Recently I came upon an article that bothered me a lot. This article was addressed as a letter to several powerful female characters, specifically Rey from the most recent "Star Wars" installment. To sum up the general idea of this letter-formatted-article, its author stated several times that women are the weaker and more vulnerable sex, that a woman’s purpose on this earth is to further a man’s potential, and that characters like Rey are an insult to men because part of a man’s dignity is to be able to save and protect his “woman worth saving.”
Amongst the problematic statements that this man was making, I saw the laundry list of unfair and sexist standards that both men and women are faced with every single day in mainstream media (ie. a woman has to be petite and vulnerable or a man has to be strong and 8-pack-abs-sexy). Going off of that, I started thinking about films and books and the ways in which both binary female and male characters are written.
In many films (i.e. "Jurassic World," "The Legend of Tarzan" and any "Superman" film ever, etc.), men are the faces of perfection. They’re smart, kind, sexy, strong, talented, modest, humble, witty, and on and on. It paints a pretty unrealistic picture for young men out there but, then again, it is just a movie, right?
Yeah sure, it is “just a movie” when it comes to strong lead male characters, but as soon as a strong female character comes along, one of two things consistently seem to happen: 1. She is shamed by viewers as being “unrealistic” (such as Rey, Wonder Woman, or even Hermione Granger) or 2. she is eventually reduced to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype whose, despite any potential she has, only purpose was to further her male counterpart’s storyline (Summer from "500 Days of Summer").
Women are so much more than the sexy sidekick or the damsel in distress. To settle for anything less an empowered woman — regardless of whether she’s single, married, straight, LGBTQ+, black, white, Asian, and more — is not only offensive, but it is tiring. I need “unrealistically” powerful female characters in film or books because we are more than the leading man’s mother, sister, wife, or girlfriend. We are more than the crazy, jealous ex and the ugly girl that gets a magically transforming makeover and lands the man of her dreams. I need female characters like Rey from "Star Wars" because she has depth. She has a backstory, a complex personality, and her worth is not based off of a handsome man’s willingness to save her.
Media is a powerful tool, and I appreciate writers and directors who explore complex female characters. It allows little girls everywhere to realize that rather than waiting for Superman to come down from the sky, that she is capable of saving herself.
Lastly, at one point during this article, the author stated that he had never had the opportunity whilst growing up to “understand or know how to respect [women]” or to “learn a woman’s worth”. And to him, I say this:
Women should be respected just as much as men. Women were not placed upon this earth to give you purpose or be your plaything. Women do not need to be saved from themselves by the likes of you (as you so patronizingly wrote down). Women are allowed to be strong, they are allowed to be powerful.
If you do not understand the worth of a woman, then you do not understand the worth of a human being.
