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| Most 12-year-old girls are not superheroines. |
One of my favorite dopey complaints from the Men’s Rights crowd is that action movies featuring ass-kicking women are “unrealistic” because real women are too dainty to do all that ass-kicking shit. On The Spearhead today, W.F. Price aims his withering contempt at the new film Hanna:
The ass-kicking chick flicks are getting more and more ridiculous as time goes on. In “Hanna” a girl is raised by her father to be a vicious killer somewhere in the arctic. Hanna is played by Saoirse Ronan, an Irish girl with a sweet smile who looks about as tough as a bunny rabbit. Nevertheless, we are supposed to suspend disbelief and accept that this waif is capable of breaking necks with a single blow.
Even worse, in the trailer for the film, young Miss Ronan is depicted doing … pull-ups! “In general, women can’t do pull-ups,” Price complains, “and the vanishingly few who can don’t look much like Saoirse Ronan.”
Price does have a point. Real women can’t do the things that female action heroes do in films. Angelina Jolie may be a deeply scary woman, but I’m pretty sure she can’t take out entire boats full of trained assassins by herself, or jump from truck to truck on the highway to escape pursuers in cars, as she did as super seekret double (triple?) agent Evelyn Salt. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Sarah Michelle Gellar has never really slain even a single vampire. And there is no such thing as an indestructible cheerleader.
But here’s the thing, guys: All that crazy shit that male action stars do? Real men can’t do that either. Matt Damon is pretty buff, and I’m pretty sure he could take Angelina Jolie in a fight, but he’s not actually Jason Bourne. Christian Bale doesn’t put on a batsuit at night and run around town taking out baddies with his bare – well, gloved — hands. Toby Maguire can’t swing from building to building, or stick to walls; if he were bitten by a radioactive spider, he’d need to go to the hospital. Arnold is not the Terminator.
Also, and I hate to be the one who has to break this to you, guys: professional wrestling is fake.
I know it might be tough to take all this in, guys, so here’s Captain Kirk fighting a very slow-moving alien monster on planet Not-Very-Far-From-The-Studio. Kirk has a little trouble with this one but in real life, I’m pretty sure William Shatner could take down an alien monster, provided it moved as slowly as this one.
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>Amanda Marcotte, I'm also gender-queer lady who loves a butch woman just as much as the next girl. I'm all about gender nonconformity and also don't believe in gender essentialism. I have a physics degree so my logic brain often takes over. I think we'd make great friends! My beef is that hollywood showcases and celebrates only one type of person, one that is traditionally associated with maleness. While I do love seeing powerful women in cinema, I would also like to see emphatic women (and men) and mediation other than violence celebrated in hollywood.
>And by celebrated, I should say, given awards, do well at the box office, positively reviewed, etc. Not worshipped in that creepy earth mother way from the last post.
>@evilwhitemaleempire:LMFAO! "Most single moms are good at disarming their kids when they start playing with kitchen knives…"Now THAT was hilarious!
>Goddamit, this fucking site just ate another long fucking goddamn comment. FUCK FUCK FUCK.
>"ScareCrow said… Only thing that bothers me – is a 100lb super model carrying 200 pounds of artillery.CHAAH – RIGHT…Or a 100 lb woman throwing a 250 lb man over her shoulders."Don't know much about Aikido, do you? Or Ju-jitsu… or tai chi… or…(Sorry, this is my expertise)"Most single moms are good at disarming their kids when they start playing with kitchen knives…"Troll unintentionally trolls self…
>This is why Fiona of Burn Notice is interesting: she uses her miniscule weight effectively, emphasizing her leg muscles, where women have a lot of strength. These losers probably worship Ahnold but the fact of the matter is that big muscles aren't effective. You have to life a lot of weight a lot of time to get them and maintain them as well as use up lots of energy—time,effort, and food—to maintain them and for what? They reduce maneuverability, speed, and reflexes, they're bulky and get in the way, and they're ultimately a liability.But other guys respect them, so that's all that matters. Women in the army not only do pushups and pullups, they have an advantage in endurance and lower body strength. And the culture encourages women from building up upper body strength—ew! muscles!—-so going to Basic is about playing catchup. The Russians studied what an effective soldier needs and they found that that was a strong back and core, followed by legs and arms. Such a soldier can carry weight while marching, maneuver, and move quickly. He's less prone to injury—if the strength is accompanied by flexibility—and needs fewer calories thansome muscle bound dude with compensation issues, who has to spend hours per day at the gym, and then hours eating. There's a book called, "The Stronger Women Get The More Men Like Football," which talks about, well, just about everything to do with strength and gender roles. Mariah Burton Nelon is the author. As a companion piece, there's "PrettyGirls in Little Boxes," or something like that but I can't remember the name of the writer. Basically it's about how male athletes are big and heroic and their injuries are manly injuries of sacrifice and discipline, while girly injuries are a sign that they're masochistic, inherently weak, and ought to be home clutching their pearls on their fainting couches. Oh, yeah, and how come female athletes in some sports have to dress like ballet dances at all times? For that matter, a ballet dancer or a gymnast could probably kick most MRA's assess. This better fucking post.
>Emma Fucking Peel.That is all.
>@ginmarNot only could a ballet dancer/gymnast kick most MRA's asses, they could probably do it backwards and in high heels.
>It still doesn't explain why they are complaining about women in comic books as being unrealistic when the entire genre is unrealistic. One may as well argue about the ability of penguins to fly an airplane.
>These losers probably worship Ahnold but the fact of the matter is that big muscles aren't effective. You have to life a lot of weight a lot of time to get them and maintain them as well as use up lots of energy—time,effort, and food—to maintain them and for what? They reduce maneuverability, speed, and reflexes, they're bulky and get in the way, and they're ultimately a liability.Not to mention that the returns from building up pure muscle mass diminish quickly, because muscles are heavy and they have to lift their own weight along with whatever else you're lifting.Fun fact: Arnold Schwarzeneggar had to reduce his muscle mass for his role in Conan the Barbarian, because his muscles were initially too big to allow him to hold a sword properly. So yeah, muscle mass can definitely be counterproductive.
>Well, because they blame all women all the time, and if there's a woman around, she's to blame. Amnesia, most often the type of restraint attackers use is directed at the upper body—-yet women have a lot of lower body strength. Men might be faster for short distances, but in the long run—-I"m thinking here of classical military training, which still requires long marches—-women have greater endurance. That higher body fat thing means there's more reserves to call on. I can tell when a guy's compensating for something because that kind of guy always overdoes the upper body—and totally ignores the lower body! They look lopsided. And of course, ballet dancers and gymnasts have that extreme flexibility, which means they can kick your face without breaking a sweat. My drill sgt. used to call me Private Gumby.
>Trip, that doesn't surprise me at all. I can see how holding a rifle and other weapons properly would be a problem for these guys. We had an SF unit next to mine in Iraq and they were for the most part innocuous-looking guys. The Blackwater guys, however, strutted around with big huge muscles and black sunglasses and all that crap.
>Weirdly, I’ve seen this exact argument from feminists- I’ve probably made it myself. It’s unfair to paint any cultural criticism with that "movies=/=reality" brush. Ginmar brings up a fair point, but truly the women who have black belts, or are power lifters, or carry guns don’t look like Hollywood. The women who do perform these things just aren’t as acceptable to the gaze of the 20-something dude watching the movie. It’d be fair enough to criticize this guy if he was complaining about how all the strong, athletic women are ugly, but he’s not. Because really: women marines, women cops, and women fighters don’t look like Angelina Jolie in Salt. For one, they know to pin their damn hair out of the way.
>I know that action movies make the heroines have unrealistic standards of beauty. Like bathorie said, you'd want your hair out of the way to fight ninja assassins. I'll let that slide, though, because it's entertaining to see beautiful people, male or female, do amazing things. I am especially happy to see female movie characters be more than a damsel in distress or a prize for the male hero to win.
>"The Blackwater guys, however, strutted around with big huge muscles and black sunglasses and all that crap."They probably needed those huge muscles in order to lift their rifles plus the eight pounds of tacticool accessories hanging off them.
>Fucking fuck. Goddamit, there goes another fucking comment. I am sick of this shit. Blackwater guys always claim they're ex hoo ah hoo ah units—SF, SO, Delta, and so on. But those guys are lifers, and they're very comfortable with themselves. Jesse Ventura trying to claim that he was a Seal when he was in fact UDT is a warning sign for what I'm talking about. Big muscles also make you stand out in a population where you might try and pass as a civilian. I fired the .249 Viet Nam era belt-fed gun, which can fire 700 rounds per second and probably weighed seventeen or eighteen pounds loaded with a box of ammo. The weapon I regularly carried was an M-16, which weighed seven pounds. Blackwater dudes did a lot of boasting, but had weird terms of enlistment and their enlistments tended to be odd lengths. Maybe the UCMJ was too much to obey. Oh, and the best fight was the one between Harmony and Xander in Season Four of Buffy.
>ginmar, try copying your comments before posting. I've saved many a long comment that way. Longer comments seem to be the ones that get eaten.
>Of course, I thought of that afterward. Huh. It's part of a general slowness and clunkiness. I'm not sure if it's Mozilla or what.
>@ginmar:"Blackwater dudes did a lot of boasting, but had weird terms of enlistment and their enlistments tended to be odd lengths. Maybe the UCMJ was too much to obey."I think that nails it right there. They certainly seem to have way more than their share of employees who think their contract is a hunting license. And the idea of someone who seeks employment with Blackwater/Xe because they find that the military has too many annoying rules when it comes to use of force is disturbing.
>Delta, Seals, SO, SF—these guys are lifers. They do it for life, until they get killed or something really really bad happens. Military enlistments are generally even numbers, but Blackwater guys all had weird lengths—eleven, seven, nine…..And they were healthy enough to do the job and rape and kill civilians and other employees, plus the ones I got anywhere near to were just horrifying sexist.
>ginmar, unfortunately I've never heard much different about them. One of the main reasons that, although their gear is really expensive, I give Heckler & Koch major credit for refusing to do any business with them no matter what. This also means I'll never buy anything from Mossberg ever again, or any other company that thinks it's a good idea to sell Blackwater/Xe-endorsed stuff.
>ginmarWomen in the army not only do pushups and pullups, they have an advantage in endurance and lower body strength.(ginmar)Really, the average woman in the army has more lower body strength than the average man in the army? As far as endurance goes you may be right in Ultra distance running but other than that, average men still win the bulk of running races against average women.I would agree with you about body builders such as Arnold, but as far as muscle(size) being a disadvantage is just not true. Watch the heavyweight fighters in MMA and you would not be saying that. Men and women are not equal when it comes to size and strength and speed in general, there are exceptions though.
>I once had a fight with an Aussie over women being able to beat men at Olympic sports. The Winter Olympics had just occurred so I had an easy time of locating the stats.In six different distance events the women outperformed the men. He then changed the parameters and said "well the women's lengths are different." Even controlling for that, women still outperformed men.
>Um, Tit for Tat, can you read? Because you're pulling shit from all over as well as putting words in my mouth. It's tiresome. Knock that shit off. And as MMA and your unsupported assertion about overblown bodybuilders, thanks—I'll take the Russian army over some dude online who asserts the standard sexist line that men and women are not equal. I kind of suspect you that men are better, and that's bullshit.
>Elizabeth, Mariah Burton Nelson has a chapter on that kind of thing in both her books. Basically, men's vanity requires that they think of themselves as better in all things athletic than women, which Tit for Tat just proved by pretty much stating th4e very same thing. There's no reason that women and men can't compete directly in many sports—-except for one thing: dudes don't want to be beaten by women. Funny thing too, even though men believe and desire to be stronger and all that than women, this is not consistently addressed in any other area. If men have advantages—which they do in size at least—-shouldn't they be held to a higher standard and required to manage themselves better in conjunction with people who are smaller, lighter, less strong? Nope, it's only supposed to feed mens' vanity, not obligate them to anything.