In Defense of Female Superheroes

Not because I am one, mind. Though with a to-do list including board exams, cross-country moving plans, pie experiments, and knitting projects, I rather wish I were. As an update, the needles of late have contained the remnants of Master of Lightning yarn, which have come together to form Comet Tail (pictured to right). I'm working on a Theory of Everything in knit form--kidding! Though the concept does sound intriguing if I decide to obtain more of that gorgeous colorway of Carlton Alpaca Divine.

The kitchen has been home to Mocha Meringue Pie, version 1.0 (pictured below). I wanted to bring together a chocolate cream pie with an espresso kick and a foamy "latte" top, but tweaking the ingredients for simplicity, lightness, and doneness of eggs (I love chocolate mousse and eggnog but get a slight case of the willies at the uncooked egg yolks often called for in the recipes) is still a work in progress. Version 1.0 was dense, dark, and very sweet, almost sinful, but not huge on simplicity and a bit finicky in terms of cooking time/temperature, so we shall have to see where version 2.0 brings us.

Speaking of Unified Theory, in writing project news I'd love to pull together a poetry collection called "A Theory of Space and Time," because I am a nerd with a rather unhealthy fascination with cosmology, and therefore have been eagerly following the confirmation of gravitational waves and Einstein's theories of gravitational fields warping space-time. No easy task, mind, for someone who is at best borderline dyslexic and at worst just plain inept at mathematical theory (we won't even discuss my brief doomed foray into computer programming). Well, it's only a field populated and popularized by the likes of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. It's hardly rocket science. Oh, wait.

Though that does bring me to my soapbox of where all the women at. I did just see "Wonder Woman" last night, and as the lights came up in the movie theater my vociferous opinion was "that was way better than it needed to be." Any woman reading this is probably like "well, duh, welcome to being a woman!" But, well, even us nerd girls aren't necessarily used to representation debates, or is it especially us nerd girls?

In truth, the sci-fi/fantasy/comic book world can be a daunting place to be a woman technically as well as socially. As an outsider I've noticed some of its major tenets revolve around the concept of "world-building," a grueling set of internal consistency principles grounded in areas that, by a fortuitous combination of nature and nurture, men tend to excel at far more often than women do. An example is the Tolkien vs Rowling debate, where Tokien's four races inhabit their own continent and speak their own languages whereas Rowling's witches and wizards mingle within existing nations and cultures. In geek culture, this difference can be paramount: is it sheer laziness that dictates silly wand flourishes and Latin incantations? Or, gasp, is it that the authors' intentions are different?

A typical (sorry, mostly male!) comic book audience's criticisms of "Wonder Woman" might be as follows. Diana's backstory is scantly sketched at best and unravels slowly and in layers and is often deliberately obscured "in the service of the plot." She's never punished for her idealism. She's consistently allowed to outshine her male companions. The bad guys are stock characters...with one notable exception. The attempt to incorporate diverse characters is heavy-handed. The plot is, by normal comic standards, too darn straightforward.

I would argue those points are exactly where it shines.

In an odd departure from superhero origin movie canon, Diana's origin/parentage/purpose for being is less important than the woman she evolves into. Her idealism doesn't lose to the cowardice and the machismo of the menfolk, but nor does it outweigh her companions' scrappy courage: the war of ideas is allowed a stalemate, and her conclusion that men after all possess both light and dark is of course messier than expected but actually refreshingly complex. She does get to be both prettier and more badass than her ragtag team of spy boys, but the film never reduces men to the same degree that your typical popcorn film reduces women, to the roles of eye candy, sex toy, and crone. The Amazons' conclusion that men are necessary for reproduction but superfluous for pleasure doesn't stop Diana and Steve from engaging in...whatever it is they engage in within the confines of a bedroom in that besieged Eastern European village, and if the dashing captain isn't a match for her physical prowess he turns out to be a worthy partner mentally and emotionally. As for those stock character bad guys, how come the head chemist responsible for all that mayhem is a brilliant woman and, though obviously disfigured, not (at least in my reading of her portrayal) a terribly ugly one? And don't tell me Ares is who and what you thought he was. In terms of diversity, is Samir's comment that "I wanted to be an actor but there's no roles for someone like me" a knowing dig at Hollywood? Of course. But does he then go on to use his acting chops and racial stereotype in the most hilarious and effective way possible? Also yes. And as for the straightforwardness of the plot, it's actually a relief not to have to follow every twist and turn of 11-dimensional chess that seems to be a dictate of intellectual male entertainment. After all, a story built on ideas, characters, and emotions rather than dicta can be messy--as we women are told we are--all on its own. But if you don't mind the messiness of walking two moons in another man's moccasins, it pays its own dividends. Just...be prepared to have to womansplain it a bit.

Well, that concludes today's episode of "In Defense of Female Moviegoers" (no, I don't intend to make this a recurring theme, although I do have some perhaps unpopular opinions on some of the other sci-fi/fantasy entertainments I've actually enjoyed over the past half-year, i.e. "Arrival," "Rogue One," "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them," "Beauty and the Beast," and possibly others I can't think of at the moment). In terms of raising the next generation of female badasses, I will one day post a pattern for these billed "Owl and Pussycat" caps (pictured below). Just, maybe, after I've moved is all.