Hollywood Promotes Wrong Kind Of Girl Power

By Donald Jeffries – for Henry Makow.com January 22, 2010

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?

-------------------
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.

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.

Source: http://www.henrymakow.com/hollywood_promotes_the_wrong_k.html

Last updated 25/01/2010