Reading through the first few paragraphs, I didn't think you'd end up talking about women's roles in media. This actually caught my attention since I'm taking a class regarding women in history this semester.
I'm not even wondering anymore how women don't often get the kickass, awesomesauce roles that men had ALWAYS got to bag throughout the history of movie industry. Most of the world had been living (and still does) within a patriarchal society since ancient times, and in them women are made to be the less important sex that we have been deemed invisible in history.
Just read the history books we have now. There are so few women mentioned in them you'd be led to conclude that women must have wombs a hundred times bigger than their body size such that they can beget thousands of male children with one or two females only, which would explain the scarcity of females and the overwhelming presence of males in recorded history.
What's annoying, we're led to believe that women do nothing but watch while all those macho men single handedly make history as conquering heroes, national liberators, victorious generals, benevolent monarchs, wise lawgivers, etc.
Majority of text where women are mentioned only relate how their roles are to be assistants to men in history-making, where the greatest contributions they've given was using their feminine charm to ferret secrets from enemies. A few women though, on rare occasions, make history somehow. And that's because they're not truly women in the first place, but men in women's bodies. One example I think of is Joan of Arc who had to pretend she was a man to lead an army.
There are just so many documents in history that trivialize women it's frustrating. Plutarch, an ancient Greek historian, saw women as baby factories. He actually wrote:
(A)n honest man who had love for a married woman upon account of her modesty and the well-favouredness of her children, might, without formality, beg her company of her husband, that he might raise, as it were, from this plot of good ground, worthy and well-allied children for himself. And indeed, Lycurgus was of a persuasion that children were not so much the property of their parents as the whole commonwealth, and, therefore, would not have his citizens begot by the first-comers, but by the best men that could be found; the laws of other nations seemed to him very absurd and inconsistent, where people would be so solicitous for their dogs and horses as to exert interest and to pay money to procure fine breeding, and yet kept their wives shut up, to be made mothers only by themselves, who might be foolish, infirm, or diseased; as if it were not apparent that children of a bad breed would prove their bad qualities first upon those who kept and were rearing them, and well-born children, in like manner, their good qualities.
I'm sorry if this suddenly turned out into a rant/mini lecture, eheh. What I wanted to say was, this has been a man's world for too long. I'm not saying that it's every man's fault that movies/games with male protagonists are more favored than those with female ones. Sometimes, a female character wouldn't even get famous if she's not depicted as sexy. It sucks.
PS. Have you tried playing "Ib" before? It's a horror game for the PC, but the main character's a 9 year old girl. It's actually a nice game if you're looking for badass female protagonists, and it's quite funny how her male companion's a twenty year old
sissy softie. If you don't mind a lot of scares and puzzles, I think it's a game worth trying out.
by Traverse on July 15th, 2013, 10:05 pm 
