Hannah recently brought to my attention the new movie Robin Hood and the fact that Marian is wielding a sword in the final battle, which just sort of seems ridiculous. The more I thought about it, the more I started to think about the fact that a lot of times, women fighting in action movies seems silly, and I began to wonder why that is.
It’s such a complicated issue. For most of Robin Hood I really enjoyed Marian’s character. I liked that she fought off the thieves back at her farm, and I think that many women would have (and should have) been capable of protecting themselves and their own. But when I saw her emerge from that helmet in the battle scene, I just started laughing, and it’s the same in lots of movies that have the obligatory heroine-in-battle-beating-on-the-men scene. But why, if, as a strong woman, I believe that women should be capable of many things, do scenes like that make me so annoyed?
Maybe part of it is the very fact that it’s obligatory. There are lots of great women in battle—in both movies and in books. Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings is a Snoke woman favorite, and there is nothing at all annoying or humorous about her participation in battle. But it seems like every movie has to have that scene with the female beating on everyone, and because of that, the women in those movies lose their originality. They are annoying because they are just more stereotypical butch women.
So why is it different for men? Again, this is a really complicated issue, and I have only been giving it serious thought for a couple hours now. But I think that there’s something deeper going on, and that it really comes down to a question of roles. Are there gender roles? Should there be certain things that fall to a woman and certain things that fall to a man? I think movies make a very strong statement when it comes to defining the roles of men and women, by the very fact that there are no specific roles.
I am NOT saying that women’s role is never to fight. Clearly, that is not the case, especially going back to Eowyn and the Snoke woman empowerment that arises from her example. But I think something has been lost, or maybe unnecessarily added, to the complications of identity in our society. There should be women warriors. Look at Deborah in the book of Judges. But arbitrarily sticking a woman in battle scenes just to prove the fact that she can do everything a man can cheapens what a woman is.
I’ve just read some of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, a book in which she writes about the importance of roles. She doesn’t write specifically about gender, and I don’t agree with everything she has to say, but I do think she has a strong point. The characters in her stories always end up discovering that when they are resting in a role—playing a part, even—they have found true freedom. When the tension of trying to define, over and over, what they are is gone, they can live their lives freely, knowing that the important task is to fulfill their roles well.
I think Marian, and the heroines of movies like Robin Hood could learn from Dinesen’s stories. Those women, slashing around on horseback, just seem like they have something to prove. Women are trying so hard to define and redefine themselves in society, and it comes out in the insistence that they can do everything men can. Maybe they can do everything a man can. But maybe they should take Dinesen’s advice and rest in their role as a woman: a capable, confident woman, for sure. But a woman.
I was watching Swiss Family Robinson the other day for the first time in a few years, and it struck me that the portrayal of roles in that movie is phenomenal. This family gets shipwrecked on an island, and it’s a mother and father and their three sons, and then later they find another woman. The way the family is portrayed is great, from a life-giving point of view, because everyone has their role and they are not struggling the whole time to figure out who’s better or stronger or which gender is more dominant. Mother lets the boys work as much as they want cutting and sawing and running around without shirts. She works as much as she wants in her role as the mother. Father has the freedom to be a man, but he listens to his wife. The men are men, and the women are women—they all need each other. And in the end, when pirates attack them, all six of them stand side by side and defend themselves. Mother may be content to let her boys do the building and hunting, but when a pirate looms in front of her to attack, she shoots a hole right through him with her rifle. She is not a man. She doesn’t fight like a man—and that’s okay.
The more I experience life as a woman, the more I realize that sweetness comes from resting in my identity first in Christ, and second in the fact that I was created specifically. And part of that specificity is the fact that I am a woman. I don’t think women need to belittle men or try to become men to be true women. I think they need to take a lesson from Isak and Mother Robinson and realize that being a woman is a great thing. And being a woman means acting and thinking like one, no matter what the situation.
~Ruthie
