I was talking about this with a friend recently - regarding Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. Another friend repudiated it because the female character, she felt, was anti-feminist.
While I would agree that she was not particularly well defined, that was kind of the point.
Sometimes it seems like all female characters are supposed to represent an ideal of perfectly balanced earthy compassionate strength. No baseness, no selfishness, no venality - which is why playing villains always looks like more fun. But I've really started to wonder how it serves women that we have to be portrayed as the OTHER kind of perfect, instead of made of bits and pieces of everything, more or less balanced, human and quirky outside of the lines.
We won't really have equality until we can be bad.
That's what I loved about the Saturday Night Live sketch with "Palin" and "Hillary" -- Hillary was angry, and everyone could relate to it. She even gets violent at the end, and with Palin next to her, everyone gets it; people understand what she's feeling.
In a sense Palin's selection has been liberating: women are angry about it, and that anger is accepted. It's not being ridiculed (or I haven't seen it). The Republicans were counting on cornering women into the dichotomy "you're either a woman and for Palin, or you're sexist", and it's backfiring. They didn't count on women getting angry at "one of their own" -- but that's exactly what's happening.
It has flaws, yes, but it *is* a step towards women being seen as three-dimensional human beings with their own opinions, and not as monolithic "women". That's what equality means -- everyone, regardless, being seen as individual human beings with their own opinions.
There are so few archetypes that are cultural approved for women. I just recently wrote a post about the show Mad Men and the madonna/whore and the Marilyn and Jackie archetypes as the pervasive roles of duality that women seem to embrace and that the culture seems to perpetuate. http://tinyurl.com/53qwvg
The more we push more angry types of feminine behavior into the unconscious the more shadowy and dangerous these behaviors are likely to become. It took centuries for Athena women to find their place in the culture. I imagine that it will be along time before Medea's are understood as anything but anti-Madonna's.
Delighted to find your thoughtful and well written blog. I will be back again. Hope that you will stop by mine soon.
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