Janeway's a less impressive physical specimen than Kira, Ivanova, and certainly Xena; she's been defeated repeatedly in single combat, which probably makes her easier to relate to for many women, since most of us don't have martial arts training, and god knows we don't look like Sarah Michelle Gellar or Tia Carrere. She also avoids violence to an unprecedented degree, which ought to be a good thing, except it usually ends up getting her ship into a situation from which someone else must save them. Then, when she does choose to show strength, it often makes her look unstable.

Do we want female heroines who are just as dangerous and deadly as their male counterparts? Or might there be another model entirely that would meet viewer demands for action, yet move us away from the violence on genre TV? I know that I prefer to see women using their brains for thinking and their bodies for pleasure, rather than their minds for plotting and their muscles for kicking ass. I bet there are men in the desired demographic audience who agree with me.

HE SAID:

There are; they watch soap operas. Soaps are about romance and betrayal; science fiction and fantasy (and let's face it; most TV producers don't know enough science to understand the difference) as we now understand it derives from the pulps of the '30s, aimed at teenage boys and therefore containing a lot of action, violence, bloodcurdling thrills and pretty girls. It's the same formula TV uses to appeal to teenage boys today.

Do we want heroines who are just as dangerous and deadly as their male counterparts? Damn straight we do! Ineffectual males are just as annoying as ineffectual females, whether they're ineffectual at telling their friends the truth before it's too late, as on Dawson's Creek and other soaps, or ineffectual at saving their friends from bleeding to death in a shell crater, as in war movies. The desirability of another model of feminine heroism altogether is, in my view, irrelevant to the present discussion, which is of TV/movie SF as it exists now and is likely to exist in the future.

I have defended the general concept of adventure fiction before, at cons and in print: while I don't claim it's the only worthwhile form of fiction (a claim its enemies are not shy of making in defense of their particular hobbyhorses), I think it speaks to a certain sort of audience better than any other. That sort of audience is excitable, bored, interested in exotica, and hungry for decisive action to solve important problems (something many of us keenly feel the lack of in the real world).

In a word, male. Sorry, but those traits appear to be found more often in male readers/viewers than female, even in today's enlightened culture. So it's not surprising that so many women warriors appear to be "acting like men"; to paraphrase de Beauvoir, there are two kinds of people in adventure stories: human beings and women. And when women try to act like human beings (that is, when they step out of the narrow role of Nell on the Railroad Tracks) they are accused of trying to be men.

After all, there are far more interesting things to do as a human being (fight wars, stop wars, start wars, raise children, be children, etc.) than as a typical TV female love object. I don't believe it diminishes a woman's femininity to step outside the Lucy Ricardo box; I believe it enhances the definition of femininity, which in the long run can't help but benefit us all, of both sexes. A culture that artificially restricts men and women to various roles wastes some of their potential, just as cultures that define certain other sorts of people as less than human do.

Ahem. Sorry for wandering; Doc Savage would hardly approve. What I believe Michelle says above when she asks if we want deadly women is whether we want action heroes to be all action and nothing more, without the leavening of traditionally feminine traits like clever dialogue with multiple meanings, complex social relationships, ties to the larger world and to the future, etc. Of course not. Depth and action are not mutually exclusive, as Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine have shown. Which women warriors in the recent oeuvre meet that test of being not just competent warriors but interesting people?

Janeway: Hell, no. No on both counts. Back when the Borg swallowed her up, I was telling my buddies that now was the time for the Federation to strike, while the Borg were assimilating Janeway's unerring tactical idiocy. And as for a personal life, well, there's such a thing as multiple personality disorder with paranoid delusions of grandeur alternating with suicidal depression, but it's hardly a life.

Janice Lester: She, too, was insane, and wouldn't have been fit to command a starship if she'd been more male than John Wayne. The throwaway line in that script about Starfleet forbidding women to command was asinine, of course, and utterly at odds with the rest of Starfleet ethics as demonstrated in the rest of the series. But it was the last episode, and they were tired, and some chauvinist on the production staff screwed up. Let it go.

Ivanova: This character appears often in sf: the soldier who lives for battle and puts up with all the other crap just to get from one firefight to the next. As a Russian, Ivanova tolerated no backtalk, but also had a deep drive to set things right by force. Not "if necessary"; she thought that if people were going to abuse each other, they needed to be smacked around, hard, until they straightened up.

Scully: She's a warrior in the sense that Renaissance courtiers were warriors, fighting hidden enemies in a vast bureaucracy. Scully is an example of another adventure fiction cliche, the Woman Expert, who knows something vital to the plot but which might make a male hero look, y'know, all bookish if he said it. The James Bond movies are particularly full of these women. But Scully has more guts than anyone, because she faces the consequences of her actions and does them anyway. Mulder's brazen rush into the unknown isn't really courage, it's mental illness; he genuinely doesn't care about anything but his quest.

Ripley: Kills hard for her little girl's life, and those of her friends. What could be more female? (I refer here to Aliens, of course, not the dopey sequels). Ripley has classically feminine concerns for the colonists cast into outer darkness by moneygrubber Burke, and she figures out Burke's slimy scheme faster than any of the Marines because she looks for motivations, not just opportunities. If only they'd let HER command Voyager -- hey, is that another column topic I see leering around the corner of that black, dripping machinery, jaws savagely agape? Go find out, Hicks.

Xena: Her warrior prowess is less impressive than it would be without the cartoon leaps and kicks; it's semi-comedy, sure, but if you don't believe it, it doesn't impress you. But her warrior attitude is excellent, sometimes macho, sometimes not, and unlike Janeway, for valid reasons: Xena throws insults in the teeth of Death when her friends' lives are at stake, or when the odds are small, but when the odds are very long and there's no compelling reason to fight, she's not going to taunt Caesar just to score points off him. Yes, she enjoys intimidating bad guys, but why get killed over it? And her motherhood, her de facto marriage to Gabrielle, her maternal feelings toward several proteges, all add a dimension most cartoonish heroes lack altogether. Xena's series, though historically absurd and physically impossible, is true on the emotional level, something many sf series don't seem to be able to manage. Yes, UPN and USA Network, I'm looking at you.

This column was originally written for AnotherUniverse.com.

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