas.

I mentioned in Monday’s post that this show passes the Bechdel test twice in the first three minutes of the first episode, but what is even more notable is that it holds to this pattern for the remainder of the first season. Bomb Girls is precisely the kind of show that would exist in a post-Bechdel test cultural climate, in which women in the media are shown to be thinking, feeling people with important relationships with other women, all of whom have full lives that don’t revolve around men.

(Note: We will only be covering the first season in our analysis. We have, however, timed these posts to coincide with the release of Season Two in Canada, so once you’ve bought and marathoned the first season on DVD, there will be bright, shiny, new episodes waiting for you.)

Lorna Corbett

We begin with Lorna Corbett, the blue shift matron at Vic Mu, who is just about the only person in management who seems to understand how to run the place. It is her job to ensure order in her shift and to inspect her workers for materials that may spark in the very literal powder keg in which they work. Her boss, Harold Akins, reduces her job to a simple task, exclaiming, “For God’s sakes, all you have to worry about is dressing the girls for their shifts.” But Lorna actually does much more. She asks that the factory implement a comprehensive sexual harassment policy and goes on to write it herself. When a bad bomb injures three male workers during testing, she takes the women’s suggestions for improvement to Akins. She tells him to publish them in a report and take the credit for increasing safety and productivity; in exchange, she asks only that her scapegoated worker be rehired.

In these two instances, and in many others, she demonstrates that she is committed to protecting her girls. The best example occurs near the end of the first episode, when Lorna appeals to a doctor to give a grievously injured woman worker the same treatment that he would give the higher priority soldiers. She gives an impassioned speech: “You can’t let her leave here deformed; it will destroy her future. … Vera is a soldier. Vera risked her life every day to help win this war. Do not turn your back on her. If you want to see our boys with bullets in their guns and bombs in their planes, you will show her the same respect. … Now go in there, and book the operating room, and you do the surgeries, no matter how expensive or lengthy. You do your best for that girl.” Lorna refuses to let women’s role in the war be dismissed and their work devalued; instead, she argues that they are instrumental in the men’s success and should therefore be treated with equal care.

Lorna knows very well what it means to contribute to the war effort. She is the mother of three grown children, two of whom are fighting across the pond while she and her daughter do their part at home. She is also the wife of a World War I veteran, whose experiences during the Great War left him crippled, both physically and emotionally. The show takes this opportunity not only to flesh out the well-worn character of the dissatisfied middle-aged woman, but to explore the effects of PTSD on the affected person’s family.

As her husband’s character becomes increasingly complex, we discover what Lorna has had to live with for twenty-five years. Bob has a drinking problem and a tendency to be brutally honest in a way that comes across as callous. He refuses to have sex with her and chooses to complain about the extravagance of buying a whole pot roast rather than praise Lorna for making it. He’s not all bad, however. His observations, cynical as they may be, are often correct, and his decision to revisit the trauma of his wartime experience in order to write convincing letters for Edith’s children is admirable. When it comes to their marriage, however, things have gotten so bad that Lorna becomes suspicious when he displays any positive emotion.

From Lorna’s perspective, the problem is that Bob has never made any effort to move on from his traumatic experience, choosing instead to view the world “through the lens of a few terrible months [he] had twenty-five years ago.” He seems to prefer to wallow in his pain rather than acknowledge the things they have accomplished since the war. While he remained isolated in his pain, she tried to convince him to let her in, explaining that “[she] asked, [she] hinted, [she] tried, and then finally, [she] gave up.” She has been trying to re-forge a connection for decades, and it’s understandable that she would resent him when he finally makes an attempt to do the same.

Her relationship with Bob also explains why she is so determined to help Vera. Faced with the prospect of seeing another person in her life lose themselves to depression, she fights back. She has to make Vera what Bob never allowed himself to become: a person who lives after not dying.

Unfortunately, most of Lorna’s good advice is reserved for other people. Just as she makes it her job to protect her girls, she also considers it her duty to protect her country. In the first episode, she begins a campaign to get a materials controller, Marco Moretti, ousted from Vic Mu based solely on his Italian heritage and Italy’s connections to Hitler. She accuses him of being an enemy spy and then spends most of the first three episodes trying to prove her suspicions. She believes that people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to hide, and any investigation will necessarily find them innocent. Implicit in this notion is the idea that if you are found guilty of something, you must have done it. Eventually, she reports him to higher military authorities, which leads to rumours of his being taken to an internment camp. It is only when she shares an awkward family dinner with Marco and his mother that she begins to relinquish her fear and comes to appreciate their cultural differences, as well as the flaws in her worldview.

While Lorna claims that her actions are driven by the circumstances of global conflict, she proves that, in this case, the political is personal. Smoking out an enemy spy allows her to feel like she’s helping to protect her sons; the same rationale motivates her to make the bombs that will kill other mothers’ sons. When she sees Marco with his mother in his home, she can no longer pretend not to see him as a person. Unfortunately, this realization coincides with the discovery of their mutual attraction. It seems that Lorna’s misuse of her power as a native Canadian to banish an Italian threat was also an attempt to banish the temptation that threatens her family and marriage; she had to neutralize what she viewed as a threat to both her home country and her home. This is further complicated by the fact that Lorna ends up having sex with Marco and becoming pregnant with his child, willingly letting him into her life.

This all brings us to the issue of sacrifice. When asked to deliver a speech on Armistice Day, Lorna chooses as her focus the topic of individual sacrifice on behalf of the greater good. While she explicitly links this concept to the efforts of soldiers in both wars, she also acknowledges the sacrifices that she and her fellow workers make to support them. Implicitly, she also talks about herself. Early in the speech, she delivers a line that she wrote in an earlier scene; the repetition suggests that it is intended to draw our focus. As she says, “We are all asked to make sacrifices, and while not every sacrifice is rewarded, it is our duty to do so.” It seems as if Lorna is speaking about her marriage, twenty-five years of living with a distant partner in order to raise three children, two of whom she has offered to her country. By the end of the speech, however, she seems to be looking to the future: “Sometimes, you know when a thing is right. What’s a few small sacrifices on our part when we stand to win back the happiness and freedom we deserve?” She sees herself as deserving of love and affection. She sees herself as deserving of a life that takes into account her needs.

This all changes when she learns of the pregnancy in the next episode. After the positive test comes back, she breaks down in front of Marco, saying that she’s a horrible person who deserves this punishment for all of the awful things she’s done. She laments, “I thought it was finally my turn; I’d get my life. And now it’s over.” She has come to the conclusion that she’s not the hero, doggedly pursuing the enemy; rather, she is the villain, paying for her crimes.

Verdict: Actual strong female character

Edith McCallum

Edith is the least developed and, arguably, the weakest character among the six that we’ll be discussing. At the factory, she is Lorna’s right-hand woman, the bridge between her and her girls. In the show, she is the first victim of the war.

Edith is at work when she learns that her husband’s plane has been shot down, and her grief is suddenly made very public. While the show makes clear that the news could have come to anyone, even going so far as to make it seem as if one of Lorna’s sons had died, it is ultimately Edith who collapses with grief. The rest of the season chronicles her attempt to cope with the loss.

Although she gets less screen time than other characters, Edith’s story is a fairly compelling one. She continues to work after receiving the news, taking comfort in her friends and in the activity. Despite the fact that she barely sleeps, she knows that she must support her family and diligently does her job until she is the unfortunate victim of scapegoating after a disastrous testing day. When Lorna tries to justify her firing by implying that she could have done better on the test, Edith defends herself: “Aside from not sleeping a wink since my husband was blown to bits, or worrying how I’m gonna raise two kids, or how I still can’t tell them Daddy’s never coming home... Aside from all that, I can’t imagine what took my head out of the game.” In addition to her grief, she now has to deal with a reputation for incompetence that will prevent her from finding further employment.

Once she gets her job back, she still has to deal with the mess that is her personal life. The rest of her storyline revolves around her refusal to tell her children that their father is dead. Although both Lorna and Bob take issue with her decision, Edith is persistent, trying to protect her children from the kind of pain that she is experiencing. She causes herself more pain, however, in pretending that everything is fine. Helping and hindering her in this pursuit is Bob, who pens letters for the kids in the guise of Edith’s husband before eventually revealing the truth. In a refreshing change, the show doesn’t actively support Bob’s decision to end the charade, but instead has him acknowledge that it was her right to tell them; he apologizes for taking away her agency.

Edith’s defining moment comes in the second episode. Vera has asked to brush Edith’s hair, and in a revealing moment, Edith laments, “I guess the war pretty much kicked the girly girl out of us, didn’t it?” She is not just talking about coveralls and turbans, but about the reality that she faces as a single parent, having to become mother and father and breadwinner.

Verdict: Supporting role

Miscellaneous Mondays: The Quest for a Better Hero's Journey

This week’s Miscellaneous Mondays post features a talk given by communications expert Colin Stokes about the profound influence that the filmic hero’s journey exercises on the audience. In this video, he discusses the limitations inherent in this trope and advocates for a paradigm shift from a hero’s journey, focused on an individual (usually a man) who either defeats other people or claims them as prizes, to a heroes’ journey, focused on a team comprised of people of all genders, whose goal is to improve themselves and those around them.



Now for a bit of a teaser. Whether you have been basing your viewing habits on the Bechdel test for years or had never heard of it before watching this video, you might be interested to know that the television show that we’ll be talking about in our next series of posts passes the test two times in the first three minutes.

She Blinded Me With Science

In our survey of the subversive qualities of the ladies of Adventure Time, it’s only right that we end with Princess Bubblegum. For the better part of three seasons, Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum (hereafter Bubblegum, Bonnibel, Peebles, or just PB) occupies the role traditionally reserved for the princess prize, the woman who will be given to the hero as just deserts for his impressive deeds. Except, of course, that that’s not even remotely what happens.

Just as Marceline operates within and against the conception of vampires derived from literary and folkloric sources, the character of Bonnibel is informed by a long tradition of fairy tale princesses. Her skin, hair, and wardrobe are all overwhelmingly pink. She has a tendency to speak in a formal register, stopping just short of speaking with the royal “we.” She serves as an almost preternaturally all-knowing guide to our hero, and it is her job both to send him off on quests and to ensure that he learns the proper lesson from his adventures. She even bids him farewell by waving a handkerchief.

The handkerchief incident is an excellent indicator as to the show’s approach to Bubblegum’s princess status; when seeing Finn off, she actually stops herself mid-sentence, says, “Wait a minute,” and produces the cloth in order to get the look right. If a princess is sending her hero off, she has to cut a suitably dramatic figure. The same kind of transparency exists in her speech patterns. While she clearly strives to stay in royal character, she also regularly slips into informal diction and slang, mixing declarations that she “will be back on the morrow” (a phrase which, in context, is itself a play on assumptions about formal language) with words like “y’all” and “aight.” Even the lessons she imparts are delivered in unexpected ways. When Finn and Jake disregard signs telling them not to enter a dungeon -- signs that Bubblegum had them put up -- she tries to make them see that the lesson was to obey her orders. The boys offer a different lesson and, when Bubblegum finds it lacking, Finn amends it: “I learned that you are a very... intelligent princess?” Her response? “You’re darn right I am.” As if all this weren’t enough to let us know that we’re dealing with a different kind of princess, the swan she rides can shoot lasers. Because of the show’s post-apocalyptic setting, it almost seems as if Bubblegum has tried to meld her reality with our storytelling tropes, revealing the performativity of princessery in the process.

Further hammering this point home are Bonnibel’s other pursuits. She is a polyglot, speaking German and English as well as understanding Korean. Like the sugar-based lovechild of Pinkie Pie and Marie Curie, she spends her time either attending bizarre events (our particular favourite is the Whistling Choir Death Match Championship) or doing Science (the capital “S” is always implied). We’re most interested in the latter interest, because science has typically been considered masculine territory.

In Adventure Time, however, the first episode opens with Bubblegum conducting an essentially impossible scientific experiment while Finn looks on, fascinated and uncomprehending. It’s a daring move, because the first time we meet Bubblegum, she messes up. In another show, this might set the standard for her character: she tries to perform experiments beyond her ability and Finn saves the day by fighting the monsters that result. Instead, she has him babysit her subjects while she fixes the situation herself. In addition, the problem that she’s trying to solve is death itself, and she triumphs. Accidentally raising a candy-eating zombie hoard from the dead can be overlooked when it leads to unlocking the secret of resurrection.

Adventure Time manages to strike this kind of balance in many aspects of Bubblegum’s character. She is obsessed with science, once going so far as to use a wide variety of scientific approaches and equipment to make “the most perfect sandwich that has ever existed or ever will exist within the confines of space-time.” In this instance and one other, when she stays up for eighty-three hours straight in order to make herself an immortal replacement, the show suggests that this obsession may be unhealthy. At the same time, however, the vast majority of her experiments and inventions are helpful, practical, and just downright cool, and the show actively supports her accomplishments. She also has a tendency to engage in displays of irrational anger, but these moments are tempered by the hyper-rationality that dominates the rest of her life.

Although she often has to be saved, she is clearly able to take care of herself. The best example of this occurs in the episode “Lady and Peebles,” which follows Bubblegum and Lady Rainicorn as they embark on their own adventure to save Finn and Jake from the nightmarish Ricardio the Heart Guy. Not only does PB prepare for every eventuality, but when her equipment is stolen and Lady injured, she nevertheless sets forth to save her friends, all while carrying the much larger Lady on her shoulders. When she discovers that Ricardio has made himself a body and intends to marry her, she agrees, on the condition that he must beat her in hand-to-hand combat. She exploits his body’s poor design, literally ripping him limb from limb before delivering this amazing speech: “You think we’re intellectual equals? It only took me seconds to get you off your guard! And this ‘body’ you’ve designed is self-congratulatory garbage! See, I know a thing or two about building a body out of biomass, and you don’t leave your heart exposed!” When Ricardio protests that he only wanted to impress her, she simply replies, “You didn’t.” Finally, because she hadn’t quite reached a high enough level of BAMFitude, she drags Finn, Jake, Lady Rainicorn, and the Ice King back to the Candy Kingdom, where she cures them and builds the Ice King a new heart. Still, while she combines brains and brawn, she doesn’t quite fit the warrior princess mold. She doesn’t seem to enjoy fighting, using it not to replace, but to support her intellectual smackdowns.

In addition to her duties as princess of the Candy Kingdom, she is queen of the trolls. Not only does she help Jake with his haunted house trick, but she uses her knowledge that Finn wants to kiss her to engage in a little good-natured teasing. She makes a habit of exploiting her connections to a hero to get him to do menial tasks for her, like watching her princess plant or putting up signs. The pièce de résistance is her decision to make Finn and Jake believe that she’ll be decapitated if they don’t deliver tarts to an official ceremony on time, purely to ensure that they won’t eat the tarts themselves.

This attitude toward Finn may explain, at least in part, why they don’t really work as a romantic pairing. While Finn entertains the idea that the (probably several times) eighteen-year-old Bonnibel could come to love his thirteen-year-old self, she seems to understand that they are at different places in their lives. This is confirmed in “Too Young,” when the thirteen-year-old Bubblegum displays feelings for Finn that her older self dismisses as a mere childish whim. He constantly tries to impress her, but she cannot -- or does not let herself -- see his actions as legitimate romantic advances. In fact, her willingness to tease him about wanting to kiss her may stem from her inability to figure out a way to let him down gently. This is suggested by the events of “Incendium,” when Finn puts his head in Bubblegum’s lap and she cannot get away fast enough. Before she goes, she does manage to express how awkward he has made their friendship: “Finn, no. Come on, Finn, don’t be weird.” Finally, when Jake suggests that jealousy lies behind her objection to Finn’s relationship with Flame Princess, she tells him that it’s not about “some petty love triangle.”

Jake speaks here as the voice of narrative convention. In other stories, the girl who’s been resisting the boy’s advances might show interest after he’s moved on, moving him out of the so-called “Friend Zone” only after he’s already left. Adventure Time doesn’t even entertain the idea of friend-zoning, instead replacing it with an increasingly foreign concept we might call “being friends.” What makes this particularly impressive is that it shuts down the easy drama represented by the love triangle in order to show respect to the characterization of all parties involved. It’s a bold move, and as people who would prefer not to have to see another lazy love triangle storyline for about a decade, we appreciate it.

When she’s trying to explain to Finn why he shouldn’t date Flame Princess, Bonnibel makes a particularly revealing argument: “Finn, sometimes you want someone, and you want to kiss them and be with them, but you can’t, because responsibility demands sacrifice.” Regardless of your shipping preferences, this says a lot about her approach to life as a princess. In “Too Young,” she talks about the toll royal responsibility takes, stating that she would love to remain thirteen in order to enjoy the freedom of childhood; however, she ultimately decides to age back into rulership because her people need her, “and that comes first.” She is motivated primarily by a need to do right by her subjects, keeping them in ignorance when it will save their lives and planning to torture the Ice King in order to cure an epidemic. She is a monarch first and a person second.

The most interesting treatment of PB’s approach to leadership comes in the “Goliad” episode. Faced with her own mortality following her near-death at the hands of the Lich, Bubblegum decides to make a successor who can live forever. That successor turns out to be Goliad, a rather horrifying piece of Nightmare Fuel made from Bubblegum’s DNA. Because PB stayed awake for days making the unholy creature, Finn and Jake take Goliad out for her first lesson in leadership. Goliad learns the wrong lesson, claiming that enraged shouting and psychic/telekinetic manipulation are the best ways to get people to do what she wants. When it comes time for Bubblegum to correct her creation’s conception of leadership, she tries to figure it in terms of a symbiotic relationship between ruler and subjects: “Goliad, let me tell you something about leadership. You see this fat bee? She gets pollen from this flower, but she’s gentle and makes the flower happy and pollinated. They both get what they need. And that’s how a leader should be.” Goliad rejects this reality and substitutes her own.

To prevent Goliad from indulging her megalomaniacal tendencies, Bubblegum makes another candy sphinx, this time using Finn’s heroic DNA to make Stormo, a selfless creature willing to sacrifice himself to save the kingdom. Here’s where things get interesting, even though that’s technically where we leave the episode. If we are to infer that Finn’s heroic DNA made Stormo heroic, we have to wonder what Goliad’s actions say about Bonnibel herself. Is it her DNA that produces a creature willing to rule others by force? Or, considering the fact that Goliad initially sees this forceful behaviour demonstrated by Jake, is this merely a comment on the malleability of children’s minds and the necessity of giving them healthy examples to emulate? At the very least, it shows us that Bubblegum is willing to enter ethically dubious territory in equipping her ideal ruler with psychic powers.

What we appreciate about Bubblegum is precisely what we enjoy in all of the Adventure Time characters we discussed: they are successful subversions of familiar character types that demonstrate what you can create when you expand these types into nuanced, fully-formed people. The show gives the lie to the claim that children’s programming is simplistic and unsophisticated. On the contrary, Adventure Time proves that a simple concept can give its creators room to create, to expand upon ideas, situations, and characters that television shows and films intended for adult audiences leave unexplored. It is a cartoon that draws its women in fine detail, rendering them human with all the accompanying strengths and flaws inherent in the term. If enjoying some legitimately strong female characters means that we also have to adjust to a world in which the amount of candy matter present in one’s body determines one’s age and buttermilk is instrumental in summoning demons, we have to say we’re okay with it.

Verdict: Actual strong female character

Edit: Sometimes when you have a deadline looming, you publish work that is less than your best. Luckily, we’re giving ourselves something of an extension to ensure that Princess Bubblegum gets the treatment she deserves.

We have had it brought to our attention by Adventuretitan that we missed a major issue in the “Lady and Peebles” episode. While we focused on Bubblegum’s ability to defend herself, we neglected to discuss what she was defending herself from. From the moment that Bubblegum and Lady Rainicorn enter Ricardio’s lair through a sphincter, the episode is full of the imagery and symbolism of violated bodies. While flying through a dark chamber, Lady and Bubblegum are accosted by a multitude of groping, disembodied hands. After temporarily impairing her sight, the hands strip Bubblegum of her bag of supplies, leaving her vulnerable.

Once she and Lady enter the chamber that houses Ricardio, they are confronted with the body of the Ice King, whose chest bears a gaping wound. Next, they see the unconscious Finn and Jake, who have been poisoned by zanoits, which seem to replicate some of the effects of date rape drugs. Finally, Ricardio reveals the reason for this horrific display: “I thought I only wanted your heart, but I was wrong. I was unfair to you. I want the full package.” He has made himself a body, and the interest he takes in Bubblegum removing some of her clothing suggests that he is planning to use his new body to violate hers.

In light of this, Bubblegum’s ability to best Ricardio on a physical level can be seen not only as a display of badassery, but as an assertion of bodily autonomy. She annihilates his capacity to enact sexual violence, not just preventing a sexual assault, but incapacitating a sexual assailant. Even better is the fact that the narrative upholds her actions as very much the right thing to do.

Another important moment we wanted to discuss occurs in a situation where Bubblegum’s body has actually been compromised. In “Mortal Folly,” Finn uses the power of love (or liking someone a lot) imbued in the sweater Bubblegum made him in order to defeat the Lich. However, when he attempts to use the same sweater -- and, therefore, the same power -- to restore the possessed Bubblegum’s true self, nothing happens. As Finn observes, “Liking her didn’t work. She’s unstoppable.” For once, the power of love isn’t enough to save a woman. We may be jaded as a result of overexposure to Disney movies, where the healing properties of “true love’s kiss” are apparently limitless, but the idea that a woman can have strengths and weaknesses that have nothing to do with romantic emotion is pretty excellent. It’s sad that we even have to celebrate such a thing, but we’re willing to give kudos to any show that does it right when so many do it wrong.

Miscellaneous Mondays: Anne Hathaway’s Awesome Interviews

Welcome to our first Miscellaneous Mondays post! Every week we will be providing a link, a quote, a timely rant, or an insightful piece of commentary (written by the brilliant people who inhabit the Internet world outside SFC) that deals with an issue related to the representation of women in media.

We’re kicking things off with a post dedicated to a woman who’s been having a banner year: Anne Hathaway. She’s starred in two blockbuster films this year (The Dark Knight Rises and Les Misérables) and was arguably the best part of both, bringing life to two legitimately compelling characters. Unfortunately, it seems that all the media cares about are her marriage, her weight loss, and her crotch. Luckily, Anne has given some excellent responses to completely asinine questions asked in interviews.

Take, for example, Anne’s answer to Extra’s Jerry Penacoli’s question about her exercise regime in preparation for her role in The Dark Knight Rises (at 1:20 of the following video):

This is the response of a woman who has been asked stupid questions about her appearance far too many times. Even her teasing comes across as frustrated instead of light-hearted.

Her frustration is equally palpable in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer that took place only a few weeks ago. Although she was on the show to be interviewed about Les Misérables, Lauer decided to open the interview with the comment, “Seen a lot of you lately,” referring to Anne’s wardrobe malfunction at the film’s premiere. Then, instead of asking relevant questions, he asked what lesson she had learned from the experience. Apparently not one to let the opportunity to call another interviewer out on his inappropriate line of questioning go by, she answered thusly:

“It was obviously an unfortunate incident. It kind of made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and rather than delete it, and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants, which takes us back to ‘Les Mis,’ because that’s what my character is.”

In a move that’s been described as “tenth-degree black belt media judo,” Anne simultaneously condemned the sexism inherent in Lauer’s question and brought the interview back to the actual topic: her work.

While the media is obsessed with women’s bodies and love lives, the women who do their work in front of the camera generally want to focus the public’s attention on that work. We’re glad to see a rising tide of support for these actors -- a group from whom we’ve selected Anne Hathaway as a timely example -- even if that support is mostly coming from the Tumblr set. We’d like to hear from you, dear readers; leave us a comment with your favourite instance of a famous woman (politician, actor, writer, you name it) pointing out and smacking down sexist questions.

I’m Holding Out For a Hunka Hunka Burning Cookie

In last week’s post, we talked (and talked and talked) about the subversive work that the Adventure Time crew has done with Marceline. This week, we’d like to tackle the way in which this subversive spirit has affected a few of the more minor characters.

Fionna

We start with someone who, despite her limited screen time, isn’t actually minor at all. Fionna is the gender-swapped version of the show’s hero, Finn; with the help of her cat, Cake, she must keep Ooo (and Prince Gumball) safe from the evil Ice Queen.

According to Rule 63 of the infamous Rules of the Internet, for every given male character, there is a female version of that character, and vice versa. Gender swapping is so pervasive a phenomenon that the rule’s popularity is only dwarfed by that of Rule 34: “There is porn of it. No exceptions.” However, while Rule 34 only proves what Avenue Q’s Trekkie Monster has been telling us for a decade, Rule 63 has a more complex function.

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that, in G-rated films released between 2006 and 2009, women and girls only comprised 32.6% of the characters onscreen. This number only decreases as the rating goes up. Essentially, in mainstream Hollywood, the ratio of men to women is 2:1. Now imagine a world in which the opposite is true: women star in nearly all blockbusters, women make up the majority of background characters, and the “womance” becomes a common trope. Women play all of our admirable action heroes, all of our bold world leaders, all of our iconic villains. When a film starring a man or a group of men succeeds at the box office, it is nevertheless dismissed as a “male tale.” Gender swapping, taken to its logical conclusion, shows us just how messed up our current media norms really are.

Although the show is certainly engaging in this conversation, in its use of gender swapping, Adventure Time seems to be responding to a very specific -- and ultimately negative -- application of the trope.

Let me explain. (No, there is too much. Let me sum up.) Although she appears to be a few years older than her male counterpart, Fionna closely resembles Finn, possessing his thirst for adventure, his crush on Bubblegum (now Gumball), his friendship with Marceline (now Marshall Lee), his canine best friend (now feline), and a very near approximation of his wardrobe. However, whereas many of Finn’s personality traits are considered pretty standard for a thirteen-year-old boy, they are somewhat less common among cartoon representations of girls in their late teens and therefore take on a slightly different significance.

Fionna is labelled as a tomboy, seemingly just because she loves adventuring and finds wearing dresses to be a chore, to the extent that she wears her everyday clothes underneath the one that Cake recommends she wear. As she says, she is “all about swords” and prefers a wardrobe that accommodates their inclusion. When she is being serenaded by a false Prince Gumball, she provides the pyrotechnics by chopping through a swarm of attacking creatures. She is an accomplished hero, saving Gumball on several occasions and holding him in the very definition of a heroic pose. She is less competent when it comes to romancing or actually talking to her crush; in fact, it is only by the end of their evening together that she can confidently and excitedly state, “It was a date! There was singing and junk!”

Their next rendezvous doesn’t go so well. Gumball urges Fionna to join him in his bedroom, and she’s clearly very uncomfortable with the idea of the sudden shift in their relationship. She gets even more uncomfortable when she notices that the real Gumball is frozen to the ceiling and the prince that has been wooing her is the Ice Queen in disguise. The end of this scene is the pivotal moment of the episode, not because it clears up the plot, but because it reveals the subversive function of Fionna.

We’ve all noticed that Hollywood has a tendency to make movies starring men about universal ideas and experiences, and movies starring women about love, usually of the romantic variety. A recent television-based example is a much-criticized aspect of The Legend of Korra. Whereas its predecessor, Avatar: The Last Airbender, focused on a major plot arc and used romance either as a subplot or a device to enhance character development, the first season of The Legend of Korra became bogged down in endless love triangles that took time away from the plot arc and, arguably, regressed Korra as a character. The most glaring difference between the two series? The last airbender, Aang, is a thirteen-year-old boy and Korra is a seventeen-year-old girl.

Taking the very same difference into account in its own episode, Adventure Time manages to avoid making a similar mistake. The episode does focus on Fionna’s romantic troubles, but, while Finn struggles for three seasons with his crush on Bubblegum and tries to deal with a potentially life-threatening relationship with Flame Princess, Fionna decides over the course of an eleven-minute-long episode that she don’t need no man to complete her. After the real Gumball offers to take her out on a real date, she not only tells him that she isn’t interested, but physically shoves his face away, stating, “I think the reason I got all these guy friends and no boyfriend is because I don’t really want to date any of them. I don’t need to feel like I’m waiting to be noticed. I know who I am, and I’ll know what I want if and when it ever comes along.” The episode focuses on one girl’s love life in order to argue that there is more to a girl’s life than love.

Perhaps the greatest part of this episode, though, is the reveal that it all occurs in a piece of fanfiction written by the Ice King, a character to whom Jake has said, “Your constant harassment of the female gender makes me sick.” The fact that a person like the Ice King can write a female main character who is happy with herself and has no need for male validation serves as a pretty clear condemnation of the writers and producers that have populated our screens with women who can’t live without a man.

Verdict: Actual strong female character

Flame Princess

Flame Princess is explicitly introduced as Finn’s new love interest, some time before Finn has even met her. The situation itself is more than a little dubious: Finn, heartbroken by Bubblegum’s rejection, has descended into an almost catatonic state of grief, and Jake decides that the only way to get him out of his slump is to provide him with a new girl to pine over. Thinking that Finn should perhaps go for someone a little more attainable than Bubblegum, Jake has the brilliant plan to hook his best friend up with a girl made of fire. The fact that this situation leads to a lot of pain is not surprising; what is astounding is the fact that Flame Princess turns out to be a compelling character in her own right.

When we first meet her, she is incarcerated in a lamp: the Fire Kingdom equivalent of a maiden stuck in a tower. Jake must essentially woo her father with gifts in order to gain her hand for Finn, and it is only after the whole courtly routine is complete that the Flame King lets Jake know that his daughter is evil. When Jake attempts to get out of the deal, telling her that Finn no longer likes her, she attacks the tree fort, snapping Finn out of his funk in the process. Hurt by Finn’s unknowing rejection, she tells him not to mess with her ever again. Unfortunately, this encounter leaves him smitten with her.

Adventure Time does a lot of interesting work with Flame Princess’s forced innocence and ignorance. Flame Princess comes to learn that the world outside of the Fire Kingdom is a dangerous place, for her and for anyone who gets close to her. Everything she touches is reduced to ash, so she cannot truly discover things like trees or flowers. She comes to learn that she can be physically hurt as well, whenever her flames are put out. Instead of depicting her as an uncontrollable, natural force, the show portrays her as a young girl just beginning to learn exactly what it means to harm and be harmed.

As if that weren’t difficult enough, as soon as she seems to be carving out a place for herself, she learns that she can hurt others just by being a normal teenage girl. When she is released from the lamp, her father describes her as “an unstoppable force of destruction,” and the cruel irony is that the full force of her power is unleashed only when she finds something that she doesn’t want to destroy. As Princess Bubblegum explains, “Her elemental matrix can’t handle extreme romance! If Finn tries to kiss her, she’ll burn so hot, she’ll melt right through the planet’s crust, down through the molten core, then she’ll be thrown back and forth by gravity until she burns up the world from the inside! Why do you think I had her father keep her locked up?” Setting aside for a moment (and another post) the incredibly interesting idea that one princess had another locked up, Adventure Time is suggesting that sometimes princesses need to remain in the tower for the good of the world. Sometimes, Beauty and the beast are the same person, and the villagers need to be protected.

But sometimes, what is better for the world doesn’t trump what is better for the girl. Finn and Flame Princess bring out the best in each other, even if together, they produce an inferno that threatens to destroy Ooo. What we find particularly lovely is the fact that Finn makes a point of making the adjustments so their relationship can work. They want to hug, so he has Jake wrap him up in tin foil. He doesn’t let her think that she is a burden to shoulder or a problem to be solved, and in this way he tries to keep her from getting hurt. This doesn’t come across as some sort of misguided attempt to protect her because she is in some way weak; if anything, he’s protecting himself so he can continue to seek out and enjoy her company. At the same time (and we’re giving the Adventure Time writers major kudos for this), Finn and Flame Princess’ affection for each other doesn’t magically resolve the difficulties inherent in their relationship. Instead, it allows the show the opportunity to represent an interesting partnership that both people have to work to maintain, which we’ll take any day over an unrequited crush and several seasons of moping.

Verdict: Strong Female Character™ (just because she hasn’t been developed very much beyond Jake and Finn’s perceptions of her)

Princess Cookie

This analysis is the result of a special request by our illustrator, Jai. While Princess Cookie goes by masculine pronouns in the episode and could therefore be excluded from the category of “strong female character” based solely on that, we’re pretty confident we can defend his inclusion.

We first meet Princess Cookie as Baby-Snaps, a chocolate chip cookie person who has taken hostages in a grocery store and refuses to let them go until Princess Bubblegum gives him her crown. While this initially seems a bit like a very poorly staged coup d’état via small-scale domestic terrorism, it soon becomes clear that there is something else at work. Once Jake and Finn have infiltrated the store, the former in the guise of a milkman, Jake befriends the nervous Baby-Snaps, who then tells Jake why he has taken such extreme action.

Baby-Snaps was the new kid who tried and failed to make friends with the perpetually depressed children at his orphanage. One day, Princess Bubblegum visited and brought with her an influx of joy and optimism. Baby-Snaps describes that day as the most important -- and most crushing -- of his life: “Everything was different. Everything was... was better with her around. And something inside me changed that day too. And then later she told me I could be anything I wanted. … And I told her I wanted to be a princess like her, so I could make all the children happy. And she laughed in my face, man! It really messed me up.”

After hearing this story, Jake starts to call Baby-Snaps “Princess Cookie,” not in a patronizing way, but with genuine respect. He tries to secure Cookie’s safe departure in exchange for the hostages, but Bubblegum refuses to entertain any proposal that does not eventually end with Cookie rotting in the dungeon. Still, Jake decides to help, turning himself into Cookie’s trusty steed and temporarily turning his back on his Bubblegum-supporting buddy. When Jake and Cookie reach a cliff with a sheer drop, Cookie gives up, knowing that he cannot escape. He attempts to commit suicide, but Bubblegum’s forces merely gather up the pieces and deposit them in a mental institution. In the final scene, Jake delivers a specially made crown to Cookie and bows before him, driving the rest of the people in the room to acknowledge Cookie as the princess he always wanted to be.

There are a number of issues at work here, but we’re going to isolate two. The first hearkens back to a major issue already tackled on Strong Female Character: the idea that every little girl wants to be a princess and that, accordingly, every female character must be royal. Princessery is therefore an intensely feminine pursuit. The fact that Baby-Snaps wants to be a princess and assume the duty of pleasing his royal subjects makes a solid argument in favour of the awesomeness of typically girly things. Throughout their lives, the boys who watch Adventure Time will likely receive the message that they shouldn’t like things intended for girls, because our culture champions the stereotypically masculine and denigrates the stereotypically feminine. This episode, however, argues that embracing feminine pursuits is a legitimate endeavour, to be celebrated just as much as any typical path.

The other issue that emerges is one that perhaps validates Princess Cookie’s inclusion on SFC: his apparent genderqueer identity. In a show where just about every female character is a princess, there is a suggestion that “princess” is synonymous with “girl.” What Princess Cookie is doing then, more than breaking laws, is violating the unwritten societal assumptions with regard to the binary nature of gender. He seems to identify as male, nevertheless yearning to break free of the social restrictions (here represented by Bubblegum, the show’s head princess in charge) and become a kind of model of femininity.

It would have been subversive if Adventure Time had merely represented this story and portrayed Princess Cookie sympathetically. Instead, they went one step further. Not only did they give Cookie a heartbreaking backstory of dreams dashed, but they gave him a supporter who made every effort to help him realize those dreams. They told a tale about being yourself and deserving the opportunity to achieve your dreams using a princess story that Disney wouldn’t dare produce. Unfortunately, Adventure Time offers no miraculous solutions; Cookie is institutionalized, and his subjects are his fellow inmates. He achieves his dream, but at a tremendous cost, trading his credibility for his crown. In the rest of society’s view, his story remains, at best, a cautionary tale.

Verdict: Supporting role