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HEALTH • When it comes to walking, more is better P | 11 TECHNOLOGY • Bitcoin buys burgers to music as stores FUTURE embrace currency P | 12 OF FEMALE Learn Arabic • Learn commonly used Arabic words ACTION HERO and their meanings P | 13 2 PLUS | TUESDAY 31 DECEMBER 2013 COVER STORY Are female By David Cox such as Buffy and Xena, and their many sisters in the world of gaming. atniss Everdeen’s tri- By fairly common consent, the god- action heroes umphs extend beyond the mother of the bunch rose out of the Quarter Quell and the pitiless crucible of 1970s blaxploita- global box office: she has tion. Today, Pam Grier is remembered guaranteed the future of mainly as Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, good role Kthe female action hero. Not that this but it was forgotten films such as Coffy, was in much doubt, even before The Friday Foster and Sheba, Baby that Hunger Games: Catching Fire swept all made her “the biggest, baddest and before it. On the big screen, women most beautiful of all female heroes in have been successfully kicking and popular culture”, according to Rikke models for slashing for some time now. Schubart, the author of a book on As our current millennium dawned, action heroines. the derring-do of Stallone, Willis, Grier’s characters gleefully punched, Schwarzenegger and their ilk had lost kicked and shot men, kicked them, and young women? its edge. The protagonists of Lara Croft: stabbed them with hairpins, broken Tomb Raider, Crouching Tiger, Hidden bottles and metal hangers. Meanwhile, Dragon and Kill Bill brought welcome Asian cinema was already awash with spin to their genre. viragos who did not go unnoticed else- Since then, a new clutch of male where. Then, in 1979, Alien brought heroes has fallen prey to self-doubt. the dauntless action woman into the This has left the likes of dragon-tat- mainstream. tooed Lisbeth Salander, teen assassin Nonetheless, for decades progress Hanna and Kick-Ass’s Hit-Girl to steal was slow. Sociologist Kathryn much of their thunder. Female toughies Gilpatrick looked at 157 female protag- infiltrated the otherwise masculine onists in action films released between domains of The Matrix, Prometheus, 1991 and 2005. Only 7 percent took Captain America: The First Avenger and control of their situation; 58 percent Avengers Assemble. The Snow White of were submissive to male characters. Snow White and the Huntsman turned Thirty per cent were dead when the out to be an adept killer. Not even chil- credits rolled. dren’s animations have escaped the Still, social change was not to be vogue: in Shrek, the princess knew gain said. Continuing screen depic- kung fu; in Brave, she was a warrior. tions of submissive women provoked This era’s movie-makers cannot growing protest. In 1985, the Bechdel claim invention, of course. Sissy Spacek test was invented to show how few outclassed Chloë Moretz’s Carrie back films could boast at least two named in 1976. The original behind this dec- female characters capable of talking ade’s remakes of I Spit on Your Grave to each other about something other appeared in 1978. And the big screen’s than a man. The industry took note, action women have long enjoyed valu- but it was hard commercial reality able support from small-screen peers that made it act. PLUS | TUESDAY 31 DECEMBER 2013 3 Once upon a time, boys took girls on dates and therefore picked the movie. No longer. Film marketer Jeff Gomez says: “Women are making the decisions now with regard to entertainment choices.” This has created a prob- lem for his industry. If a boy fancies Transformers but his girlfriend favours Twilight, the couple may give up on the multiplex altogether. To worried stu- dio executives, the female action hero looked like a godsend: maybe she could deliver adventure for him and inspira- tion for her. Some doubted that male filmgoers would want to watch, but reassurance was on hand. Action, it was suggested, would enable female stars to flaunt their painstakingly tended bodies more shamelessly than was permit- ted by more sedate forms of drama. And for men, the theory ran, female violence would prove titillating rather than threatening. Research suggests that such think- ing was well founded. In 2003, a Washington University survey of undergraduates found that 74 percent of male respondents watched female more remarkably, for Snow White action heroes for their attractive- and the Huntsman the figure was 47 ness. Meanwhile, 73 percent of female percent. respondents watched to see their own Some women would prefer the gender in a powerful role. This may female big-screen bruiser to be given be bad news for women hoping that yet more scope: they feel she gets cinema might educate their menfolk, accorded less agency than her male but it was to prove good news indeed counterpart. Characters such as for the studio bosses. Katniss are often allowed to take up At the beginning of the last decade, arms only when circumstances force they began to allocate big budgets them to; male swashbucklers have been to films such as Charlie’s Angels and freer to shape their own destiny. So the Resident Evil. With higher spending Bond and Terminator franchises are came more publicity, more atten- named after their protagonists; The tion and bigger rollouts. The strategy Hunger Games, on the other hand, seemed to work with male as well as “isn’t named after Katniss, it’s named female filmgoers. In America, the audi- after what happens to Katniss,” com- through nurture or nature, women found respondents complaining that ence at the opening weekend of The plains the Last Psychiatrist website. in the real world tend to recoil from female action heroes fuelled unreal Hunger Games was 39 percent male, Overall, however, women seem violence. Most feminists define it as expectations; they also created the according to exit surveys. Perhaps pleased. The Washington University “patriarchal and oppressive”, accord- impression that in order to be strong, study found 56 percent of women say- ing to Martha McCaughey and Neal women had to be abnormal. ing that the female action subgenre King in Reel Knockouts: Violent Women Film-makers seem to be aware that was good for gender equality, and in the Movies. the macho female is something of an 75 percent said they could apply its Women, already subject to so oddity. Hence, doughty female protago- themes to their own lives. To find out many pressures, may not fancy being nists are often encumbered with tra- how Hanna had gone down, its star, expected to toughen up physically to ditionally “feminine” attributes. Their Saoirse Ronan, went to an all-female keep up with screen idols. Nor will violence tends to be sanitised rather screening. “What they really got out of their lot be improved if films celebrat- than messy, and usually springs from the film was a sense of empowerment,” ing female violence further erode the good intentions. Katniss meets the she reported. taboo on male violence against women challenge confronting her with reluc- However, not all leading women are that already seems to be fading away in tance, not elation. Unfortunately, this strapping on weaponry. As Jane Foster, the real world. The Washington study is what turns her into the victim of the hero’s love interest in Thor: The circumstance so lamented by The Last Dark World, Natalie Portman stayed Psychiatrist. well away from the fighting, and was Traditionally, in view of their defi- not sorry to do so. She said she had ciency in brawn, women have relied taken the part to provide a positive on their brains to get what they want. female role model, but went on: “The Portman’s unsanguineous Jane con- fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re tributes to the struggle against evil making a ‘feminist’ story, the woman through her expertise in astrophys- kicks and wins. That’s not feminist, The fallacy in ics. Characters like this might provide that’s macho.” Hollywood is that a more useful role model for young With this remark, Portman put her women than sure-shots like Katniss. finger on a paradox. The female action if you’re making a Sadly, however, female intellectuals hero certainly looks like a hero, but is would doubtless prove less of a box- she really female? And if she isn’t, what ‘feminist’ story, the office draw than battling babes. kind of influence is she actually having “This is a business run by guys,” on both women and men? woman kicks and Mariel Hemingway once remarked, In Gender and the Action Heroine, “who want women to be a certain way.” Jeffrey Brown writes: “The modern wins. That’s not As long as this is the case, it seems that action heroine confounds essentialism feminist, that’s macho. the female action hero will be sticking through her performance of tradi- around, for better or for worse. tionally masculine roles.” Yet whether The Guardian 4 PLUS | TUESDAY 31 DECEMBER 2013 CAMPUS BFPIS Junior Wing rocks Annual Show Young students of Bright Future Pakistani International School Junior Wing won over the audience during their Annual Show.