MovieChat Forums > Supergirl (1984) Discussion > The problem of 'female versions' of STRO...

The problem of 'female versions' of STRONG men

posted 2 years ago by avortac4 (3743)
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You can't just make a 'version for all' of something that proves to be popular. There's a reason strong men are more popular than strong women. There's also a reason why women don't have to be strong to get a mate in real life, but men can't be weak - I don't mean physically, but men have to have some form of status to score.

The easiest form to see is of course wealth, money, resources, etc., and it's the easiest to explain with evo-psychology as well.

The thing about men and women is that although we're all supposed to be just human beings, PEOPLE, and pay less attention to what kind of form we are piloting, the genders being very different make people very divided by their gender, when it comes to values, behaviour, mating strategies, desires and methods for trying to achieve their goals based on those desires.

You don't have to go further than the old interview of a 'boy and a girl', both which were supposedly 'gamers', and when they asked what kind of game they would create, if they could, the boy answered rationally and seriously, conjuring up as interesting a game as he could, the girl basically answered by putting down men and boys, and didn't really give a serious answer.

It's weird, how obsessed people have become of genders, although the same people think gender is meaningless, because it's just a social construction.

Even in some typical youtuber intro, I spotted japanese for 'Girl Power', as if we couldn't read simple kanji and katakana. It was even written as 'Onnanoko no pawaa', instead of 'Mesu chikara' or whatever.

Women love to boast how powerful women are, probably exactly because women really aren't that powerful physically. Their power is elsewhere, and societies and governments have always catered to this power and amplified it, while protecting women more than men. Compare the amount of women's shelters and women's institutions to .. the non-existent 'men's ones'.

My point, however, is that woman has more options than men, and her power is very different from man's, but because it's often more subtle and harder to see and pinpoint, simplistic thinknig never sees it.

The movie- and cartoonmakers (Think He-Man and She-Ra - of course they ALWAYS avoid the word 'Woman' for some reason.. what's wrong with She-Woman?) seem to think that they can just copy whatever the man is, super strong and muscular, for example, able to do amazing physical feats, and then just paste that to a more feminine body.

This doesn't work, because whereas man being strong makes sense for multitude of reasons, one of which is that historically, strong men have been able to gather resources, so they have been able to provide for the family (read: woman).

This is woman's psychology; to attract a mate that's useful. Man's value is in how useful he is to the woman. If he has money, he's useful. If he's a celebrity, he's useful. Alpha male, useful. It has nothing to do with man's looks, and even the most ardent, hard-boiled MGTOWs and men's rights advocates have not yet opened their eyes to this fact. I don't know how they can simultaneously say women choose rich men and bad boys, and think looks are what attract women.

If looks were enough, if THAT was an option, men would strive to improve their looks, because that would be the EASIEST route. No one would strive to be rich and powerful or become a bike gang member to attract women, if they could just take some plastic surgery and put on some make-up.

In any case, you can't just take a strong man and then make a female version of that and call it a day. It just doesn't work.

You can imagine women being attracted to a strong man that can do amazing feats with his muscular power, but can you imagine teenage boys drooling over a strongwoman? There's not even a term 'strongwoman'!

Men are physically strong, because they can be. They also have no choice. Or to put it in another way, they have only very difficult dilemmas, no real choice. They can become a CEO, but that's extremely difficult and hard work, and improbable.

Any form of status that attracts women, is hard work and difficult - the easiest probably being 'becoming a PUA', but even that takes commitment, facing your fears, growing as a human being, confronting difficult situations, going out into the field to practice, so much labor, toil, learning, failing, falling down and forcing yourself to get up over and over until you can ever even dream of becoming good at it.

Because women's and men's mating strategies are different, making your main hero a 'muscular, strong woman' just doesn't work, because its NOT the same. You can't just reverse genders by doing the same thing and calling it a day.

You can't take an ugly woman and ugly man and think they're equal. You can't take a pretty woman and handsome man and think they're equal. It doesn't work that way.

Their strengths are different - men's only strength is obvious, direct, physical, observable, measurable.

[–] avortac4 (3743) 2 years ago

Women's multiple strengths are multi-layered, subtle, hard to see, hard to realize and often invisible.

A woman can attract a man and make him sweat, his heart pound, and his feet jelly just by sitting on a chair and doing absolutely nothing. How do you measure that?

For some reason, this enviable, immeasurable power is never seen as strength, although women use it every day to ruin men's lives and wreck marriages. A pretty woman can tie a man around her pinky in various ways. Crocodile tears, among with other manipulation tactics and playing men against each other or crushing some woman through her man are very powerful control methods women use without even thinking about them, it's natural for them.

Women make great spies and spreaders of information - gossiping is an actual, useful strength, if used for good, and it used to be. Think the fifties nuclear family, whose woman, wife, mother not only extracts information from everyone she meets, but then also creates a semi-coherent narrative based on all that information and is able to spew it into the family pool of knowledge in staggering detail and length.

There's a reason why men's version of the exact same night is 'We went bowling. The end.', and a woman's version is: 'So Jenny, of all people, out of the blue calls me - it was the most amazing thing, because I was just thinking about her, and she had all these ideas on a family get-together, and of course my blue dress was in the dry cleaners, so I had to stall and try to think of something we can do that doesn't involve something so fancy, so I was thinking of a party, but you know how Susie hates when one of her friends give parties, when she thinks of herself as some kind of party queen, so I half-wanted to do it just to see her smug face, but Jenny talked me out of it, because she had just had coffee with Nancy, who talked about how much fun her husband had last week bowling - Nancy is of course cheating on that husband of hers, and..'

[–] avortac4 (3743) 2 years ago

..Well, I think everyone gets the point by now.

That story will at some point come to some kind of point, but we will be better off just diverting back to my point before we want to re-decorate our livingroom walls with an interesting new color called a hint of brain.

My point is, if you think about the whole 'Kunoichi' phenomenon, how women could actually work as servants and other 'non-suspicious' elements, and thus smoothly flow through the otherwise impenetrable walls of societal discourse and flocks of important people, and how they can retain trivial and mundane details, whereas men focus on the big picture and important points, THAT power could be so easily and well shown by movies, TV shows and cartoons.

Instead of doing the typical 'strong woman beats up men for DARING to feel anything sexual - HOW DARE men have sexuality!1'-misandrytrope to show how strong and powerful a woman is, I would be more impressed seeing women seducing men and that way extracting secrets, poisoning men's drinks while flirting with them, eavesdropping on men while seemingly just being a good maid or a hostess or whatnot.

The possibilities of these feminine, subtle but powerful expressions of strength are endless, and yet all we get is a 'female version of a big muscle'.

You can't just take what works for a man and then make a female version of that. That's why She-Hulk is a boring character, and she has to do something -extra- even in the comics to stay interesting and relevant, like breaking the fourth wall. Titania got beaten up by Spider-Man in Secret Wars (they would NEVER do that nowadays even in a comedy movie, but it's the funniest thing I have ever seen in a comic), and that just goes to show that a strong woman is just boring.

A strong man can be interesting, because it's a natural extension of what men strive to be and can be anyway. A strong woman seems a bit off, it's not a natural extension, but more like going the OPPOSITE direction from nature.

[–] kwestmo (4385) 2 years ago

stop making sense

[–] avortac4 (3743) 2 years ago

Cesar Millan has often said, 'never go against mother nature'.

Yet we have She-Hulk, Titania, Supergirl (why not SuperWOMAN? Why are they ALWAYS so afraid to use the word 'woman'? Why 'She-Hulk' instead of something like 'Hulkess' or 'Hulkette'?), you name it. They just don't get it.

I am tired of seeing the SAME, exact character, but slightly smaller body, longer hair and more attitude and misandry.

My point is exactly why this movie is such a mess. It's easy to write a 'Superman' story; a strong, powerful man rescues weak people from the tyranny of some kind of villain. It writes itself.

But what do you do with a woman? The problem is, it has to offer something different than the 'strong man', or there wouldn't be any reason to even make that gender switch, if it's just going to be exactly the same, now is there?

However, by making the strong woman a copy of the strong man, they lose so many possibilities they could otherwise have. You can't just have a strong woman save weak people, because it would feel somehow 'wrong' for a woman to have to rescue some icky and yucky man, ecch. Men are always the worker drones, the robots, the cannon fodder and the nameless henchmen in stories.

Women are always pedestalized and valuable prizes that have to be treated with silk gloves. So what is a woman heroine to do, that would be different than what a man would do, but still show off her physical power,... ? It's a dilemma, moviemakers haven't been able to solve it, because they are going away from the nurturing, gossiping and stealth women would be so good at. Women could manipulate men so easily, but instead, they just physically beat them up.

Why can't women's strength be psychological? Women always win arguments against men. This is not coincidence. Men have physical power, which is USELESS against women in the modern world, because if you hit a woman, you will face DIRE consequences, and women don't even have to lift a finger, because simps are everywhere.

[–] avortac4 (3743) 2 years ago

But there are no simps for men. Hence, you can do anything to a man, and people will just think it's funny.

Superman takes quite a lot of pain and beatings in the movies, cartoons and comics. But a Supergirl can't take a punch, because how dare anyone punch a woman!

This makes it a very strange 'hero', because she's supposed to be powerful, but not powerful enough to take punches? She's supposed to rescue and save people, but this would make her a typical worker drone that men usually are. A woman punching something really hard is just boring, because we've already seen a man do that.

We should be able to expect woman to give us a feat of strength we haven't seen men do. They should be able to use seduction, flirtation, social-sexual power, even 'sleeping with the enemy' to gain some kind of advantage for the common good. They could be spies, kunoichi, psychological mind game masters and such, they wouldn't have to do acrobatics and punch people in the face, for crying out loud.

Why are women's ACTUAL strengths never seen in movies or cartoons? Why is She-Ra just another muscle-bound, physically strong entity?

Why is everything si physical anyway in movies? Even in the old, 'The Neverending Story', Autreyu doesn't pass the first gate because he ACTUALLY succeeds in doing what the rules say he should, but because he PHYSICALLY RUNS VERY FAST.

This is so mundane and banal, when it could've been something so much more interesting. Too often have I watched a movie, expecting something a bit more interesting, but then it all crumbles down because it's just 'physical'. Everything is SO physical, even if someone 'mind controls' someone, it's somehow done in a physical way.

I don't know if it's lack of thinking, understanding just HOW different the genders and powers endowed with each gender are, or just not caring about anything except money, but they just do a lazy 'copypaste' instead of really thinking how they could make a 'female version of Superman'.

[–] avortac4 (3743) 2 years ago

Just making a physically strong woman that can fly doesn't cut it. THIS is why this movie failed. It makes no sense, because the woman can't have a typical 'male story', but they couldn't figure out what to make a woman do in a movie, because she can't have crude fistfights or other typically 'male' thing. So what do they make her do? After watching this movie a few times, I still don't really have a clue.

She.. destroys .. a .. witch?!

Think what a REAL Superwoman could do. A Superman is just a man, whose natural strengths have been boosted to the extreme, and then some weird crap has been added, like eye beams and flying.

So what would a Superwoman look like that actually had a woman's natural strengths boosted? She would be even MORE nurturing, more adept at social interactions, even better at manipulation and gaslighting, even better at informational work and social engineering (gossiping), and so on. She wouldn't be physically strong, but BOY, would she be strong in so many other ways, especially social ones.

The power she would have over men would be beyond mere mesmerizing or even hypnotizing ability, she could make masses of men fall in love with her, and she could be bubbly and flirty with them and they would do her bidding. They would never figure out she doesn't really love them - she actually despises the losers she can control so easily. Sound familiar? This happens in every single webcam site.

This happened in human history for thousands and yet thousands of years.

Why can't stories take this power into account in their stories and build a REAL SUPERWOMAN instead of some muscule-bound, misandristic jerk that tries to simply mimic physically strong men? IT'S BORING, and it doesn't work!