****
Marvel movies are a blast to watch. If you’ve seen the more recent ones like The Avengers: Age of Ultron, or Antman, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The action (more like the CGI), the corny one-liners, and the secret endings make them an enjoyable experience. Then there’s the one badass woman who likes kicking and doing acrobatic takedowns on the evil henchmen, and the one genius woman who’s a scientist and uses her brains to aid the superhero. In a world where women are objectified, glamorized, and glorified for their appearances, girls admire these token heroines because that’s all we got. I know I did when I was in my teens and my nerdiness was at its pinnacle. As I got older though, I began to notice a glaring pattern in the heroines I had admired-they were always skinny.
I was
beginning to wonder, “How come none of these heroines are ever fat? Not even a
bit chunky?” People would tell me like it was a fact, “Fat women are unhealthy
and can’t move around as much, duh.” We
instinctively correlate healthiness and fitness with skinny women,
unhealthiness and laziness with fat women. But it’s wrong-being fat has to do
with many factors other than food and a lack of exercise. Associating thick thighs and chubby bellies
with junk food and laziness is-well, lazy. Similar to the extreme end of
skinniness, being morbidly fat comes with a slew of health problems. But you’re
telling me Marvel can’t feature a woman with plump thighs as a love interest? A
biophysicist? A sidekick? All of the above?
Now
you’ve probably assumed that my upcoming novel is full of fat female characters
doing unrealistic backflips and jump kicks. You’re wrong-I have one. Adaeze,
one of the denizens of the alternate world my protagonist Opal has to save, has
got thick thighs and isn’t stick skinny. She’s got the brains and the brawn-if scifi/fantasy
authors can create female alien races with two tails, one eye, blue skin, and
four arms-and always making them slim if they’re love interests-I’m sure they
can create a thick-boned alien girl. It’s 2015, we can have fat women in combat
that doesn’t involve crashing into cars or rolling around on the ground for
laughs. We can have fat women who create superweapons in their sleep, and have
different kinds of fat women as our token heroines (until equality becomes a
part of society, which I think will take a while). We can have heroines with
thick thighs that save lives.
I think it’s high time we stop over-representing
one type of female stock character, especially in the sci-fi genre. Apparently,
every female alien, superhuman, and sidekick love interest exists as a size
two. At this point, you’re definitely
rolling your eyes and saying, “Look at this bitter, fat girl who’s trying to
write a novel about fat women fighting and being smart.” You are again,
terribly wrong! I’m a skinny, twenty-one year old who’s grown bored of seeing
the same type of women in my favorite books, my movies, and in the media.
****
Miri's book "The Path to Dawn" is soon to be released. You can find out more about Miri here...
5 comments:
She certainly doesn't have to be a stick figure. She needs a shape. Curves are sexier than bone, that's for sure.
I agree. Movies especially make women so homogenous that it's hard to tell them apart from them. I mean, if you think about it, all Disney females follow the same basic shape too.
And then they give them the same characterization treatment and... yeah, I'm getting rather frustrated with all this.
Hollywood is notoriously shallow.
I sometimes wonder if body image was invented by men who created standards for both sexes and force everyone to conform or face possible societal shunning.
Seems like few of the male heroes are built outside of the fit sterotype either. Except when the middle-aged Mr. Incredible started to let himself go.
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