They Aren't Good Girl Media, Either

If these franchises are being feminized, they're doing an awful job at it

There’s a lot of talk about the feminization of traditionally male media franchises (Star Wars, Marvel, He-Man, etc.). The issues come usually from the perspective of the largely male original audience who loved those things for what they are, which is a very fair sort of criticism, but what don’t gets talked about is that they are also bad as girl media.

A brief author’s note before we get into this: I was not a conventional little girl- I had dinosaurs, not baby dolls, in fact I’m not sure I ever even owned one- and I haven’t been a conventional woman, either. This has been a mixed bag in terms of life difficulty and makes me no better or worse than other women of itself. I do get how the world of female media works, though, because some of it appealed to me too; I both am and am not like other girls. Like all the other girls, once you get to know them.

What is good girl media? Monster High is a good example that’s on the off-beat side. Monster High is all about fashion dolls based on the classic movie monsters- their daughters, in fact.  First arriving on the scene in 2010, these dolls have stuck around in assorted forms despite a brief hiatus and had television series, animated movies, a live-action movie, books, video games, web shorts, and info booklets that come with the dolls. Quite the multimedia project, really, and one that has clearly worked for its target female demographic.

This is a female-led franchise and the high school situations the characters get themselves in connect with girls. There’s school problems, boy problems, and growing up problems. One girl is clumsy, one has a temper, and so on. The personalities have heavy trope elements but the thing with tropes is that if you let characters lead, they blossom into something more distinctive, which they do in Monster High. The value in the story is in the relationships between these personalities.

They’re physically distinctive girls, too, with unique and fun looks. It’s not that they’re just pretty, though of course they are, they’re cool, too. They’ve got different looks and that is fun for girls. It’s fun for adults, too, which is part of the franchise’s sticking power. It’s collectible.

These characters’ stories are about their relationships to each other and, yes, to some cute boys. I’d like to take the time to point out that women as a general rule really like attractive men. Witness the way in which writers really make money: the romance genre. It isn’t just the bedroom action drawing women in, it’s the bedroom action with interesting men who have met their match in capable women. You visit the circles of women who keep these writers in business and they’ve got opinions on the tropes and styles of the men involved. It is the selling point of these books. They would not be as big a business- and as someone who would like to make money in writing, I’ve looked into the numbers, and lamented just a bit my commitment to my dignity and religious obligations- if it were just women doing some stuff.

So a good girl franchise has:

·         Distinctive characters who are pretty and have cool pretty outfits, plural

·         Stories that highlight interpersonal relationships

·         Attractive men

There are many of these franchises, I just picked one that’s unconventional in some aspects and has a franchise history I can trace easily. Barbie has been around for a long time and has the same things going on. The Barbie movie owes its success to the fact it fits within these parameters, I think. Not in a way that speaks to me really, but it clearly does to a lot of women.

The most recent Star Wars (and other ‘feminized’ franchise, really) offerings fail at meeting these parameters.

To start with, the outfits the female characters wear in Star Wars in particular are unremarkable. Apparently Rey does change outfits in the sequel trilogy, but I only know because someone pointed it out. She wears some variation of a track uniform with drapey bits the entire time.  It’s fine, but it’s not particularly cool or pretty. What’s her name with the purple hair has a dull formal dress, no real flare, perfectly serviceable for some functionary but not a heroine. Rogue One’s Jeyne Erso also doesn’t have too much flare, though I think her outfit works better than the rest especially in the context of that story- it isn’t trying to be anything other than an action movie that only covers the last few days of these people’s lives.

I was a child when the prequels came out, I remember the many Barbies of Padme in her various costumes.  I’ve never seen such a thing for Rey, though I guess Disney tried kind of to make fashion dolls of her and others, though they weren’t very good. She just doesn’t wear that cool of clothes. Little girls do not want a heroine to wear clothes that look cheap to cosplay in; they want to wear something that looks expensive and elaborate and awesome. Leave the budget concerns to the people making the cosplay.

The interpersonal relationships also aren’t a focus of the most recent Star Wars, not in the way they are in girls’ media where, even in the most drama-filled catty version, you at least get a sense these people value each other’s company.  I feel these modern franchises are too fixated on making a group of women look powerful together rather than look like friends. The power of friendship is kind of a hokey thing, no doubt, but it’s far more compelling than the friendship of power you see recently in Star Wars, the MCU, and so on.

On top of that, these women often end up alone. Powerful, but alone. Rey ends up alone and we don’t even see her say goodbye to her friends or hear her mention them when she symbolically buries the Skywalkers on the place farthest from the bright center of the universe. There’s this misapprehension that goes that a woman must be left standing alone to prove her value, as men often are alone at the end of their stories, but this mistakes tragedy for triumph. It’s sad when Shane rides away from the community he saved to his life of lonely wandering, not some victorious act of self-fulfillment. You can write a story where the tragedy is the point, but it can’t be painted as anything other than sad really because it is.

Lastly- and most contentiously in some circles, it seems- there are no attractive men. Oh the actors around these women can be physically good-looking, but that’s not the same as being an attractive man. An actor can be on fire in one role and a doofus a grown woman wouldn’t give the time of day in the next without so much as changing his haircut. This is hard to explain. There’s a reason why a lot of women who watch the recent Fallout series are wondering just what the heroine sees in the Brotherhood guy and are going wild for the heavily mutated ghoul. It isn’t just about appearances. The actors in these now female-led franchises aren’t given a chance to be attractive.

I feel the entertainment has for some reason underestimated women’s prurient interest in men- a weird thing as it’s something that’s so easy to exploit for profit. As I mentioned, where writers really make money is in romance novels. I knew a quite normal, non-nerd woman who is personally offended by fat Thor in Avengers Endgame whenever it comes up. The internet contains not insignificant sections where women engage in really quite terrifying locker room talk about men they find attractive. I think, though I’m not really familiar with the phenomenon, that this desire is what drives the popularity and profit of K-pop boy. Women want attractive men badly. Very badly. It doesn’t look like male desire, it doesn’t move like that particular beast, but it is very powerful.

What’s been done to your favorite franchise isn’t that it’s been retooled for girls, at least not girls as they actually are. Star Wars has not been retooled into Monster High, Marvel hasn’t become Barbie and friends, and Warhammer- the most hilarious of them all because the Horus Heresy is already a soap opera with outfits- has not been turned over to the Disney princesses. If the people running these things wanted to do that, they’d have gone about it a different way. The things that make girl media work for girls are not present in what’s been done to these boy franchises.

I can’t tell you who these things were done for. I don’t think it’s for a real demographic, or at least not a statistically significant one in financial terms. But it isn’t being done for women and girls as a group. Rey didn’t even meet a benevolent magnificent space unicorn with a light-up horn and color-changing mane and tail, it is definitely not being done for girls.