I used to imagine my favorite shows with female characters as a kid
Growing up, I watched cartoons like any other kid, trying to enjoy the hijinks and questionable behavior on screen the best I could. Yet, there was always one thing that’d make my rage bubble up just underneath, ready to spill every time I opened my mouth.
Where were all the girls?
Now, before someone puts words in my mouth, I know that there are a lot of female characters in the media and all that. However, how often are those women the main characters? How many times are they allowed to be as messy and annoying and terrible as the male characters are? How often is the one female member of the cast the one forced to be the morally upstanding one, clean and pretty and with nothing rough around the edges to offend anyone’s moral values? Even as a kid, I saw how the female characters were designed. Small features, smooth lines and more normal outfits. In live action shows, I’d see women staying out of the messes, their hair always perfectly styled, their makeup always expertly applied. Dirt rarely touched their skin. Women were rarely the ones bloodied up or committing heinous acts, more relegated to the voice of reason and almost always being the first villain redeemed. I hated it then, and I hate it now. More important than all that – what do these women do? How often is the main story a woman’s story?Â
In all fairness, this has improved recently, as many shows have female leads who are morally gray at best.Â
Now you all may be asking me: why are you advocating for absolute gremlins of women to be shown? Why is it important to you that women be depicted as despicable? Why should they be driven by a pure unadulterated rage?Â
Women’s anger has long been glossed over and ignored; we are socialized to suppress the natural and often righteous anger we feel as human beings. Early medical literature would describe hysteria in women, and any strong emotion or opinion was given some sort of medical diagnosis. Our humanity is ripped away from us when we are held up as some kind of infallible moral pinnacle and relegated to the role of a caretaker. There is a certain catharsis when it comes to seeing bad women. It allows us to see emotions represented that we often are not socially allowed to express. A bad woman is one who is a middle finger to the face of patriarchal systems, who reasserts the parts of human nature we are made to forget that we have simply due to being female. Bad women are a scathing critique of societal expectations and norms. Because they don’t conform to traditional gender roles, bad women challenge the status quo and force people to examine their own assumptions and biases.
Humans evolved around 200,000 years ago in a world with animals we no longer remember and a life very few of us will ever know. We had to fight to live, foraging for plants and hunting for prey. We would track prey down for miles on end, stalking them with a singular goal in mind. We would die young, surrounded by a world that threatened us, and this was the world humans evolved to survive in. Half of those humans were women, and to deny the very essence of what we are does nothing but harm us in the long run.Â