There has been a disturbing shift in women and entertainment as of late. Well, it has been going on in the past couple of decades, but lately it is more-in-your-face.
Women, you see, are now no longer allowed to be damsel’s in distress to be rescued by manly men. These days, this is considered to be misogyny.
I’m not kidding. I’ve heard several people refer to women in distressing situations as misogynist because such a woman was not a strong, independent woman.
These days, a woman has to be shown as a hero, a villain, or simply a strong, almost manly, figure in movies, televisions shows, and books. If she is anything less than this, it is automatically considered misogynist. Also, you will be pegged as misogynist if you think otherwise.
An example is the recent treatment of the character of Barbara from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Many modern critics (and even some from a few decades ago) characterized her as being a one-dimensional character who melts down in the face a crisis. Of course what most of these critics fail to recognize is that there are people like that in real life. Real people, especially women, do shutdown in the face of a serious crisis. Just look at how Edward Snowden’s revelations have affected the American people.
So when women freak out and act like women on screen, that is sexism, but when men act like murderers or rapists on the silver screen, well, that’s just natural. No sexism there, after all.
On the other hand, we also are literally saturated with movies, especially movies for children, where females are the heroes and males are the either the sidekicks or the weaker sex.
One good example is How to Train Your Dragon. In it, we have the best dragon slayer among the main character’s age to be a girl. Somehow, despite hitting puberty where male-female differences become more pronounced biologically, she is faster and stronger than all the other boys. On top of that, the main character, a male, defeats the dragons through clever research and application of said research. I don’t have a problem with that aspect, if his rival had been a boy. It would have made more sense then.
There are so many other movies out there where the female is the hero. It makes them wholly uninteresting to most boys, as boys want to see men kill the dragon or battle the evil wizard.
My point is, the girl power movement has gotten out of hand now that even suggesting that some women aren’t as tough as they think is considered to be misogyny. And on top of that, they have relegated all male characters to positions of being a sidekick or a bumbling fool.
And now feminists are attacking video games and the portrayal of women in those outlets. Because Envy is never satisfied.