Where have all the strong women gone?

[katiebgood]

I've been fairly active in fandom, under another name, for over a decade now.  I am a nerd- I like Star Trek and Star Wars and Stargate and Firefly.  I intend to one day watch Buffy, but I haven't yet because there are seven seasons and I know what happens when I get obsessed with something new.  I didn't hate Hayden Christensen's performance as

Comments

[loungelemming]

Honestly, for me as a young adolescent it was Buffy. She was human in a way that was tangible for me. There were times where she did play the victim and then she or someone else would smack her out of it and she would learn from it. I guess in a way we grew up together, as weird as that sounds. She starts out as a young girl and the viewer watches her reach womanhood. Joss Whedon writes her believably and her cast mates are equally endearing

[katiebgood]

For me, in elementary school, it was Lt. Uhura. Because at that age the only non-children's show I watched was ST:TOS. But TOS always failed the Bechdel test, of course.

When I got older I noticed that most of the women who were being portrayed as strong and capable had to be pointedly unfeminine in order to bring it off- a tomboy or just not empathic at all. In shows that featured a group of friends, there was usually a girl (just one, sometimes one or two more on the fringes), who was either cute and wimpy, or kickass and entirely uncompassionate.

What really ticked me off is when I got to high school and I noticed myself doing that- in an effort to make sure I was heard and to avoid a certain brand of bullying, I didn't wear makeup and dressed as non-girly as possible (well, the men's jeans were simply cheaper in my size, but the rest was intentional). And it worked, and I hated that it worked. I'm only just now changing that around.