There’s an issue I have noticed in studying history and being a woman in the world today: the term “girlboss.” In passing or jokes, I don’t necessarily have a problem with the word. I’d be a liar if I claimed that I’ve never said that I or anybody else is a girlboss for literally making a single important phone call. Where my problem comes is in discussions of real women that existed and made major progress for women of their time as well as women in the media that represent a larger message to the public on how women should be viewed. It is all too common for women that furthered their position against society’s pressure to remain subservient to be reduced just to “feminist icons” and “girlbosses” with little acknowledgement of the wrongful actions they did to reach that elevated status. In turn, that reduction only furthers the stereotypes that women are inherently morally superior and entirely incapable of causing harm and cruelty.
The Historical Villainesses
This societal problem is incredibly prevalent in spheres of historians discussing the women in the past that rose up against societal expectations. Women like Mary Tudor, for example, are very often remembered for ruling as queen in her own right. They are seen only for their progress for their sex with no acknowledgement of the morally neglectful things they did to achieve that progress. Articles cite women like Cleopatra and Catherine Medici as “bad girls of history.” Literally what? Cleopatra killed her siblings in order to secure the throne! Catherine Medici was instrumental in orchestrating the St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre! These women were not “bad girls.” They were women that did morally reprehensible things in attempts to better their own station. Sure, Cleopatra was a female ruler in a place in time where it was harder for a woman to become sole ruler of a nation, but that does not erase the objectively bad things she did. Catherine Medici gained respect in a world where it was difficult for a woman to be seen by the male rulers around her, but she also ruthlessly had thousands of people killed for their religious beliefs. Plenty of female rulers did horrible things to gain their status, yet somehow their actions are reduced to “bad girls?” It is simply baffling to me how often women are described as “ruthless” in their journey to power when people are trying to prove their impressiveness. For their male counterparts, ruthless is a bad thing to be called, so why is it that the women are given leniency?
During the Second World War, there were women that jumped at opportunities to spew hateful vitriol in the press for the sake of their own professional gain as journalists. Did they make moves for their careers that previously were relatively unheard of for women? Yes. Did they also say and do horrible things that are in no way redeemable? Also yes. Two things very much can be true at once.
The Villainesses of the media
This phenomenon of women who do bad things being ignored for the sake of uplifting their actions as women is not restrained to the real world. Much like the cases above, writers rooms and authors circles are full of an unusual fear of an unredeemable woman in media. People aren’t shying away from writing male characters that have literally nothing to justify their actions. So why is it that women always need something to be the tragic reason that they are the way they are. Don’t get me wrong, I think that all characters should have complex origins and developed personalities to be well written at all. However, there is a trend I’ve noticed of even when the male counterparts have justifiable reasons for their actions, audiences read them as nuanced but irredeemable. Female characters with similar or identical circumstances are not only redeemed by audiences but infantilized as unable to have done those horrible things because “she’s so innocent.” I spent a week binging the show Yellowjackets and it’s an especially prevalent concept in that audience. One of the characters, Shauna Shipman, unfortunately lost her best friend and baby while trapped in the wilderness after her soccer team’s plane crashed. In the final season she organizes a literal hunting party and makes a “tough break” joke to her teammate that is about to actually die. She isn’t a good person but audiences refuse to see that and I really feel that if she had been a man, the total acceptance of her actions wouldn’t exist to nearly the same extent.
So why is this wrong?
On the surface, this does not seem like a huge deal. Women are being uplifted aren’t they? They’re being highlighted for the actions of progress they took or represented. This is a good thing, right? Technically, yes, but it ignores a very major issue within society at large. Women are humans. Sometimes, women, being human, say and do irredeemable things. Women, just like men, are very capable of being bad people because they are people. It doesn’t matter if you’re reducing a woman to an object that is wholly “good” because you are still reducing that woman to an object. Not only that, but descriptions like “girl boss” and “bad girls of history” ignore the fact that these are adults. They aren’t little girls that had no idea what they were doing when they did it. Many of the women I discussed earlier made purposeful decisions to kill, have people killed, or manipulate others for their own gain and that needs to be understood in conjunction with the progress they made for women.
The infantilization and objectification of women as pure and incapable of violence does not create a world in which women are pure and incapable of violence. It just creates a world where women are not human. This doesn’t even include the fact that the ideal woman being perfect and without moral issues means that when people really do believe a woman did a bad thing, her baseline is so much higher than a man. Her figurative “bar” is dropping from space instead of the clouds. To get the same location of moral neglect as a man, she covers a lot more distance. It’s a lose-lose situation and it stems from the “ideal” woman being nothing but an object for men to look up to.
This isn’t only in history and the media either. It’s happening every day in elementary school classrooms when disruptive little boys are sat next to the girls because it will “make them behave.” In my elementary school, I had a teacher get so fed up with boys wandering the hallways that she would assign girls to escort them to where they were supposed to be. I loved that teacher and still do, but that action gave me and I’m sure other girls the idea that they were supposed to be better than the boys instead of behaving in class because we are human. Likewise, it teaches little boys that girls are supposed to be used as an example of behavior standards instead of simply other students in the same classroom. If we, as a society, continue to treat women as nothing but a standard for men to look up to, we reduce them to nothing but a way for men to judge their own actions off of and justify themselves because they’ve been told their whole lives that women are going to be better people than them. In that case, it doesn’t matter the awful things they do because it is expected for them to do it.