Of genre television, Helena Cain, and gender roles
A couple of quick notes and disclaimers before I get into the meat of this post: I am speaking from a feminist perspective here, which I know may not appeal to all of my flist. If that's not something you want to hear about, you may not want to read past the cut. Also, what's behind the cut contains recent and not-so-recent spoilers for various shows including Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and Heroes. Please note that I have not yet seen the last five episodes of Battlestar Galactica's third season. Do not spoil them for me! I know too much already!
Also, troubleinchina, I hope I'm not too late to be considered for the carnival, because if I'm not, I would love for this post to be included!
There was a time about a year ago when I briefly made myself extremely unpopular with some of my best friends for asserting two strong opinions about Battlestar Galactica - specifically, that we were meant to look at Admiral Cain and the crew of Pegasus as a cautionary tale rather than an irredeemable villain (which has since been strongly supported by the events of Razor), and that the strong negative reaction to her, both among my friends and among fans in general, was partially due to her being female. I would like to be able to say that I felt sorry for having gotten so worked up about something unimportant, but the truth is that I can't bring myself to believe it's not important. This post is my attempt to defend that idea.
The trouble is, I'm not sure if I can, not directly. As my friends rather bluntly pointed out, she wasn't male, so how can we know how viewers would have reacted to a different presentation? They insisted that they would have reacted no differently to a male Admiral Cain, but they can't know that any more than I can. Rather, I think my strong reaction to Cain was the last straw following a lifetime of seeing female characters in SF and fantasy be marginalized and detested by otherwise reasonable people. It was a rage that had been brewing in my mind for years, and of which my friends were the unfortunate recipients.
To be honest, Battlestar Galactica really doesn't deserve the brunt of this rant. It mostly does a good job of characterizing its protagonists as humans rather than gendered stereotypes. Sure, Six's wardrobe choices sometimes leave me shaking my head, and in recent seasons I've wished we could see at least as much of Starbuck's brilliance as we do of her brokenness, but compared to a show like Supernatural that after three seasons still hasn't figured out how to include a female character in a role other than "evil temptress" or "sexy, victimized corpse", it does okay. But consider this: Cain is probably the most masculinized woman that BSG has given us yet. Her iron-fisted command style, her fatal flaw of responding to all threats with over-the-top aggression, and (as of Razor) her possession of a hot Cylon girlfriend are all stereotypically masculine traits - whereas Dualla and Cally and Boomer have lately had as much screen time spent on their romantic travails as on their work aboard the ship, Roslin is by turns commanding and mothering, and Starbuck is still just a scared, abused little girl under all the cigar-smoking bravado. Could the lack of these feminizing traits in Cain have been a bridge too far for the fans who objected to her so vehemently? (It also interests me to note that of all the women of BSG, Cain is the only one explicitly coded as queer, although the fact that we didn't learn this until Razor pretty well excludes it from my argument.)
Because although a lot of ink has been spilled lately on how it's more socially acceptable for women to display stereotypically masculine traits than it is for men to display stereotypically feminine traits, sometimes when it comes to TV I see it as being the other way around. We look at Bill Adama wanting to become a better father and letting Starbuck get away with just about anything and crying over Boomer's body and remaining adorably oblivious to the fact that the President of the Twelve Colonies would really love to jump his bones, and we think it's so wonderful that he has a sensitive side, regardless of the hard and questionable decisions he's had to make along the way. We applaud him for being able to be sensitive and get in touch with his feelings. I wonder if learning that the worst part of Admiral Cain's legacy, the imprisonment and torture of Gina, was a response to a deep and painful romantic betrayal - that in the end, she did it all for love - is going to do the same for her.
I see this sort of thing so much on other shows. I watch Lost and I think about Sawyer, an unabashed con artist and a cold-blooded murderer, who nevertheless enjoys great popularity with fans since he fell in love with Kate and turned out in flashbacks to have a heart of gold - and before that as well. Or Locke, beloved despite the dozens of times he's back-stabbed and endangered everyone with his increasingly obsessive quest to understand the island. Compare them with Ana-Lucia, another resoundingly hated character, whose only sin appears to have been stepping up to lead the tail section survivors. I am thoroughly incapable of understanding the fan hatred toward her, because in the text of the show I never saw her do anything worse than Jack or Kate or Sawyer or anyone we'd been with since the beginning, so I won't even try to analyze that. I think about Heroes, where most of the female characters have powers that are more of a disease than a superpower, while Peter takes his shirt off and continues his slow power creep. Or Supernatural, which as I've mentioned already seems to have no understanding of how to write a female character who doesn't end up dead and bloodied or at least in need of rescuing, and whose (predominantly female) fans pitch a screaming fit whenever any icky gross girlz! show up and threaten to come between the brothers Winchester.
Or maybe it's the language that is used to talk about these hated female characters. "Ana-Lucia, that slut. That skank. What a bitch." Almost all the insults are sexually based, in one way or another. But the harsh words directed toward a clearly villainous character like Ben always seem to come tempered with a hint of covert respect for what a magnificent bastard he can be. Hate Ana-Lucia or Admiral Cain if you want; it's your prerogative. But at least be willing to admit, however grudgingly, that they both kept their "crews" together under circumstances as harsh or harsher than the male so-called heroes of their respective shows were asked to face.
And that brings me to another thing: One of the reasons I liked Cain was that she was the rare female character who was allowed to fill an antagonistic role without using their sexuality as a weapon, whether it's overtly stated or strongly implied by the mise-en-scene. Most female villains are at some level seductresses - Six being a prime example of this, along with Grayza from Farscape, just about any female comic book villain you can think of, every female demon that has ever appeared on Supernatural, and basically everything that happened with the mirror universe stuff on Deep Space 9 (also known as "the mirror universe, where all the men have goatees and all the women are evil lesbians"). Certainly there are male characters who follow this "seduce and destroy" M.O., but there's variation in the behavior of male villains. Consider, for example, the differences between Lex Luthor, Scorpius, and Sylar - all villains with certain commonalities in their behavior, surely, but much more different from each other than, say, Supernatural's crossroads demon compared to Poison Ivy compared to mirror-universe Kira Nerys. It may seem weird to say that women should have the same opportunities to play great and varied villainous roles that men do, but here I am, saying it anyway.
In the end, I suppose I can't explain why I feel so strongly that so many characters have been hated for nothing more than the sin of being female. I can only say that I believe it. If nothing else, I hope this entry has at least given you a glimpse into what I think and why I think it, whether you agree with me or not. I realize that most people probably won't, but I hope that someday they will.
And now, let the angry comments begin!
Also, troubleinchina, I hope I'm not too late to be considered for the carnival, because if I'm not, I would love for this post to be included!
There was a time about a year ago when I briefly made myself extremely unpopular with some of my best friends for asserting two strong opinions about Battlestar Galactica - specifically, that we were meant to look at Admiral Cain and the crew of Pegasus as a cautionary tale rather than an irredeemable villain (which has since been strongly supported by the events of Razor), and that the strong negative reaction to her, both among my friends and among fans in general, was partially due to her being female. I would like to be able to say that I felt sorry for having gotten so worked up about something unimportant, but the truth is that I can't bring myself to believe it's not important. This post is my attempt to defend that idea.
The trouble is, I'm not sure if I can, not directly. As my friends rather bluntly pointed out, she wasn't male, so how can we know how viewers would have reacted to a different presentation? They insisted that they would have reacted no differently to a male Admiral Cain, but they can't know that any more than I can. Rather, I think my strong reaction to Cain was the last straw following a lifetime of seeing female characters in SF and fantasy be marginalized and detested by otherwise reasonable people. It was a rage that had been brewing in my mind for years, and of which my friends were the unfortunate recipients.
To be honest, Battlestar Galactica really doesn't deserve the brunt of this rant. It mostly does a good job of characterizing its protagonists as humans rather than gendered stereotypes. Sure, Six's wardrobe choices sometimes leave me shaking my head, and in recent seasons I've wished we could see at least as much of Starbuck's brilliance as we do of her brokenness, but compared to a show like Supernatural that after three seasons still hasn't figured out how to include a female character in a role other than "evil temptress" or "sexy, victimized corpse", it does okay. But consider this: Cain is probably the most masculinized woman that BSG has given us yet. Her iron-fisted command style, her fatal flaw of responding to all threats with over-the-top aggression, and (as of Razor) her possession of a hot Cylon girlfriend are all stereotypically masculine traits - whereas Dualla and Cally and Boomer have lately had as much screen time spent on their romantic travails as on their work aboard the ship, Roslin is by turns commanding and mothering, and Starbuck is still just a scared, abused little girl under all the cigar-smoking bravado. Could the lack of these feminizing traits in Cain have been a bridge too far for the fans who objected to her so vehemently? (It also interests me to note that of all the women of BSG, Cain is the only one explicitly coded as queer, although the fact that we didn't learn this until Razor pretty well excludes it from my argument.)
Because although a lot of ink has been spilled lately on how it's more socially acceptable for women to display stereotypically masculine traits than it is for men to display stereotypically feminine traits, sometimes when it comes to TV I see it as being the other way around. We look at Bill Adama wanting to become a better father and letting Starbuck get away with just about anything and crying over Boomer's body and remaining adorably oblivious to the fact that the President of the Twelve Colonies would really love to jump his bones, and we think it's so wonderful that he has a sensitive side, regardless of the hard and questionable decisions he's had to make along the way. We applaud him for being able to be sensitive and get in touch with his feelings. I wonder if learning that the worst part of Admiral Cain's legacy, the imprisonment and torture of Gina, was a response to a deep and painful romantic betrayal - that in the end, she did it all for love - is going to do the same for her.
I see this sort of thing so much on other shows. I watch Lost and I think about Sawyer, an unabashed con artist and a cold-blooded murderer, who nevertheless enjoys great popularity with fans since he fell in love with Kate and turned out in flashbacks to have a heart of gold - and before that as well. Or Locke, beloved despite the dozens of times he's back-stabbed and endangered everyone with his increasingly obsessive quest to understand the island. Compare them with Ana-Lucia, another resoundingly hated character, whose only sin appears to have been stepping up to lead the tail section survivors. I am thoroughly incapable of understanding the fan hatred toward her, because in the text of the show I never saw her do anything worse than Jack or Kate or Sawyer or anyone we'd been with since the beginning, so I won't even try to analyze that. I think about Heroes, where most of the female characters have powers that are more of a disease than a superpower, while Peter takes his shirt off and continues his slow power creep. Or Supernatural, which as I've mentioned already seems to have no understanding of how to write a female character who doesn't end up dead and bloodied or at least in need of rescuing, and whose (predominantly female) fans pitch a screaming fit whenever any icky gross girlz! show up and threaten to come between the brothers Winchester.
Or maybe it's the language that is used to talk about these hated female characters. "Ana-Lucia, that slut. That skank. What a bitch." Almost all the insults are sexually based, in one way or another. But the harsh words directed toward a clearly villainous character like Ben always seem to come tempered with a hint of covert respect for what a magnificent bastard he can be. Hate Ana-Lucia or Admiral Cain if you want; it's your prerogative. But at least be willing to admit, however grudgingly, that they both kept their "crews" together under circumstances as harsh or harsher than the male so-called heroes of their respective shows were asked to face.
And that brings me to another thing: One of the reasons I liked Cain was that she was the rare female character who was allowed to fill an antagonistic role without using their sexuality as a weapon, whether it's overtly stated or strongly implied by the mise-en-scene. Most female villains are at some level seductresses - Six being a prime example of this, along with Grayza from Farscape, just about any female comic book villain you can think of, every female demon that has ever appeared on Supernatural, and basically everything that happened with the mirror universe stuff on Deep Space 9 (also known as "the mirror universe, where all the men have goatees and all the women are evil lesbians"). Certainly there are male characters who follow this "seduce and destroy" M.O., but there's variation in the behavior of male villains. Consider, for example, the differences between Lex Luthor, Scorpius, and Sylar - all villains with certain commonalities in their behavior, surely, but much more different from each other than, say, Supernatural's crossroads demon compared to Poison Ivy compared to mirror-universe Kira Nerys. It may seem weird to say that women should have the same opportunities to play great and varied villainous roles that men do, but here I am, saying it anyway.
In the end, I suppose I can't explain why I feel so strongly that so many characters have been hated for nothing more than the sin of being female. I can only say that I believe it. If nothing else, I hope this entry has at least given you a glimpse into what I think and why I think it, whether you agree with me or not. I realize that most people probably won't, but I hope that someday they will.
And now, let the angry comments begin!