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Hollywood Promotes Wrong Kind Of Girl Power

January 22, 2010

xena.jpgBy Donald Jeffries  
donjeffries@mris.com

(for henrymakow.com)

 

Hollywood continues a relentless campaign to celebrate violence and aggression in women. Movies, television shows and commercials regularly feature fist-fighting females of all ages.  

These role models are not about female empowerment. They promote the false notion that diminutive females regularly can overpower and physically defeat much larger males.  

They also glorify fighting in general, which is simply not a part of life for any civilized adult. 

This isn't played for comedy any longer, as it was in the days when Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble would beat up Fred and Barney, or when Mary Tyler Moore would beat up Dick Van Dyke. 

In those days, there had to be a "gimmick" utilized to explain the obvious improbability of smaller women overpowering larger men. Usually, this was attributed to judo or karate lessons. 

Now, the female characters simply are able to punch out larger males, and no questions are asked. 

The females are almost always the pretty, thin, super model-types. Thus female viewers identify. On the rare occasions when a fat or large boned woman does the beating up, it is done for comic effect.


AGGRESSORS

The females are not merely defending themselves from male ogres; more often than not, they are actually looking for a physical fight.

They wear the same mean spirited, no nonsense expressions that nearly all actresses seem to wear nowadays, and often they initiate the fights.

Well, it's not normally much of a fight, because the man is usually knocked cold (or at least down) with one mighty feminine blow.

The Lois Lane character on the otherwise excellent show Smallville is one such bully. She has been beating up men, often armed (once she overpowered a huge SWAT team member in full gear), on a regular a basis, with nothing more than her pretty little fists and her magical, flying-Matrix-like drop kicks.

This lady looks for trouble all the time. She is the aggressor, not some Neanderthal male trying to paw at her.

Despite this disturbing character flaw, she is well liked by all the other characters. The audience is supposed to like her too.

If anything, Hollywood scriptwriters are becoming more fanciful. In the recent television series V, the middle-aged female lead rushed an armed assassin from a long distance and tackled him, as throngs of wimpy males looked on in admiration.

This female-as-aggressor campaign has been especially prominent on children's television shows.

On the Nickelodeon teen show I Carly, Carly's best friend Sam is a petite blonde girl who somehow can beat up every male (and is always eager to do so).

On Drake And Josh, the same actress who plays the lead in I Carly, Amanda Cosgrove, then a very young girl, bullies and utterly dominates her older teenage brothers. She beats them up frequently, and they are terrified of her.

The character is completely odious, with not a single redeeming quality yet she never gets her comeuppance and is portrayed positively. Again, the audience is supposed to like this little monster.


WHY?


What is the purpose of pushing this patently absurd notion so consistently and for so long? 

Instead of encouraging men to be more sensitive and less brutish and aggressive, we are now fostering a belligerent, in-your-face attitude in females.

As result, females are growing more violent in real life. In the UK, the number of violent crimes committed by girls 10-17 doubled between 2005 and 2008.

A search of You Tube reveals a spate of videos featuring young girls punching each other. Often, it is a group attack on one hapless victim.

Then there are violent young women in women's soccer.

Clearly, female-on-male violence in movies and television is having an unfortunate impact on today's young women.


Why do we bother to teach our children that fighting is wrong, if our movies, television and video games constantly preach the opposite?


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Donald Jeffries is the author of the 2007 sci-fi fantasy novel The Unreals and a long time JFK assassination researcher. Married with two children, he is a keen observer of pop culture.

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Makow Comment: This is elite social engineering designed to erase gender identity and thus undermine marriage and family. Part of masculine identity is protecting and providing for women and children. Obviously aggressive women become masculine themselves and act to neuter or feminize men.

UPdate-- Huge Increase in Female Violent Crimes   

80% School Fights-Girl on Girl


 


Scruples - the game of moral dillemas

Comments for "Hollywood Promotes Wrong Kind Of Girl Power"

Dan-2 said (January 23, 2010):

About the time I read tonight's article I'd noticed an ad for a new television drama called 'Spartacus'. Curious this meme would be infused into the programming melting pot this year I checked out the first episode online. This show debuted on network tonight.

The show kicked off with a series of incredibly blood splattered fights with no Xena Warrior Princess in sight. But sure enough, about half way through the episode when Sparticus and his babe are subject to coitus interruptus by a band of five barbarian warriors, Sparticus is down for the count when his little woman picks up a sword and broad ax and massacres 3 of his assailants with blows which would require the upper body strength of Jesse Ventura.
That's when I recalled the television programming formula sheets I'd seen, and sent that information in. They really do that.
I saw there are three women in the cast so I expect these ladies will be performing their share of dispatching 250 lb brutes.
Another thing about this show is it's a new level for prime time television profanity and features full frontal female nudity.
In one scene the Roman villain 'goes down' on his fully naked Playboy centerfold wife, the Senator's daughter - notice that's a subtle sign of male submission in movies. I already picked up on the theme that this upwardly mobile Roman's character is pussy whipped rather the way Yul Brenner's Ramses in Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments (1955). I mean he makes the correct decisions man to man, but then the woman goads him into breaking his word and taking stupid short cuts to power behind closed doors.

Looking over the characters in this thing for future episodes I see they even have a homosexual hero - " Though possessed of a temper and an imposing stature, he tempers this with the tenderness he shows his collection of birds and Pietros, a slave boy."

Anyway, there's a lot of estrogen injection in this testosterone epic.


Bruno said (January 23, 2010):

About your story on the ever more violent girls, it is in my opinion even worse than was stated in the report. The history of female violence is much longer than that though more subtle. With the beginning of women's emancipation in roughly 1900 began a period of greater immoral behavior of women.

First it was in the arena of sexual attraction by using her body as bait. Later it became politicized. Then it became workplace experience. Now it is open aggression in the male format.

Many decades ago the women started to pull up their breast and stuff them to look bigger and more revealing and use them like battering rams.

That was a gesture of aggression of the female variety like in your face: see what I can do and there is nothing you male chauvinists can do about it. It is amazing to me how few women are capable of seeing this as aggression i.e. how few there are who have any moral inhibition to go along with this self degrading practice. The question arises: are women utterly incapable of any moral decision?

This week there are demonstrations about abortion. The more fundamental question is if women have absolutely no sense for degrees of cruelty that they can walk down to the abortion clinic and have the brains sucked out of their very own kids and not even blink.

Looking at the larger historical picture and the brainwashing of women for more violence, one has to wonder what will happen when some day the Mongolian armies will arrive and the men have no desire any more to defend their women as they used to in former times. I assure you there will not be a single woman who will ever win against a single man on earth when it come to trumping physical violence.


Jeffrey said (January 23, 2010):

Xena is nothing new. Even good old fashioned Andy Griffith had a show that dealt with women "beating" men and how men should accept it. First, Andy's girlfriend, Helen, outscores Andy while bowling. We don't see that. The episode starts off with Andy begrudgingly recounting his previous evening's activities at Goober's insistence. Andy lost and fesses up to Goober's delight. Later, Helen's niece comes by and becomes Opie's (Andy's son) new playmate. Guess what? She kicks his ass at everything they try to do together, including the boys' football game. She even gives Opie a black eye.

We are talking over forty years ago, right about when feminism was becoming an established norm.


Dan said (January 23, 2010):

Television network programmers inform writers of mandatory behaviors and situations which must be included. I don't have a copy of one but I saw a few for Star Trek and other shows when I took courses in radio-television back in the early 70's. These were called formulas.
One for 'action dramas' today might go something like this:

"there must be 1 fight with a woman defeating men per 3 fights between men" if the show's target market in males, 12 - 25 yrs. Or if girls are the target, "for each 3 fights where the female lead defeats men, 1 fight with the female lead defeating a rival female".


Henry Makow received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 1982. He welcomes your comments at