(no subject)

Happy birthday, easyforletters and marykaykare!

Super-women

Article today by Tanya Gold in the Guardian about her dissatisfaction with recent superheroine movies. However, I think she's rather missing the point: the paradigm of the superhero of which these superheroines represent an offshoot is of someone with damage or trauma in his background (Superman's whole planet blew up, for heaven's sake) or else a weedy 7-stone weakling who gets sand kicked in his face on a regular basis before gaining super-powers. (Paging Alfred Adler here: inferiority-complex-compensatory-mechanisms much?)

But just plonked onto a woman, this damage/trauma/inadequacy model simply feeds into the general notion of the achieving woman as pathologised. The female superhero really needs rethinking entirely.

This (it occurs to me) is what Buffy TVS got right: until she was fingered as the Slayer she had a happy family, was a cheerleader, etc: having to negotiate her new role was what caused the problems, wasn't a fantasy compensation for parents divorcing and not being invited to the Prom. In fact it's about the problems that being an achieving woman caused for the woman, rather than making her the problem.