The More I Watched "Killing Eve" the Less I Liked It
Should we celebrate equal opportunities for female assassins?
As a girl, I read Nancy Drew's books nonstop.
I wanted to be like this young, charismatic sleuth—clever, outspoken, and a determined fighter for justice. Those books planted feminist roots firmly in my heart. They also birthed my love for well-done murder mysteries and international spy thrillers.
During that era, women rarely played lead roles in television mysteries or big-screen spy thrillers as detectives, secret agents, or assassins.
Women were often cast as facsimiles of Bond girls, the voluptuous love interests of the ultra-masculine MI6 agent. Several had sexual puns like Holly Goodhead, Honey Ryder, and Pussy Galore assigned as their names—a tactic borrowed from the low-budget sexploitation genre.
Admittedly, exceptions occurred, but they were not the rule.
Flash forward, and it now seems commonplace for women to be violent aggressors in television and films, as we see in Killing Eve.
Is that a step forward for gender equality?
