...the tomboy I refer to is Jo Polniaczek, from the 1980s sitcom “The Facts of Life.” That Jo was a working-class kid on scholarship at a fancy girls’ boarding school. Her signature hairstyle was two little ponytails that connected to a big one in the back. Her signature outfit was a leather jacket — once she even dressed up as Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider” for Halloween — and jeans. Her signature ride was a motorcycle — which she fixed herself....Emphasis added. I was struck by that because it could just as easily be a description of my wife. Mostly I fix her motorcycle, actually, but she's not afraid to do it if I'm not available and has performed field repairs and adjustments on a number of occasions.
When Jo joined “The Facts of Life” in 1980 for its second season, she was among many tomboys on the big and small screen in that era.... These were often my favorite characters, living examples of the feminist zeitgeist that told me I did not have to be feminine to be female: I could, and maybe should, dress and act like boys and have access to their domains...
But this kind of tomboy began to recede in the mid-1980s.... This was followed by the pink-hued “Girl Power” of the 1990s, which moved away from the more masculine-presenting tomboy toward an image that seemed to comfort the male gaze. Jo gave way to Sporty Spice, Xena, Buffy — coifed, petal-lipped and sometimes baring midriff — with the message that one didn’t need to sacrifice femininity to have power.
What strikes me here is that the tomboy character (and, I suppose, my wife) is even more masculine than the Xena-type character. Like Davis, insofar as I watched those shows as a kid (and we had much more limited options in those days), the tomboy characters were my favorite of the girls. It makes sense; there was a lot more to relate to with them, and they seemed like people you could have fun with doing things you liked to do anyway. Probably that dynamic explains the success of my marriage to some degree; we have always gone hiking, motorcycling, and with horses she always liked trail riding rather than the display sports like dressage (which was once a highly masculine sport, but now is generally not).
So it's not a desire to enforce rigid gender roles that bothers me about the Xena-type. Nor was it Xena herself; partly because of the ridiculous Beijing-opera wire work, I just found that show too silly to bother with back when it was around. But the proliferation of that type of character, long now a source of irritation, is here too recognized by a female writer and thinker as somehow harmful to women as well.
4 comments:
I, too, prefer a woman who ignores gender restrictions that aren't based in reality: she does what she can do, and it's as simple as that. I haven't got that much use for the fantasy woman with superpowers. That can be an entertaining trope if the screenplay is deft about the irony involved in underestimating her, but it's usually just cartoonish.
The chick in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo appealed to me. She had somewhat magically exaggerated hacking powers, but real people do sometimes have those. She saved the day by being plucky rather than by being unrealistically strong or skilled in fantasy martial arts. She rescued the Daniel Craig character by catching the bad guy off guard and beaning him with a golf club, at considerable risk to herself--because if he'd seen her too soon he probably could have killed her with a single punch. An earlier generation of subsidiary female characters would have stood around with their fists in their mouths weeping. I always wanted to say, hey, pick up a rock or something and make yourself useful. And quit melting down in every emergency.
Most males are 60/40 and women are 40/60.
60 Masculine by percentage of energy polarity vs 40% feminine.
Tomboys, as a kind of preference or specialization, devote an additional 10-20%, de polarizing the feminine and polarizing it masculine.
What modern Xena/Buffy archetypes did was to attempt to polarize both masculine and feminine energies.... which does not work.
Only the unity of the two would work, and Xena/Buffy are not Divine Unions.
Tomboys often times are admired by women, for the same reason women often admire strong masculine/military men. Because organizations and social circles need strong masculine leads to unify and resolve internal or external conflicts.
Human society has almost never had an appropriate education on the proper balancing of Divine Feminine and Masculine energies. People can mix and match Toxic Masculinity and Femininity, or lower orders of the energy rather than the higher esoteric forms.
The pool of energy for combination is stable. Energy cannot be destroyed in this sense, it can only be transformed. Out of the common pool, a person can only have access to a total sum of energies, which are split into Masculine and Feminine polarities, Ying and Yang, matter vs anti matter, positive vs negative.
The more feminine a character becomes, the more they can manipulate the energies of the heavens and Earth (the universe) to absorb and transform power. This is potential energy not kinetic. It is the ability to refuse or direct events, much as women have directed their husbands and supported from the back, or as masculine politics termed it: the Power Behind the THrone. There is the surface superficial figure head, but the real power may be elsewhere.
The potential energy when added to the kinetic blast, is more potent than just the kinetic blast.
The number of souls and spirits who are adept at using both Masculine and Feminine energies are not common. A majority collective group choosing to incarnate opposite to the gender they are used to, may be choosing to learn how to multi task or they may have already mastered one side of the equation and wishes to learn about the other side. This may lead, unintentionally, to men orientating towards more feminine power while women orientate more towards masculine power. This is difficult to parse, as the society corruption has to be isolated, and whether people are attracted towards yin or yang, does not mean they are better at using the two.
Hmm. Grim, Does your wife have a long lost Italian twin sister? I may be married to her....!
Not a twin sister, no -- her father was red-headed Irish American! You can see it in his daughter's temper, sometimes.
Post a Comment