Strong Enough for a Man, Made for a Woman?

So, about strong women in fiction. And I don’t mean strong only in this sense.

This past month, I had the opportunity to work with U of T’s Drama Centre on a production as a historical consultant and a co-lighting-designer. While doing one of the many tasks that fall to the latter with my co-designer, we happened to start talking about TV shows and strong female characters. He mentioned an interesting theory: often, characters whom people refer to as “strong women” are considered strong only because they’re women. That is, if you imagine a male character behaving in the exact same way or saying the exact same things, you wouldn’t think of him as a strong character at all. Because writers have a different set of expectations for women, most really strong female characters are the ones who were originally supposed to be male but for one reason or another got gender-swapped before production.

I thought it was an intriguing if sad idea but didn’t really consider it until I started re-watching/regular watching The X Files.

I recently bought seasons 1 through 7* on DVD, since they were only $20 a pop. As yet, I’ve managed only as far as the third episode, due to lack of time, but even watching those, it struck me that, for a “strong female character” (a quick Google search for “scully strong female” gets a couple hundred thousand hits), Scully is awfully teary and vulnerable.

Now, a quick caveat before I get excommunicated for that heresy: I like Scully. I liked her when I was an X-phile back in the day, I liked her when I was re-watching the pilot, and I even liked her better than Mulder, almost all the time. Yes, on the show, she kicks bad-guy butt, outsmarts the boys, and winds up rescuing Mulder at least as many times as he rescues her, if not more**. But just because she’s strong-er than most female characters out there doesn’t mean she’s a strong character, period.

In the pilot, she does show a lot of virtues. When Mulder’s too-cool-for-a-partner with his accusations of spying and can-you-keep-up slideshows, she sasses right back. When he’s all like, “I’m Crazy McPlothole with my Crazy Theory Lacking Any Sort of Evidence!”, she tells him the reasons why he’s wrong. (We’ll ignore the facts that her arguments are scientific straw men and that she backs down way too easily without any logical reason because this is The X Files, and that’s how they roll.) And when she hears a strange noise in the creepy dark woods, she yells, “Mulder?” and then turns and points her gun at it.

But she also freaks out over mosquito bites on her back and literally runs to Mulder, the guy she’s only just met, trembles, and has to be reassured by a hug and spending the night talking to him with the lights on. The second time she runs into the sheriff in the woods, she’s the one who gets disarmed while Mulder confronts the guy. And even though she argues with Mulder when he states his theories aloud, she always defers to his decisions. He gets to decide where they go, when they go there, what they’re investigating, even when to stop the car and spray paint Xs on the road like a nutbar.

If you imagine a male character who acts like that, you don’t get the strong badass. You get the geeky, adorable guy, like Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Neville Longbottom from the Harry Potter series – the one who’s funny because he’s competent but slightly goofy, who’s the reliable pillar when necessary but never dares overshadow the hero who is clearly (supposed to be) much cooler, much more effective, and much more powerful.

Mulder’s the one with the knowledge and the authority. He’s got street cred (how many of your sisters were abducted as children, Scully, scarring you for life?), and the other characters all act like he’s in charge: the Bellefleur police approach him first; the coroner’s daughter calls his cell; and the nurse at the mental hospital even repeatedly demands, “What’s she doing?” Um, hello! “She” is right there! Why don’t you ask her?

Now, obviously a lot of this has to do with the fact that at this point in the series, Mulder was still meant to be a solitary main character a la Sherlock Holmes, with Scully as more of a Watson than an equal. (In one interview/director’s commentary, which I totally can’t find, it’s mentioned that at first Gillian Anderson, the actress who plays Scully, was instructed to walk a few steps behind David Duchovny, as the director/producer/whomever wanted the audience to keep their attention on him.) But that’s just the point.

There’s absolutely no reason why Mulder couldn’t have been a woman whose brother Sam got abducted and Scully couldn’t have been a dude. But if you imagine Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny playing Foxessa Mulder and Dan Scully, He-Scully*** would come across as long-suffering, yes, and talented, certainly, but also as kind of a wimp. Not because Scully’s actions aren’t admirable in and of themselves but because audiences have different expectations of fictional men and women. What’s strong enough to push a female  Scully over the edge into Badass Heroine Canyon doesn’t begin to make a male Scully teeter.

True, there are some problems with playing this gender-switching game. Do we have to flip the whole cast to make the analogy work? Do we  flip the genders of only the relevant characters? Who’s relevant? But regardless, it seems like the rule of thumb is solid: for a female character to be considered strong, she just has to be as good as a man. For a male character to be considered strong, he has to be better than most other men.

I want to see more women on TV, in movies, and in books who are better than most other characters, male or female.

* Seasons 8 and 9 are dead to me. I’m sorry, Doggett.

** It is a truth universally acknowledged that a postmodern male protagonist whom the plot dictates is always right has every possible physically uncomfortable thing happen to him over the course of his story.

*** By the power of Greyskull!