There’s a new version of The Three Musketeers and from what I can tell from the trailer playing on television there are actually four musketeers and none of them ever use a musket. Okay, that’s the way the story’s been told but once again the “damsel in distress” kicks butt and takes names. I suppose it started with Princess Leia who had guts and gumption but other than strangling Jaba the Hutt to death wasn’t exactly a Kung Fu master.
It always annoyed me when Fay Wray and the countless ingenues in her ilk that when threatened could only scream. They couldn’t even run away more than a couple of yards without twisting an ankle and falling helplessly to the ground, screaming. These professional victims couldn’t even hide as they couldn’t stop screaming. Leia was a breath of fresh air at the time and Ellen Ripley who followed in 1979 in Alien really established the template for the modern heroine. Ripley, who at first seemed too cowardly to go off regulations to allow the alien infected John Hurt back on board their ship, proved to have been the sensible one and through her ingenuity and bravery ended up being the only one to survive. Since Ripley we’ve seen dozen of sword / machine gun / martial arts wielding women saving the day or at least being an equal hero to the male lead. The third remake of The Thing has also been rewritten so that the star is now a female who undoubtedly will have to “man up” in order to survive to the end credits.
It’s not the fact that most of these ladies would not be able to lift heavy automatic weapons or Samurai swords let alone be able to aim or use these weapons against vastly superior physical beings and numbers that bother me, and it’s not that I mind the message to little girls that they shouldn’t and really can’t rely on a man to save them any more, but rather the effects these films have on boys. Where is the incentive to be a hero, to be brave and to step up to a challenge if there is no girl that’s going to be impressed? Why risk your life to save someone who will just snap back at you that she could save herself, thank you very much? Women these days complain that chivalry is dead and don’t realize that it was some woman with a sword or gun that killed it. Of course, women usually don’t make these kind of films, men do and they do it for a predominantly young male audience so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe these films are not meant to brainwash young girls into self sufficiency but really to program young boys to stand aside and let the ladies take over. If you’ve seen the latest statistics regarding college enrollment or unemployment roles then it seems the switch over to a matriarchal society is well under way.
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