The Good-Girl Heroine
The Good Girl Heroine
These days it has become fashionable for men to configure female heroines who reflect their own deepest fantasies regarding what women can be. These female heroines are actively seeking redemption, though they are often unaware of doing so. They are invariably blonde. They are often holding back a great deal of grief and attempting to hold their families together in the face of violent forces of capitalism which seek to tear them apart. In many ways, these women represent socialism--they are caring, kind and compassionate towards the less fortunate. They care a great deal about people who will never care about them. They love people who are not worthy of their love and they cry over people who are incapable of loving them. These are the women who will spend their entire lives in love with men who can barely manage to tie their own shoes, let alone complete an intellectually stimulating sentence. They adore their fathers, who oftentimes are borderline abusive and certainly neglectful of their less-exciting daughters. They seek to become people who their fathers will be proud of, even though such a thing is impossible so long as they possess breasts.
Their favorite question in the world is ‘why’--which they ask of men who do not consider them worthy of explanations. They tend to believe that insanity is the fastest route to being listened to, which is unfortunate because their inability to articulate a complete sentence on their own behalf impresses no one. In fact, it is this tendency to explain nothing to no one of the inner workings of their hearts, souls and minds that leads them to the pit of doom that these movies and television shows oftentimes find themselves in. On the outside, they appear to be doing fine; on the inside, they are drowning and one step away from death’s door.
The only tell-tale sign of the despair which haunts these women is something seemingly small and out of their own purview or ability to change. They are poor, or failing out of school, or have not turned in an essay as they were supposed to do. They want desperately to be happy, but they have no idea how to accomplish such a state of being in real life. Having never been asked flat-out what they want out of their lives for themselves, they don’t particularly value that question. They rarely ask of themselves what will make them happy, and when they do, they immediately leap to what will make other people happy. They have not been taught how to discover what they love and what they want, and they have received the conditioning to be as sensitive as possible to other people’s wants and needs. They have been taught how to devote themselves to trying to earn other people’s love by being as “feminine”, I.e. as selfless, as they possibly can be. They tend to have one specific talent, which is portrayed as being genetic rather than something they have deliberately set out to develop over time.
Yes, these women work hard at being whatever it is they are most known for by those who choose to support them but that work is considered necessary and virtually out of their hands. they do not choose to devote their time and energy to becoming excellent at their ‘chosen’ path; rather, genetics have chosen them to be great at one specific thing. They train, they work, but they do so because someone--usually some older, paternal man--pressures or forces them to do so. These are the men who have taught these women every story, tale and skill they have to protect themselves. Eventually, these women are saved from whatever violent forces are trying to hurt them by their instincts, their inherent talents, rather than whatever training they have deliberately undergone or choices they have made. Essentially, it is their connection with the Patriachal force present in these male role models that saves these women, not their connections with other women or even their strength of self.
Women who devote their lives to trying to please men are never going to be truly happy. Women who try to save other people are never going to be genuinely able to fight their own battles; rather, they will spend their entire lives fighting men’s battles for them. They will try their best to rescue vulnerable, somewhat generous people whose souls are too twisted to genuinely love anyone. These women befriend wild horses, troubled young men, very angry men and women too neglected to ever rise above any of the genuinely horrible things that have happened to them. They put themselves out on a limb in order to serve some Patriarchal version of justice that a father figure has taught them is all the good they can hope to do in the world. They never quite stop seeing themselves as broken and a bare step away from crazy, which vision their father figures support them in perceiving themselves as. Thus, any actions they take to defend their concept of justice or to please their father-figures are half-hearted and ineffective at best, dangerously ill-conceived at worst.
Often, the choices these women do make only contribute to their troubles, leave them sick or near dead, and come close to depriving them of whatever it is they actually want for themselves in their lives. They eventually triumph, but only because some man steps in on their behalf and fights off whatever illness or violent man has been attracted by their weakness of spirit. The idea of justice they are pursuing may ultimately be served, but it is only when the paternally-minded man they are trying to please steps in to defend their previous actions. These men convince whatever other men or institutions “their” women have offended that the women were simply misguided, not mean-spirited, and deserve a second chance. It is the men whose hearts the women touch that ultimately improve their lots in their lives, not the choices of the women themselves.
In fact, if one walks away from the stories depicting the lives of these patriarchal heroines with any lessons learned, it is that nothing any woman does will actually help her in any way. Rather, she should just sit back, relax, never assert herself and especially never seek out what she wants, but rather wait until some man guesses it and becomes enamored enough with her to try to give it to her. These women are loved for their vulnerability, while their strengths set them apart from those around them unmistakably. Whatever friends they have are mere props, cheerleaders or mascots urging their heroine on towards whatever destiny awaits her. They may be swept up enough in her story enough to try to help her, but they certainly never succeed in doing so. Rather, the actions of anyone involved in the heroine’s life in anything but a patriarchal role rarely contribute much, if anything at all, to the improvement of her circumstances. It is only the compassion of some not-very-nice man with a demonstrated dearth of understanding for this woman’s actions that saves her from whatever trouble she is portrayed as having got herself into in the first place.