Apparently, when I promise to blog more I stop blogging for months at a time; when I say I’m too busy to blog, I get out a record number of entries (for me) in a month. Go figure. But one of the cool things to come out of the Dr. Horrible discussion (at least for me) was a long list of things to blog about.

Here’s one thing that came up a lot in that discussion: Strong Women. Because I felt very much that Penny was a weak character, and many people responded that she was very strong in nontraditional ways; in other places I saw a lot of angry muttering that not every female character needs to kick ass, and that Penny would have been ruined if she’d kicked someone in the face, in response to people wishing that she had been stronger. And the thing is, all of the above are true, and non-contradictory.

The heart of the problem is this: there are two meanings of “strong” in play here, and that’s making the discussion a lot harder to have. In one of my very first entries, I actually wrote this in a footnote:

I call them dynamic female characters rather than strong female characters to avoid conflating the idea of a well fleshed out, well written female character with a female character who is physically strong.

Still true! Basically, what we’re looking at is two definitions: physically strong (or emotionally/mentally/etc), referring to a character trait; and strong characterization, referring to well-written, three-dimensional characters. Penny from Dr. Horrible was, I think, emotionally strong — she was quietly, optimistically trying to make a difference in the world, from what little we saw of her personality — but was weakly written because we saw so little of her personality in a story that could have given us much more. What motivated her to help the homeless? What was it about Hammer that enamored her to him? What would her idea of a happy ending have been? I’ve got no idea. I know she was nice, and pretty, and very well-acted. But her presence in the story wasn’t as a character, it was as a prop; she provided motivation and a point of contention between the men. Penny may have been a strong person, but she was a weak character.

I suspect that the fact that Dr. Horrible was by Joss Whedon made the distinction even less clear — after all, Buffy is an iconic character. She’s strong, in that she’s able to throw her enemies across the room; she’s strong, in that she has her own motivations, a developed personality, and she was able to grow and change through the course of even just the handful of episodes that I watched. So I was disappointed that Penny was “weak”: not that she didn’t have Buffy’s superpowers, but that she didn’t have Buffy’s agency.

This is why I prefer the word dynamic to strong when discussing the quality of presentation of female characters. But overall I don’t think it’s a very hard concept — but often the two meanings of strong are mistaken and it’s rarely a good thing. I’d much rather read a story about a dynamic woman who is rescued from danger by a man than read a story about a physically strong female caricature who always rescues herself. Either way can be done well, but to tack physical strength on to a dynamic hero who doesn’t need it — who’s dynamic in other ways — can be confusing and detrimental. So to illustrate this, I’m going to critique a movie I actually really enjoy (Ever After) behind the cut.
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(Note: the conclusion of this piece non-specifically references elements of Dr. Horrible and The Dark Knight that could be spoilery, but gets in to no detail.)

An anecdote: sophomore year of college, I took an American Literature class (ranging from Native American narratives through about 1900, so… pretty vast) as part of the requirement for my major. As we got to the later part of the course, we read works by Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and Hawthorne. My professor made an off-handed comment about how the books didn’t actually sell that well when they were first published, and the authors didn’t quite get why. After all, their works were important and intelligent, and in fairness, history did indeed prove them right on that count.

“So what were people reading?” I asked. Evidently, the answer is dime novels: romances, mysteries, and general silliness. Pretty much the same thing they’d read since the products became available, and the same things they read now. So, my question was, why weren’t we reading or discussing what most people were interested in?

The professor didn’t really get why I asked.

Here’s my stance: I think that what people — most people, the majority of people — consume is of deep importance. Culture is an inescapable influence on everyone; for better or worse, it creates the status quo and maintains it. It defines normal and exerts a constant invisible pressure that pushes people towards that norm.

Culture changes with time, but it’s slow to do so, and it takes a lot of people putting a lot of effort in to change it. This happens on many fronts, the most obvious being political, but social change is also a huge part of culture. For example, President Truman signed the order to integrate the army in 1948 — the year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball. It seems to me that there needs to be a cultural tipping point for change to happen, but it doesn’t just happen. People need to work to create that tipping point, to raise consciousness, to shove cultural norms in a new direction inch by inch. Nothing happens easily or automatically.

I am a feminist.* I believe that, while there have been many, many positive changes in this culture, that we’ve got miles to go. I look around and see a culture that dismisses women as just bodies, that feels entitled to tell women what their bodies should look like, and what they should and shouldn’t do with said bodies.

I’m a fairly huge consumer of media. And I get really excited on the rare occasion I find a female character I can really identify with, because they are just that: rare. And yeah, that has everything to do with the sexism of culture, which is reinforced in myriad ways. These ways are hard to see, especially if you have privilege. But they don’t have to be blatant, because there are millions of them, so they can be each be tiny still exert great pressure. That’s why I speak of things in terms of trends and tropes and cultural context: because each individual problem may be tiny, but then you look at how many examples of a problem there are, you actually start to see scope and the influence of the mostly-invisible culture.

So to go back to my anecdote: I think pop culture is hugely important. I think studying the past can reveal those fought-for and hard-won inches of change. When did dime novels first feature characters of color? How were they represented? When did the first character of color show up as the protagonist? How about queer characters? How about women in non-traditional female roles? If I had the time and the funding, I would loooooove to actually do a massive examination of dime novels.

And of course, if you look at current media, you can see a reflection of the current culture. In light of recent discussion, some examples: the problem isn’t that a couple of movies fail the Bechdel test, the problem is that so many do. The problem isn’t that one superhero’s girlfriend died horribly so he could angst, it’s that so many do. Look: the actual problem is a cultural normal doesn’t treat women as people, and those are two examples that I run across all the time when I look at this culture. And like so many others, they’re things you might not notice at first glance, because they seem small, or completely unimportant until you notice them stacking up.

So I think it’s important to pay attention to pop culture, and to analyze it. Think about it. Talk about it. Write about it. Put a viewpoint out there so that maybe someone else can run across it and have a lightbulb moment, realizing that there’s a problem and it takes consciousness-raising to fix it. Because people have to be aware that there’s a problem in order to shift the cultural norms; the cultural norms have to shift so people’s attitudes will change. It’s a cycle, and all pieces of it are important.

I’m not kidding myself about this blog. It doesn’t have much of a readership (my traffic the day of the Dr. Horrible post skyrocketed to, quite literally, a hundred times what it normally gets). But at least it’s a place for me to throw my thoughts out there, which is what I want. So I absolutely have a specific outlook when I analyze and review media. And I can’t turn it off. I can’t un-notice these things; I can’t not care about them. I can and often do enjoy things despite their shortcomings, but I have high standards and something like a female character getting fridged can really destroy my enjoyment. Sometimes it’s a slap in the face, because I’ve been enjoying a product, as happened with Dr. Horrible. Sometimes it’s what I expect and I’m braced for it, but not left unannoyed, as with The Dark Knight. In all cases, I’d have liked the end product much better if the sexism hadn’t been there.

* Please note: that does not mean that I am only a feminist.

So I watched Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. And I really enjoyed it! Until the finale.

First, in full disclosure: I’m not a Whedon fangirl. I was at most pretty much indifferent to Buffy and Angel; I watched them on occasion, but never got the big deal. I could see a lot of effort being put into making Buffy a dynamic female lead, which I appreciate, but I also spent a lot of time going, “…Really?” because there were areas where the show seemed to me to fail. But I’m sure those criticisms have been tackled by others, who are far more familiar with the show than I am, so that’s not what this entry is about. Also: I’ve never seen Firefly/Serenity. I kind of meant to get around to it, but never really had much of an urge, so it hasn’t happened. However, I’ve also always appreciated that, while he doesn’t do a perfect job, Whedon at least seems to always try, when it comes to female characters. He knows the world needs good ones, he does his best to put them out there, and he never comes across as a grandstanding douche who just wants recognition for writing good women even when he doesn’t do a good job, Aaron Sorkin.

Wait, got sidetracked.

Basically, what I’m saying is that I’m pretty indifferent to Whedon, but positively-inclined. And so the end of Dr. Horrible pisses me off hugely, because it really seems like he didn’t even try, and embraced everything he’s always stood against. More, with spoilers, below the cut.
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