The answer on Defeminization in Hollywood - Make Women Female Again!
I was gearing up to see "Black Widow" and I happened to be perusing the internet to take in some of the general hype and publicity surrounding the movie when I stumbled upon this little article, where Scarlett Johansson reflects on her changing attitude towards the character. Quote: "While Iron Man 2 was really fun and had a lot of great moments in it, the character is so sexualized, you know? [She is] really talked about like she's a piece of something, like a posession or a thing or whatever - like a piece of ass, really. And Toni even refers to her as something like that at one point ... 'I want some.'"
Jesus, this girl rambles worse than me after a point of absence! Anyway, what she's basically saying her is that she feels the character was treated as a simple sex object in her early appearances and it's only recently that she's begun to come into her own and get treated as a fully realized human being in her own rights, freed from the shackless of sexual attractiveness. Now I have to admit my first reaction to this was: "Damn Scarlett, talk about bite in the hand that feedy you seems to be a bad idea! Your career was basically built on the fact that you you were extremely beautiful and you didn't seem to have a problem exploiting that for your own benefit or banking all those hefty paychecks it generated!"
What I personally see is now the big 40 is on the horizon and I guess that stuff will become will become less of an exploitable asset over the next few years, so it's time to disown it as a dated relic of a different culture, but is it really a fair assesment of the character and is it a path that you really want to go down? I mean the whole point of Black Widow is that she's a classic Femme Fatale archetype, she's beautiful and sexy and she uses those traits to distract or manipulate her male opponents, creating a weakness, that she can take advantage of.
I mean female spies have been doing this kind of sht for centuries, for one simple reason: It f**ing works! Even way back in Iron Man2 Black Widow was able to use her beauty to infiltrate Stark Industries, so that she could spy on Tony. Yeah, she probably could have fought her way in and defeated the security guards standing in her way, but what would be the point when that wasn't her mission in the first place? Her job was to use every tool at her disposal to complete her objective with minimal collateral damage and one of her most valuable tools was her looks!
Take those things away and you're basically left with a low tier human avenger on par with Hawkeye, someone that can fight and shoot guns to a reasonable standard and... well, that's it really, but also brings up a larger issue when it comes to how female characters are presented in movies like this. See, there's been a real push in recent years to do away with any hint of femininity and sexual attractiveness in female comic book heroes, which is why we're going to be subjected to stuff like The Marvels, She-Hulk, Mariko Tamakis Nightstar and other trash the world doesn't need!
That's lovely and all if you happen to be a blue haired land whale, but is it really what people want to see on screen? See, there's no diplomatic way of saying this and if there was, I wouldn't do it anyway because it's necessary to be clear in this to wake up a world in which madness has become Normality! We the Fans who suffer under this crazy agenda have to say women aren't that interresting to look at if you dress them up like a sack of potatoes, even a few exceptions in film history won't change that, because the story was successful, but certainly not because a feminine, attractive woman was turned into a kind of misogynistic something with breasts that makes even some of the men next to her seem almost feminine (hashtag: Terminator 2).
Movies in general and comic book movies in particular are basically built on physically attractive people doing incredinle things! They exist in a world of hyper reality where everything is just a little bit more extreme than what we have in the real world, the same physical laws exist, but they're not enforced as strictly, people are stronger, faster, they can punch harder and jump higher, they can take damage that would kill or severely injure a regular person in the realy world!
Why is that so? Because when it comes to films like these, we don't want reality, we want fantasy, we want a world where the incredible is possible, where dreams and nightmares come true and where people can transcend the limitations of our mundane existence to become more than human, superhuman if you will, and we want the character's physical appearance to reflect that change. It's not that hard to figure out why, human beings are instinctively drawn to people who look visually appealing, handsome men and beautiful women of course, representing the very best of what humans can be.
Yeah, somehow I doubt Scarlett has an issue with this kind of stuff, even though it's playing on literally the same exact psychology that gave us Black Widow in a revealing dress or a close-fitting combat uniform. The difference is in how they achieve this end, for men it's all about size, strength, conditioning and the kind of masculine dominance that only sheer physical mass can give you, because those are things that women generally find appealing and men find inspirational. They're designed to look good to both genders albeit for different reasons.
The thing is women can't use size, strength and physical dominance to get your attention, because they don't have those things and they never will! No amount of diet and exercise is going to make an actress a foot taller and 70 pounds heavier, and even when it could, nobody would want to see her, because those things just aren't appealing in a woman. What is appealing is grace, elegance, agility and sensuality!
If men are bulldozers, then women are sports cars, fast, agile and sleek, each gender does best when they play to their strengths and for women that's exactly where they lie! Movie directors have known this since the dawn of the industry and they understood exactly how to appeal to it. Is it manipulative and exploitative? Absolutely, in exact the same way that shirtless Chris Hemsworth is manipulative and exploitative, that's basically what movies are all about! The problem is that when you reverse that strategy and have women try to copy male characteristics, they usually end up looking exactly like what they are, they look smaller, weaker, uncomfortable pretenders, desperately trying to be something they're not!
Believe it or not, people can see through that kind of thing a lot more easily than you think, so I guess what I'm saying here is be careful what you wish for Scarlett, stripping your female heroes of their femininity and attractiveness might eliminate that pesky male gaze that you seem to find so problematic all of a sudden, even though you totally didn't 10 years ago, but it also takes away pretty vital component of what makes them so appealing and interresting in the first place, with consequences which you've already experienced in your career.
Someday you will realize that without it, well, people just aren't that interested in you anymore.