One thing I remember annoying me when I was a kid was how the hero in a lot of TV and movies would be taunted with the line "You wouldn't hit a girl/woman, would you?" or would actually say "I don't hit girls/women" to the female villain. Nowadays, if those lines are used at all, it's delivered ironically or quickly subverted on-screen.
While this ideal is frequently no longer spoken, we still have the phenomenon of the designated chick fight, where any female on the heroes' side is tasked with taking out the female villains. One of the great tings about the finale of A:tLA was that Zuko actually fought his sister and was winning before she turned him into a smoking heap and Katara had to finis the job. He even knocked her to the ground. No designated chick fight there, and definitely no loss of sympathy for Zuko for hitting a girl.
Amon was an interesting case, a lot of us were freaking out over how much the Equalists dragging her into the dark reminded us of the imagery of sexual violence to give a crap that Amon hit her in the face. They didn't go there, but it made me realize that the visual language of captivity when applied to women and girls always suggests something else with it.
female serial killers seem to always have a tragic backstory
God! It took Criminal Minds until season six to give us a female villain without a tragic backstory. Granted, a lot of their male serial killers have tragic backstories, and there are more of them, but still. Also, it's said on the show several times that female serial killers never kill for sexual gratification, which, yeah, do you want me to link you to some examples of women who did just that? It sounds like the same kind of thing people do when they say "women don't rape!" yes, yes they do.
John Winchester and the evil father brings up something else interesting. While society often says that women are harmless or not true villains, or not responsible (can I argue that's part of a larger societal trend of stripping women of their agency? Yes I can) but evil mothers, or evil seductresses can conversy be treated worse than their male counterparts. An evil seductor, unless he goes beyond seduction to rape, or he's kinky or queer, rarely has his sexual proclivities seen as part of is villainy, and an abusive father is much more able to argue that he Did What He Had To Do.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-09-03 07:36 pm (UTC)While this ideal is frequently no longer spoken, we still have the phenomenon of the designated chick fight, where any female on the heroes' side is tasked with taking out the female villains. One of the great tings about the finale of A:tLA was that Zuko actually fought his sister and was winning before she turned him into a smoking heap and Katara had to finis the job. He even knocked her to the ground. No designated chick fight there, and definitely no loss of sympathy for Zuko for hitting a girl.
Amon was an interesting case, a lot of us were freaking out over how much the Equalists dragging her into the dark reminded us of the imagery of sexual violence to give a crap that Amon hit her in the face. They didn't go there, but it made me realize that the visual language of captivity when applied to women and girls always suggests something else with it.
female serial killers seem to always have a tragic backstory
God! It took Criminal Minds until season six to give us a female villain without a tragic backstory. Granted, a lot of their male serial killers have tragic backstories, and there are more of them, but still. Also, it's said on the show several times that female serial killers never kill for sexual gratification, which, yeah, do you want me to link you to some examples of women who did just that? It sounds like the same kind of thing people do when they say "women don't rape!" yes, yes they do.
John Winchester and the evil father brings up something else interesting. While society often says that women are harmless or not true villains, or not responsible (can I argue that's part of a larger societal trend of stripping women of their agency? Yes I can) but evil mothers, or evil seductresses can conversy be treated worse than their male counterparts. An evil seductor, unless he goes beyond seduction to rape, or he's kinky or queer, rarely has his sexual proclivities seen as part of is villainy, and an abusive father is much more able to argue that he Did What He Had To Do.