Random Thoughts 3: A Little Bit of This, and a Little Bit of That...

[Takhisis]

I find it an interesting contrast that we're having the above discussion while we're having another in which a forum member defend his right to tell his wife to do things his way or their marriage is over.

 

[Synobun]

Is the implication that the twenty-first century West is a "traditional society", or that masculine and feminine are no longer socially-relevant categories?

Yes.

 

[Traitorfish]

Yes.

Are you asking us to guess, or...?

 

[Takhisis]

I've dealt with Canadian CFCers before, and I'd bet anything that his answer's going to be ‘Yes.’.

 

[Synobun]

Are you asking us to guess, or...?

No. The answer is yes to both.

 

[Traitorfish]

No. The answer is yes to both.

The West is a traditional society in which masculinity and feminity are relevant, but, also, at the same time, not-that?

Unless you mean that the West is a traditional society in which masculinity and femininity aren't relevant- but that seems, at a casual glance, entirely back-to-front. There's not a lot about the twenty-first century that is traditional, but society is still markedly gendered, at least in terms of people imagine and present themselves.

 

[Commodore]

Also golf. Nuff said.

Golf doesn't count. You still score points in golf, just in a different way than most other sports.

 

[Ryika]

She is as effective as a trained team of mostly-male marines. Her modus operandi is violently kicking ass. In a traditional society (since that's the only context in which "tomboy", and the considerations of masculine and feminine, are relevant in any way), that's fairly strictly masculine.

I mean, if "violently kicking ass" in a situation that calls for asses to be kicked violently is purely "masculine", then I'm not sure how you'd expect her to engage the alien(s). What you call 'tomboy'ish I see as a rather convincing, female badass. In an over-the-top way of course, because action movie, but still. "Badassery" will always push a character towards "traditionally masculine traits", because "badassery" is a trait that is usually ascribed to masculine bodies. There is a huge difference though, between a female character that is supposed to be a badass and therefor is created to basically be a man with a female body, and a female who actually acts in a way that makes sense.

Admittedly, that difference is hard to quantify in clear attributes, but still. Ripley feels genuine to me, as a character and as an attempt to create such a character, in a way many other characters do not.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Almost forgot my thought of the day.

Thought for the Day: My hands are starting to look old.

You need to work on accepting the aging process and learn to ignore how your evolving body looks. Be happy that your vision gets worse and so you won't notice many of the details of aging.

 

[Commodore]

Thought for the Day: Everyone wants security, but no one wants to pay for it.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Thought for the Day: Everyone wants security, but no one wants to pay for it.

Windows Defender is a great antivirus program!

 

[MaryKB]

I feel I'm very strongly agreeing with @Ryika here about Ellen Ripley. I don't feel "kicking butt" is strictly a masculine quality, like I don't feel Gamora is masculine, or Black Widow, and everyone else, right? I've seen Commando, I don't feel it's a particularly great movie, but it's one of my father's favorites, and I don't feel Arnold's comparison to Ellen is really fair or similar at all. Yes both were looking to protect a child, but I feel both were very different, if I'm making sense? Like I don't picture Arnold sleeping in bed to comfort a child like Ellen did with Newt, and my feeling was Newt really took to her because of her maternal qualities, which really just exude femininity to me. And when she's going after Newt to rescue her, I really felt a very strong vibe of "PO'd momma", which also was how she related to the Alien Queen in a way, and part of what made that scene so interesting was how you have these two mother characters angry and protecting their young. And that movie was great with Ellen's femininity contrasting against all those macho marines, and you have a wide spectrum of different types of men also.

My feeling is a lot of men look at femininity differently, and I feel many men equate that to a male's view of feminine meaning "appealing to men's sexual desires", which is not at all the same way I feel, you know? Along with Sarah Connor, I do believe James Cameron has had some wonderful female action heroes in his movies, from a woman's perspective.

 

[rah]

Agreed. Ripley was portrayed quite feminine compared to the other kickass female, Private Vasquez

 

[Traitorfish]

Agreed. Ripley was portrayed quite feminine compared to the other kickass female, Private Vasquez

On reflection, it feels like Vasquez may have been included to distance Ripley's from a conventional masculine action hero.

Vasquez is a great supporting character, but if she was a lead rather than a supporting character, the film would function as a standard 80s action flick after the Arnie-Sly model which happened to have a female actor in the lead role, which Aliens, while perhaps not as subversive as some fans would like to think, is not.

 

[EgonSpengler]

There is a huge difference though, between a female character that is supposed to be a badass and therefor is created to basically be a man with a female body, and a female who actually acts in a way that makes sense.

I disagree, and Ripley, as portrayed in Alien, is the archetype that became the template for characters like Aeryn Sun, Trinity, Sam Carter, and Kara Thrace*. As MaryKB already said, kicking butt is not a strictly masculine quality, and it was Alien that broke that mold**, and it did it by having a woman behave as a man would. Ripley was literally a male character with a female body, and yet her behavior was entirely sensible for a woman; by the end of the movie, the only men left alive were the xenomorph and Jonesy the cat. Eventually, regardless of whether you're a man or a woman, it's just you and the tiger: You fight, or you die.

In Aliens, the screenwriters obviously knew who Ripley was and folded some traditional, maternal qualities into the character (in the extended edition of Aliens, Ripley is revealed to actually be a mother, having outlived her daughter while in her 57-year hypersleep between movies - in the PC game Alien: Isolation, the main character is Ripley's grown daughter). This version of the character - the tough mother - shows up again, too, in characters like the aforementioned Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 and Charly Baltimore (Geena Davis) in The Long Kiss Goodnight - an underrated movie that I heartily endorse, if you haven't seen it.


* At first blush, Emily Blunt's character in Edge of Tomorrow looks like another of Ripley's daughters - and she is - but she was actually the Wise Elder who trains and prepares The Chosen One for the final battle. Yoda, Miyagi, Gandalf, Morpheus in The Matrix.

** Although Star Wars was first by a couple of years, Carrie Fisher was essentially playing Katharine Hepburn (so was Margot Kidder in 1978's Superman), while Ripley was something new.

 

[EgonSpengler]

More on the Alien trilogy: It's all about how the corporation uses the working-class to further its own ends, all in pursuit of a new military weapons contract. In the first film, the sacrificial lambs were the ship crew (and the Nostromo was basically just an oil rig in space); in the second, soldiers; in the third, convicts. It's a subtler critique of the system than Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop and Starship Troopers and John Carpenter's They Live, but I suppose a mallet to the head is subtler than those movies.

 

[Lexicus]

the only men left alive were the xenomorph

Um excuse me but #Not All Men

 

[EgonSpengler]

Um excuse me but #Not All Men

It's true, the genders of the non-queen xenos were inspecific, and the queen wasn't even introduced until the 2nd movie. Still, I think it's a guy.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Thinking more about the women-playing-'male'-characters thing: Claudia Black's Vala in Stargate SG-1 was basically Han Solo, and Katee Sackhoff's Kara Thrace in Battlestar Galactica, at least in the early episodes, was practically a parody of the rebel hero, the hard-drinking loose cannon whose prowess makes her indispensable. And of course that character was originally played by a man.

 

[Commodore]

It's true, the genders of the non-queen xenos were inspecific, and the queen wasn't even introduced until the 2nd movie. Still, I think it's a guy.

In some of the supplementary lore, there are some indicators that the xenomorphs are actually capable of switching their gender as needs dictate. For example, if a hive loses its queen, one of the "drones" can transform into a female and become a new queen.