The Female Power Fantasy

www.karissalaurel.com

Have you seen Encanto yet? If not, go see it. I'll wait. 

No, just kidding. 

Do go see it, if you haven't, but I'm not going to wait for you. This post will be here when you get back.

This post isn't really about Encanto, but it's inspired, in part, by the popularity of one of the characters: Luisa Madrigal. Without giving too much away, Luisa (who is not the main character, mind you) is a loveable, big, brawny, and beautiful girl who has amazing, super-human strength.

I recently learned that the artists who created her had to fight to draw Luisa with the muscular frame rather than the petite princess build Disney so-often prefers for its female characters. Here's the (very brief) article about the fight to draw a brawny Luisa:  https://www.piratesandprincesses.net/luisa-madrigal-has-become-incredibly-popular-with-many-encanto-fans/

Luisa Madrigal from Disney's Encanto

I also learned that apparently Luisa is so popular with girls that Disney is rushing to make more Luisa merchandise, something they totally hadn't anticipated. Girls love the big brawny female character? What gives?

Luisa's popularity does not surprise me AT ALL. The first thing I thought of when I read that article, and this has been on my mind a lot lately, is a pivotal moment from Season 2 of Jessica Jones, when Jessica's best friend, Trish Walker, breaks off her engagement to her fiancé. Trish is an ambitious radio journalist who dreams of a bigger career. Her fiancé has the kind of successful job she envies--he's like Anderson Cooper, perhaps--and she wants what he's got. In that scene she says, “I don’t want to be with Griffin—I want to be him. I want to do what he does. And that’s not love, and it’s not fair to either one of us.”

To that I say, girl... I feel you!

Trish Walker (From Marvel/Netflix's Jessica Jones) realizing she doesn't want to be Griffin's wife.

I've been thinking a lot about why I'm so drawn, especially lately, to characters like Jack Reacher and even the Punisher. Inspired by the new series (Reacher) on Amazon Prime, I have been gobbling Jack Reacher books as fast as I can get my hands on them. My current manuscript work-in-progress is kind of a gender-flipped version of The Punisher. When I was younger I would have thought my attraction was because I had romantic inclinations toward Jack Reacher and Frank Castle. Now I know that's not really the case. I realize that it's more like...envy. I don't want to be with them, I want to BE them. I don't mean literally so much as figuratively. Women want equity--the possibility and options of being able to achieve the same things as those guys. Sometimes it's careers. Sometimes it's social power. Sometimes it's muscles and physical strength. Sometimes it's a bit of all those things combined.

I do not fantasize about violence (to be clear!) but I do think a lot about being that strong and that invincible. And I don't think media does enough to acknowledge women have those tough-guy fantasies too, so it makes sense that Luisa is so popular. She's the embodiment of an ideal so few of us ever get to see!

This is not to say there has been a dearth of strong women in media, but that's not my point. I was talking about this with fellow ATB contributor, Mary Fan, and she brought up Gal Gadot's portrayal of Wonder Woman, and action stars like Scarlet Johansson (Black Widow). In the same vein I think of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa; Andy in The Old Guard; and Lorraine in Atomic Blond. I think of Kate Beckinsale as Selene in Underworld. These women are tiny. Or even if they're tall like Gadot and Theron, they're slim. Like, runway supermodel slim. 

Often magic, rather than muscle, accounts for their superior strength. I love many of these actresses and the characters they portray, but I'm not critiquing their plentiful existence so much as I'm critiquing the lack of representation of other types of physical shapes in media and culture. Comparatively speaking, male characters who are strong because of magic or because they are an action hero (Thor, Captain America, Geralt of Rivia, Superman, Reacher) get to have the accompanying brawn and muscle. Spiderman/Peter Parker is one of the few exceptions I can think of off the top of my head. 

On that topic, Mary Fan says:

You know what’s interesting — early superhero looks were based on circus strongmen… hence Superman’s red briefs. But there were also strongwomen in those same circuses and they didn’t get superhero-ized.

Even the Terminator, who was all robot inside, got to have big muscles to power his frame. Compare him to a long list of sexy fem-bots who have superior strength but not much muscle and are clearly expected make people think of sex. It's all about the male gaze.

Number Six a Cylon (artificially-intelligent race of machines) from Battlestar Galactica

Luisa Madrigal was not drawn for the male gaze. Instead, she's the rare embodiment of how femme strength can look when freed from sexist constraints. It broke my heart when Gina Carano (a former professional MMA fighter) turned out to be an absolute buffoon and Disney/Star Wars parted ways with her because I adored her portrayal of Cara Dune. In every heist-type group, there's always one character who plays the muscle, the heavy, the bruiser. It's usually a man, and often one who is short on brains. But in The Mandalorian, Cara Dune was not only big, muscly, strong, and fierce, but she was clever too. And beautiful! When she landed a punch, and the bad guy fell, you believed it! You believed she was strong enough to break jaws and ribs and noses. Women are so rarely portrayed that way, and I realized I had been starving to see it!

Cara Dune played by Gina Carano on Disney's The Mandalorian

When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with Adora, She-Ra, the Princess of Power. I had her action figures, all of her friends, and her flying swan, Enchanta. It didn't bother me that she looked like Barbie. ALL female dolls and action figures looked like Barbie and that seemed normal to me. Again, magic explained her strength. Never mind how her cousin, Adam (He-Man), was super strong and had the muscles to go with it. That was just the norm in the early eighties, I suppose, and I wasn't self-aware enough back then to question it. Fast forward to the Twenty-Teens and, like so many other older properties, She-Ra announced she was getting a reboot AND a facelift. She was redrawn to look how a girl who fights and swings swords might look. And naturally a lot of dudes lost their minds about it.

I, an elementary-school aged girl, was the original target market for She-Ra, and I didn't care if she had lipstick and perky boobs or not. So, why was she ever drawn that way in the first place? Sell a Barbie to a little girl to get her to start thinking that's how she had to look when she grew up. Who does that benefit? Surely not the little girl. The answer to that one starts with a "P" and rhymes with hatriarchy. The new She-Ra might still not be as big and muscly as someone like Cara Dune, but when she wields a sword, now, it's believable. There's more than just magic there to explain her physicality.

 I'm not ranting against looking femme or to argue that one cannot be both femme and strong and/or muscular. I'm actually arguing the opposite and highlighting the evolving shapes of women and femininity and spotlighting the fact that characters like Luisa are hopefully signs that the spectrum of gender representation in media is broadening to allow more variety and positivity about that variety.

2018 vs 1985

Women often live with a certain level of fear--we've somewhat come to accept that this is the way the world is. We often feel like prey, and why not? In real life, we're more likely to be the targets of violence rather than the purveyors of it. On top of that, over and over, we've been portrayed as victims in media and in history (The complicated and nuanced truth of women's roles in history is another entire blog post of it's own, but I'll save my time and simply refer you to the mandatory-reading essay by Kameron Hurley, "We Have Always Fought". I feel like an alternate title to that essay could be, "We Have Always Been Strong") . Who is surprised when our fantasies are to be stronger, more able to hold our own in a world historically dominated by the whims of men?

This tough-guy fascination is something that I'm experiencing more and more as I age. Maybe I'm feeling my vulnerability (achy joints, lower endurance, biological systems going wonky). Like I said, I'd love to be less vulnerable and more physically capable. When I was younger, I probably felt stronger and more invincible. Perhaps it's also that I hadn't lived in the world long enough to be weary of sexism, or I was better at ignoring it. Now, I think the appeal of the tough-guy aesthetic has something to do with me being middle aged and having lost my patience and tolerance for the B.S. that comes with being being a woman. 

What kind of B.S.? I'm talking about stuff like this:

I'm not including identifying information on these tweets because I don't want to bring more clicks or views to this jerk.

"That...pressure song she sings & [sic] is just stuff a guy would sing, too," he says. It's like he almost gets the whole point of the song, and Luisa's character, but then misses it by a mile. Instead of considering that women, on an even playing field, could have both equitable success and equitable problems to men, he dismisses Luisa femininity altogether and accuses her of "just being a dude in a dress."  I find it highly unlikely that men in his fundamental and conservative social circle would sing a song like "Surface Pressure." In his world men can't be both physically strong and emotionally vulnerable. It's not allowed. But take away his argument of "God's plan" for what women and men are supposed to be, and all that's left is a bunch of artificial, man-made goop. By the way, dude, Proverbs 31:17 says, "She girds herself with strength, And strengthens her arms." You know how she strengthens her arms? She plants a whole damned vineyard! No matter how much he rails against it, gender evolution will eventually leave him behind. It already has.

William Moulton Marston, a Harvard educated, feminist psychologist and the creator of Wonder Woman predicted that a matriarchy was inevitable and said, "The next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy—a nation of amazons in the psychological rather than the physical sense.” I'm hopeful that Marston is right and that masculinity, in the toxic patriarchal sense, is on the decline. This sentiment isn't about wanting men to disappear or women wanting to take the place of men in the world, but about the world becoming a place where equality for the full spectrum of gender expression is more fully realized and respected.

So bring on the Luisas and the Cara Dunes and the Xenas. Give us some Jaqueline Reachers and Francine Castles. We would love them. We'd embrace them. We'd buy their merchandise!