Female Protagonists Don't Have to Suck: A Rant
A frustration I have had from time immemorial is that female protagonists in movies tend to be pigeonholed into one of two categories. The first is the young ingénue/damsel in mild distress. She probably has a male family member who studied some sort of Science, so that is why she can simultaneously undulate her tightly clad breasts while she uses what she remembers from Daddy’s textbooks to save the planet. However, this is not before her meddlesome emotions get in the way of the (usually male) team’s progress, creating unnecessary tension in a cheap way to move the plot along. Let’s call her Dr. Gets Underfoot.
The second type is the not-woman. This lady may look like a dude, replete with muscles and a butch lesbian haircut. But even if she’s hot, thin, and wearing tight spandex, the not-woman character will certainly act like a dude. She’ll be inexplicably and unbelievably capable in a fight with males, in a way that any honest female athlete would tell you is impossible. She will also interact with the world in a distinctly masculine fashion — stoic, aggressive, and head-on, not clever, subtle, and conniving. She will degrade men any chance she gets and the only female thing about her will be her name. I’ll call her Sarah Steelballs.
Dr. Gets Underfoot is everywhere in media and film. The Bond movies are low-hanging fruit, but the sheer volume of silly Dr. Underfoots in those films is absurd. I’m no movie buff, (so please list other examples of these types in the comments) but I distinctly remember loathing the original Jurassic Park movie’s Dr. Underfoot character. Her name was Lexi, and she went from whining, wailing, and almost getting her peers killed to saving the day by her hitherto unexplained familiarity with a UNIX system. I think I was supposed to like her in the end. I did not.
As for Ms. Steelballs, there are plenty of examples there too. She-Hulk is an unfortunate recent case — she excels at everything without trying and out-hulks Hulk. Captain Marvel suffers from a similar disease. Rey from the revamped Star Wars trilogy is a lightsaber-wielding, fun buns-wearing Ms. Steelballs who routs a Sith Lord without much effort. Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill is also a play on Ms. Steelballs. All of them put on masculine tropes and language so that audiences will see them as heroes, because only men can be heroes of course.
Male heroes are the norm, I admit. Even most of famous author Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novels feature exclusively male protagonists. Her male peers like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Frank Herbert did the same. Back then, and even as recently as the late 90s and early aughts, publishers and authors alike held the assumption that male readers would not deign to read a science fiction novel with a female protagonist or female author.
In the 1970s, radical feminists criticized Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness for hewing to this assumption. Despite her novel’s groundbreaking exploration of a genderfluid world, where the dominant alien species could move between male and female sexual features, the novel spent precious little time with the female aspects of the alien character’s life (no childrearing or birth) and only referred to the aliens as “he.” This could in part be due to the main, sexed character Genly Ai being an unreliable (and possibly misogynist) narrator. Still, Le Guin appreciated this feminist critique, delving into childrearing and using the “she” pronoun in subsequent stories based on the book.
Criticism aside, at least Le Guin made the effort to portray femaleness in a way that was not one-dimensional. In contrast, her male compatriots did much literary violence in their forays into femininity. Vagina magic, women being flattered by being groped or whistled at, and women embracing polygamy or polyandry are just a few examples of male authors’ wishful thinking about women that made it into print.
A more recent combo of Ms. Steelballs and Dr. Underfoot emerged in the two Dune movies directed by Denis Villeneuve. Chani is Paul Atreides’ love interest throughout the book and the film. She is a capable fighter in her own right and is a loving companion and confidante to Paul. However, the similarities between the book and the movie end there. The screenplay author and director made the misguided decision to drive a wedge between Paul and Chani that did not exist in the book. Yes, that’s right. They made her into Dr. Ms. Steelballs Underfoot.
In the original source material, Frank Herbert’s book of the same title, Chani realizes that Paul is angling for the Emperor’s throne. To “seal the deal” politically, he will marry the Emperor’s eldest daughter Princess Irulan, but not out of love. In the book, Chani is apprehensive about this arrangement, but because she is wise, understands that Duke Paul has responsibilities to the empire. She is pragmatic, scrappy, and fully aware that Paul loves her alone. Paul reassures her of this fact by saying that Irulan will not receive any personal touch or look from him. In sum, Chani is always and forever Team Paul.
In stark contrast, the movie inserts needless strife between them. Villeneuve imagines that Paul is betraying Chani by becoming someone he wasn’t before — a charismatic, controlling cult leader of her Fremen people. At the end of the movie, Chani leaves Paul on a sandworm back to her homeland in a fit of rage because of Paul’s change in personality and the new arrangement with Irulan. While her motivation is not totally alien to the book’s anti-war message, it is not based on the book at all.
Denis turned Chani into a whiny, troublesome wife with undertones of a Reddit atheist. He made her into Dr. Underfoot by having her attempt to thwart Paul’s plans. He then proceeded to splice in Sarah Steelballs by hammering home her stoic, aggressive rejection of her husband, his ideas, and the prophecy that tied him to her people. All in all, it was a mistake and a bad way to add depth to her character.
It’s not her surliness that bothers me. Flaws like that do not undermine a woman’s strength or femaleness per se. Every female character should have flaws, but realistic ones that are true to the source material. We do not have to write Dr. Underfoots who exist as a device to add obstacles or prizes to the male leads. Instead, we can dream of female characters who feel like an imposter in their own skin, who are wavering between two desires for their life, and who are struggling to suppress their subconscious thoughts and memories. You know, two or three-dimensional people with understandable motivations.
Here’s the thing. I have many many counterexamples of female characters that are realistic and well-rounded. Every female character on the TV show Bones is competent and feminine, but still flawed. Fantine, Cosette, and Éponine are certifiable gangsters for their bravery and self-sacrifice in Les Miserables. Every female character that Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë wrote is well-balanced. Lucy Pevensie from C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, as well as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Arwen and Eowyn are also wonderful.
So why am I complaining? I am complaining because Dr. Underfoot and Ms. Steelballs are still showing up after at least a century of better examples, and as women, I feel that we have a duty to ensure that women are accurately represented in the media. The more we ingest these stereotypes at the theater or in a novel, the more we will become like them: strong women who are nothing but strong, with little to no character development throughout our lives.
We must reject Hollywood’s lie that a woman’s strength only lies in the physical. Our physical strength and whims do not have to be lorded over and against our love interests. Our true strength can be a quiet internal one, like the strength of a wife who supports her husband through deep financial distress or the strength of a queen who uses diplomacy and charm to end a war before it’s begun. The strength can be outward too, like Joan of Arc or Éponine who went into battle for their country.
The Virgin Mary is the perfect prototype of female strength. She accepted the risk of being stoned for appearing to be an adulterer, she gave birth in a place reserved for livestock, she fled with Joseph into Egypt as refugees to save their son, she likely dealt with defamation and culmination of her character for her whole life, and she went to the Cross with her innocent son and watched Him take His last breath.
I must tell you (with trepidation) that there’s a Netflix movie coming out about the Mother of God on December 6th. Unfortunately, the movie’s trailer is already giving hints of Ms. Steelballs. Inaccurate details like Joseph’s age, Mary saying “That is not possible” when the angel Gabriel tells her that she is to birth the Messiah, and Mary experiencing labor pains are also not great signs. I will still watch the movie, as I think it’s important to support the art you want to see, but I pray that Netflix does not turn the most important woman who ever lived into a sword-wielding Ms. Steelballs. You know what Substack page to check if they do.
And as always, please consider sharing this with your friends and family.
Questions for You:
What are some female characters you look up to?
How do you feel about movie directors giving important male lines to female characters (see: movie Hermione taking Ron’s lines from the books)?
Are you excited or scared for the Mary movie? Will you be watching it?
Keri Russell as Kate Wyler in “The Diplomat” is excellent. She’s flawed and often out of her element but you can’t help but root for her.
> Her male peers like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Frank Herbert did the same.
This is false, at least for Asimov. The main protagonist of I, robot and in roughly a third of the foundation trilogy (second halves of foundation and empire and of second foundation) were both women (and that's just his most famous works). He had a majority male cast but not overwhelmingly so.