Power to the Females

Photo by Gabriela Braga on Unsplash

His Take: 
I’ll be honest. When I found out about this week’s topic, I was confused. Was it a pro or con stance? Do I write about how female empowerment has effected MY life? To be honest, I’m still scratching my head over this one, so I’m just gonna tell you that I don’t think female empowerment is totally unnecessary.  

First, let me tell you about a friend of mine. This women has been through the ringer. After she finished college, she met this dude and they got married and had a baby. At some point things when south and their relationship turned abusive. Tragically, it turned physically abusive. Even though the decision was hard on every single level possible, she made the wise choice to get the heck outta there. Smart, right? Fast forward and she meets this other guy. They fall and love and get married and have some kids. Only, this guy is pretty awesome. There were mountains to climb, like any family has, and she climbed them. Wait, she didn’t really climb them, she knocked them down and walked right fucking through them. Don’t get me wrong, her and her husband did it together, but this particular story I’m telling is about her. Did I mention that she also made a career for herself in a, in my opinion, really hard to understand industry. You want to hear the awesome part? She basically molded the company system until she was given a job doing what she LOVES to do. How many of us can claim that? This women didn’t think outside the box, she took the box and made one of those paper boats out of it, sailed it on the street and when it fell down into the sewer she grabbed the scary clown and punched it square in the nuts. Then she called it an uber. Boom! 

That’s just one example of real life female empowerment. One. There’s over 166 million other stories like that in the United States alone. Whew. That’s some straight-up bad-assery. When I was a kid, 99% of families consisted of a dad, a mom, and some kids. Now, there are over 13.7 million single mothers in this country. Let that sink in for just a minute. That is TWICE the population of New York City. There’s 13.7 women out there being both a mother AND father to their kids. They’re taking their kids to practices, games, dance lessons, karate, movies, zoos, the list going on and on. And this isn’t just about motherhood. There’s millions more women who’re out there kicking ass and taking names. Women hold any position in the workforce that you can think of and there’s women doing any job you can imagine, from cabbie to cop, they’re doing it all. So, hopefully you can see this issue from my point of view now.  

It’s great that there’s movies and TV shows portraying female empowerment. Hopefully they inspire some girls to explore their greatness. But, do we NEED female empowerment movies and TV shows. No, of course not. Because it’s alive and well, growing and thriving, and has been since forever. 

  

Her Take: 

I’m a huge fan of the MCU. You can tell because I said ‘MCU’ instead of  ‘Marvel Movies’.  

I get nerd points for that. It’s a real thing. Google it.  

Even though I wouldn’t claim to be a life long student of Marvel heroes, I have at least been paying attention, and liking what I see enough to show up at Every. Single. Movie.  

All that to say: I’m a fan.  

So, when Captain Marvel finally premiered, I was there opening week, ticket in hand.  

My quick review (which is not the point here) is that it was well done, fun to watch, if not my absolute favorite. (I might still be hurting from Avengers: Infinity War, I don’t know if I can love again.) All in all, a perfectly fine experience for a Saturday afternoon.  

The thing that triggers me writing this, though, happened on Saturday night when my husband struck up a conversation like this: 

“So, I bet you liked the ‘Female Empowerment’ in Captain Marvel.” 

Before I launch in here, I want to give this guy credit. I’m not bashing him saying that, he knows me well enough to know that kind of stuff matters to me, and he was just looking for some conversation, which I appreciate, but it triggered something in me.  

Yes, ok, I did like the ‘Female Empowerment’ in Captain Marvel, fine. I liked that we didn’t have to spend any time dwelling on the fact that Brie Larson (who plays the title character) is a cute blond and WHO COULD POSSIBLY BELIEVE that a cute blond was smart and capable?  

We didn’t have to look at Captain Marvel’s boobs, she didn’t have to fall in love and learn that she can be strong and still sensitive, there wasn’t a dominating ‘Daddy’ surrogate that we had to suffer through while she found out she was powerful all along. Those are all dated tropes from the ‘Female Empowerment’ playbook and I’m more than happy to let them die.  

The Captain Marvel character was still flawed, conflicted, and not a little bit damaged. She just managed to be that as a human (well, technically an alien, but a very human looking alien) instead of because she was a woman.  

With all of that good, why can’t I just be satisfied? 

Ok, good question.  

The answer is (at least) two-pronged. 

First, we had to wait until the TWENTY FIRST Marvel movie to get the first female lead. If you’re keeping track, Captain Marvel is the 15th movie that can (technically) claim a solo lead in the MCU even though other female characters could have had that honor. (We met Agent Carter and Black Widow as early as 2011 and 2012 respectively. That might have seemed like a deep nerd cut, but you get the point.) 

We had wait for the first predominantly (⅔) female screenwriting team and first female (co-) directed film in the MCU to get it done. That frustrates me. I have to step back and realize that while, yes, there are great female leads in the comic world, it’s been a male dominated industry - huh, kind of like the movies - and the world needs to keep evolving to get everyone on an even playing field.  

So, cheers to getting this far, right, but this is where we get to the second thing that eating at me.  

I KNOW that my husband didn’t MEAN to sound condescending when he asked if I liked the ‘Female Empowerment’, but sometimes, when he talks, he’s really representing ALL men, and that attitude felt gross. It felt like “Here’s a thing we (men) did for you (women) and you should be really grateful. We’ll accept your praise and adulation now.” 

With love, let me call him out a little. It’s EXACTLY like when he mops the floor. I don’t know how it works in your house but in my house we all pretty much use the floor. And when you use a floor, it gets dirty. It’s just there, under our feet, collecting dirt and eventually someone has to do something about it. We both work full-time and (tell me if this sounds familiar) I do a little light housework during the week and the rest of the heavy lifting happens on my weekends off.  

I can’t stress enough that this is a thing I know I just have to fit in even though I’d much rather be drinking Mimosas and watching Absolutely Fabulous reruns or basically doing ANYTHING other than cleaning. 

Occasionally something will happen and he will have to mop the floor. Again, with love, it’s not that he looks at a dirty floor and decides it needs mopping, something spills or leaks or explodes and the only way to clean it is by mopping the whole thing.  

AND I’M NOT UNGRATEFUL but, you know, that’s what a person who lives in a house that has a floor should do. And once he does it, I have to HEAR about it. I get the full ‘here’s what I did today’ report with MOPPING THE FLOOR highlighted and underlined. And, again, I appreciate it, it’s just that if there’s something he didn’t do and I bring it up, it’s a fight because HE MOPPED THE FLOOR.  

Ok, enough trashing the poor guy. The point is, that’s how I feel coming out of Captain Marvel.  

Cool. Awesome. Marvel made a non-sexist movie with a female lead that doesn’t pander to all of the lame stereotypes and features a badass main character that happens to be female. 

You don’t have to tell women that we’re badass, we don’t need to be reminded that we’re strong, and, most of all, the MCU doesn’t get extra feminist points for presenting humans (ok, again, technically aliens) as complex and watchable.  

We just are, get used to it.