My Problem With Useless Females

"A Dissection of Passive vs. Active Roles"

Okay. So. I'm here to talk about what is, for me, a very painful subject; that is, the definition of a 'worthwhile' female character. I'm not going to use 'strong' as an adjective here - that's a word that's been done to death, and creates more debates than it solves, because it creates a false expectation of what a 'good' female character implies (with most people, it's 'a female that acts like a man', and that opens a whole can of gender-bias worms on its own).

No, my problem is less with 'weak' females and more with 'useless' females.

I'm assuming that everyone in their lifetime, male or female, has seen at least one movie or TV show aimed at a male audience. I am also thus assuming that most people, having probably seen several, is intimately familiar with the female characters who show up in those. Aside from a few select sub-categories of works where the entire cast is male (shows or movies taking place in all-male institutions like boarding schools or the military before women were allowed and all women are minor characters if they have characters at all, or shows, usually aimed at females, where the all-male cast is the selling point - yes, that very specific subgenre known as Boys' Love or yaoi, plus Free! Iwatobi Swim Club, if you don't count that in the former group) most shows will have at least one female cast member. Looking up the Smurfette Principle on TVTropes, you'll be guided into realizing that the vast majority of them just have one.

What I'm here to talk to you about is how they manage to screw her up.

Recently, I had the pleasure of watching a very good buddy-cop movie starring Will Smith. I'm going to assume that every human being at least knows what that is, or is at least capable of googling the term. The movie is called Bad Boys and if you like action comedies, and buddy cop movies, I highly recommend it. Or I would, except.... for her.

The average female in a work aimed at males is generally... not very intelligent. She's usually exceptionally beautiful, even if the work states she isn't (although in that case, she's generally just averagely beautiful) and she usually wears clothing that shows off her assets. I don't really have a problem with any of that.

My problem with the female in Bad Boys is that she's not just stupid - she's RIDICULOUSLY stupid. In fact, the only bearing she has at all on the plot is to do stupid shit to get the main characters in even more trouble. Aware that there is a group of people trying to kill her, she seems to go out of her way to present herself as a target, make it harder for the main characters to help her, and I don't think she'd be any easier to take advantage of if she had walked out on the street with a bright red sign strapped to her saying "I'M THE WITNESS YOU WANT TO KILL, SHOOT ME IN THE HEAD" in all caps.

She insists on only talking to a single person. She's smart enough to figure out that the guy she's talking to is actually his partner about halfway through the movie, but insists on coming along on stakeouts and then complains there's nothing to do. When the main characters decide to make their move, she insists on follwoing them, without a weapon, into the zone of fire so often that they eventually have to handcuff her to the wheel of their police car. She steals a gun from one of them and has the bright idea to track down the leader of a drug cartel, who has been trying to kill her the whole length of the movie, in his own nightclub, and tell him to his face that she wants to kill him, and proceeds to attempt to do so, only to somehow survive because unfortunately, the main characters need her in order to make their case against this guy. She insists on accompanyiing them to survey the bad guys, insists on getting a better look at them while hiding behind a fecne, and then proceeds to STAND UP VISIBLY TO LOOK, giving away the rest of the characters' cover.

Honestly, she contributes about as much to the story as Will Smith's partner's dog when it all comes down to it. Her purpose for existing, being the sole witness they need to protect, could have been easily served by a photograph that they needed to keep the main villain from getting a hold of, with a lot less headache for the main characters.

Needless to say, this is a female character done WRONG. And, to be honest, how many times has this exact dumb female showed up in a movie you're trying to watch, causing you to facepalm every five minutes with their antics? To be honest, I think I would've preferred a traditional damsel in distress. At least she would have had a reason for existing.

The real kicker lies here in the difference between active and passive story roles - and the total lack of any of them. This was a character who was designed to have a passive level of ability. Traditional female. Cook. Clean. Sex. Take care of the menfolk. She was forcing herself into an active story position and causing problems. A story position where there was no room at all for her to exist.

Let's take another character, in almost the exact same genre, in almost the exact same position: the chick from Men in Black.

If you get right down to it, despite all the aliens and the monsters and everything, Men in Black is an odd-couple buddy-cop movie (again starring Will Smith - what is it with him and these movies?). You've got two partners and a chick Fighting Crime (even if it's alien crime) in a humorous action setting. And yet.... for some reason, the chick there didn't offend me as much as the chick in Bad Boys. Sure, she had a lot less screen time, did a whole lot less, spoke a whole lot less.... but when she was onscreen, she was doing stuff that mattered. It's been a while since I've seen MiB, but I don't recall her doing anything that dramatically tripped up the MiB agents and she did a whole hell of a lot to help them, even in indirect ways. She never (to my remembrance) got into a firefight with the aliens, but she didn't have to.

Passive character. But a useful one.

A lot of feminists (and I use the term loosely, to include the feminists that make most people - including other feminists - want to gouge their eyes and ears out with soap until the pain stops) will tell you that only a female character who has an active role can be considered a good female character, because passive roles are 'useless'. Mostly, this goes back to the idea that traditionally men have reserved active roles for themselves and forced females into submissive or passive roles. Thus, any female taking a traditional gender role is in fact 'useless' and any female taking a non-traditional gender role is 'useful'. While this does open up the can of worms I mentioned earlier in my post, about worth assigned to different roles and gender studies etc., I'm not going to get into that. I'm just going to look at characters in passive and active roles.

You see, here's the fallacy of that logic: by that logic, the only 'worthwhile' character in a film about a space shuttle launch is the astronaut inside. By that logic, the only 'worthwhile' character in a film about a company is the CEO. The only 'worthwhile' character in The Hunt for Red October is Sean Connery.

These are the 'active' charactrs. They're the ones you see 'doing' things and being 'proactive' in a circumstance. They go out, they fight the bad guys, they get the treasure (and often, The Girl, if they're a man) and they come home victorious to their spouses, significant others, or family members (which can be problematic if they got The Girl and their wife finds out, see Marvel's Thor for Sif's plainly disapproving reaction). It's true that they're the most visible characters... but are they the most useful?

Let's dissect some other movies for a moment, and then we'll move on to Anime.

A lot of people complain about the female character in the Van Helsing movie. (Actually, a lot of people complain about the Van Helsing movie in general, but whether it was a Really Great Movie or not - pro tip, it wasn't - it was still fun to watch and I enjoyed it so we're talking about it) She is, again, supposedly an active character role - I say supposedly, because examing what she actually DOES in the movie, it's not really a whole lot compared to Van Helsing, but we'll get there - and to be honest, she goes out and attempts to fight monsters alongside the male, title character with the best of them. In practice, she serves most often as the movie's eye candy, and she falls prey to every horror-movie cliche in the book (Gods, woman, look UP! UP!) but in the end, she's actually done some fairly plot-critical things. Useful? Debatable. I mean, it probably wouldn't have been as emotionally dramatic if the friar dude had delivered that last syriingeful of cure to Van Helsing (though it might have; I'm sure some shipping communities are thinking hard right now >.>) but story-wise, it still could have happened. If she'd been written out of the plot, some other poor villager could have delivered most of her lines and Van Helsing wouldn't be much different, other than the lack of a suitably dramatic/tragic love interest, and we might've been spared her mediocre-at-best line delivery. On the Usefulness Scale, I'd probably give her a four. She's definitely better than the Bad Boys chick who wasn't even the love interest and did more to hurt than help.

And now, let's look at some passive roles.

Anybody remember classic Scooby Doo? I'm too young to really 'remember' but I've seen some episodes. You know Danger Prone Daphne, right?

Ahhh, here's the traditional 'passive female' role that so-called Feminists like to get all upset about. Daphne's always accidentally tripping over the right lever, falling into the hands of the bad guys, occasionally making a nuisance of herself, and just generally playing the stereotypical female for Fred to rescue and Shaggy to realize is out of his nerdy '70's bell-bottoms-and-stubble league. Useful? Eh, kind of. Likeable? Yes. To be honest, though, I'd say most of the Scooby cast is less than useful, so we can give her a slide. They all do their fair share of stumbling over things, and Fred's plans never work. The only USEFUL character in the entire show is Velma (or Scooby) and she's also a female. She's an active female and I suppose would serve to lend credence to 'active is better' as far as role-wise go, but if you think about it, that's one of the few shows where the main, viewpoint character is more 'passive' than 'active'. The real 'active' character on the show is Fred, and again, his plans never work. He tends to get himself in trouble more often than anything.

So now lets look deliberately at some 'passive' female characters, and for this, we're heading straight to anime. Specifically, my favorite anime - Ghost Hunt.

The main character of Ghost Hunt is one Mai Taniyama. Sucked into the whole ghost-hunting business by a ridiculously handsome, yet ridiculously arrogant young man by the name of Kazuya Shibuya (nicknamed by Mai "Naru", short for "narcissist"), Mai ends up working essentially as a gofer for Shibuya Psychic Research, Naru's company.

Oh gods, you think. Another rom-com character who can't do anything for herself.

Actually... not really. Even though Mai's efforts at becoming an 'active' character have a tendency to end in dramatic failure (usually NOT played for laughs, in a show that's more horror than romance), the show goes out of its way to show that Mai's talents lay in other areas. Unlike Monk, John, or Ayako, other members of the team that helps SPR out with their cases, Mai doesn't perform exorcisms and doesn't learn any sort of warding magic or self-defense until a much later case. And yet, Mai finds several ways to prove herself integral not only to the charactrs, but the plot of each case as well. Though she doesn't realize they're any form of actual psychic ability on her part until much later, Mai has dreams that often offer surprising insight into each and every case, so much so that the rest of SPR relies on her ability several times. She's a very personable girl and often helps the team by easing the fears and hearts of the victims of each haunting, and her ability with children and to make intuitive, if not logical, leaps of connection between unrelated points often helps the others tremendously.

Is she what most people would consider a 'strong' female character? Well, she's certainly strong-willed, but she has no magic skills. Compared to the rest of the cast, she's a supernatural featherweight. She can't drive out ghosts and often doesn't confront hauntings directly - and when she does, she's usually a victim. She gets in trouble a lot more than most people would consider a good female character having happen to them, and yet I could argue she's one of the most objectively useful people on the SPR team. Score one for the passive-character side.

If more shows and movies used characters like Mai, I think people would have a lot less problems with female characters as a whole. Passive and active roles so far have pretty much an even track record of good and bad portrayals of females, and I think we need to stop paying a little less attention to making srue there's an active female in every movie, and more attention to making sure that even the passive ones are done correctly. Another example, much less long-winded, is the character of Sakura from the Naruto anime - many people complain that she's useless, but every so often she proves that she's just as badass as everyone else, just in a different way. Unfortunately, the author of the series seems to have no  clue what to do with a passive badass, and so rather than using her skills, Sakura kind of just waits around patiently, passively watching things happen and getting her ass beat up to prove she's not an active character, and generally being useless until, in a flash of author inspiration, she shows up with another reason why she's actually awesome.

Oftentimes, a 'useless' female is just a female the author obviously doesn't know what to do with. They exist in the story without a purpose and become so bad, such a load on the narrative and/or the other characters, that you could probably tell a much better, and much less sexist story, without any females at all.

But, I suppose the final topping on this little cake (as it should be) is the large body of work left behind by the Bard of Avon, one William Shakespeare.

Historians and activists alike crow about his incredibly well-written female characters, from Prospero's daughter in The Tempest to Lady MacBeth, in the Scottish play. Even Ophelia, as frail and weak as she was, and as un-feminist, is praised for her well-written dialogue and speeches and her tragic story. Many of these characters have passive roles, but one could hardly call them useless - perhaps Ophelia, poor Ophelia, might be called useless, but her role in the play is much larger than some concrete 'use'. Not a single character in Shakespeare is wasted, and we can all learn a lot from what he has to teach us.

So think on it, the next time you watch a movie or a TV show - how useful are the females? What role do they serve in the greater plot? The smaller one? Is their role a passive one, or an active one - and does it really matter either way?