In an article titled “Tiny but Tough: The Newly Empowered Petites,” Maria Ricapito of the NY Times details how petite women are “shattering stereotypes” by shooting people, planting bombs and beating people up. Needless to say, their targets are overwhelmingly men.
Ricapito chalks it up to male fantasy:
The violent femme, of course, is an enduring male fantasy, a Lolita who just can’t help herself around a gun. She also does double duty as a symbol of Grrrl power, particularly when she appears in the form of cute-as-a-button crime fighters like the PowerPuff Girls (cartoon kindergartners whose motto was “Saving the world before bedtime”).
However, she lets slip that women such as herself cherish the idea as well:
It’s anybody’s guess why these anti-archetypes are striking a chord. Perhaps Americans feel powerless in an era of gushing oil, ongoing wars and a slippery economy, and want to believe that the little people can vanquish the big bad guys. If so, it might be a good sign for the small-stature Elena Kagan, who is, after all, said to wield a mean gavel.
I’d say that the ass-kicking babe is getting kind of worn-out. The theme is overdone these days, and because it no longer offers anything new it no longer feels edgy and risquée. I’m not even sure that it is much of a male fantasy any longer, especially since more men must be noticing that the real women around them are increasingly aggressive in a rather distasteful manner. When so many men have a female HR manager breathing down their neck, I wonder whether they find the idea of being targeted by an aggressive woman all that alluring.
I remember watching Hong Kong movies back in the early 90s, when this violent femme trend was in its infancy here in the US. In the Chinese kung fu flicks, women did a lot of the fighting. Not only were they kicking ass, but getting their ass kicked as well. There were even a number of jokes that incorporated women getting kicked between the legs, falling flat on their faces, being beaten, etc. I wonder whether the Hong Kong movie industry had any influence on the kick ass babe phenomenon here in the US. I suspect it did, but rather than adopt the full range of violence found in Chinese movies it was adapted to American feminist sensibility and the women were portrayed as eternal victors over bad men.
Today, the genre seems kind of flat. There’s no balance to it, it isn’t funny, and, as the author of the NY Times article suggests, it’s heavily politicized.
In short, this stuff is starting to look a lot like ham-fisted propaganda of the Soviet sort.
