Why Do We Equate Female Empowerment With Violence?
My husband and I are part-way through watching Ken Burns’ documentary, The War. It makes use of some of the most graphic photography and video footage from the battles of World War II. These are not the approved-for-public images of the flag being raised at Iwo Jima, or American tanks rolling into liberated Paris. Here we see war as it truly is: the charred bodies and the unburied dead, the starvation and misery, the awakened brutality of men for whom killing has passed from the unthinkable to the mundane. It is awful to behold. But as these images played in front of me, the thought that kept coming back to me was: what did you expect? What did you expect it to look like when men come together for the sole purpose of killing each other?
War is ugly. Killing is ugly. Heroism and personal sacrifice should be honored, but we should never dignify even necessary violence by celebrating it.
With all this in mind, I come back to the present. Carrie Fisher, best known for her portrayal as the much-beloved Princess Leia, passed away last week. Like every other Star Wars fan on the planet, I was shocked and saddened. As I took the internet to share in the reactions and eulogies, I noticed a troubling phenomenon: many women (myself included), see Leia as being a strong, powerful female character, but for a lot of these women, this perception is based primarily on moments in which Leia proves herself to be (pardon the expression) “bad-ass”. Grabbing the blaster from Luke and picking off storm troopers to cover him before the swing across the bridge. Strangling Jabba the Hutt to death with a chain. The fact that in the new series she has been “promoted” from Princess to General. The common thread in all of these is violence. Not much mention is made of Leia’s willingness to put herself in conspicuous danger by carrying the stolen Death Star plans on board her ship, risking capture and death. I haven’t heard anyone bring up that she had the fortitude to keep the Rebel base a secret even under torture and the threat of execution. From the dialogue between Vader and Tarkin it is clear that no personal sacrifice would have been too much for Leia — that is why they change their methods by threatening to destroy her home planet. She is clearly a person who has counted the cost of joining the Rebellion long before “the boys” (Luke and Han) even show up, and she never, in the entire trilogy, looks back. All this seems to be forgotten beneath our weird fixation with the image of a woman with a gun, as if the only thing that she can do to prove herself is to shoot somebody.
Although I am all in favor of women owning and knowing their way around a firearm, I find it disturbing that, although most of us would say we want to leave the glorification of war and violence in the past, we are for some reason willing to make an exception when it comes to women. For women, we equate empowerment with the power to do harm.
Even though Star Wars is a movie that (as the title suggests) centers around a galactic war, this idea that glory is synonymous with violence is one that it actually condemns. When Luke tells Yoda he is looking for “a great warrior”, Yoda answers: “Great warrior! H’mph. Wars not make one great.”
Heroism has to do with sacrifice, not violence. If you think that all it takes to be a “strong woman” (or a strong person) is toting a blaster and mowing down the enemy, may I humbly suggest that perhaps you have missed the point of Star Wars.
