Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Sometimes, though, it’s … well, not.
In fact, much of the time life sort of goes along in a way that could almost be considered typical. Stereotypical, even, odd as that sounds.
When I first read a recent piece on Jezebel lamenting the lack of strong female mentor characters, I was totally on board. The fact that fictional mentors for young women are frequently power-hungry super bitches, arrogant (and, naturally, handsome) men, or “real characters” that often happen to be flamboyantly homosexual is inarguable.
That being said, though … so the hell what?
I am a voracious reader. Sometimes, in fact, I think I need a 12-step program for my addiction to literature. I also love movies.
Why?
Because it allows me to escape from my own life, to gain perspective, to think about other things.
If somebody made a movie about my life, it’d be pretty freaking boring. And I have female mentors, several of them in fact. Furthermore, they are real characters.
- One of my teaching mentors has an obsession with Def Leppard that has led to tattoos in odd locations and guitar picks displayed in glass boxes on the mantle.
- One of my life mentors recently sent me a picture of a shell she found on the beach shaped like a penis in a desperate attempt to get me to fly to North Carolina for Thanksgiving.
- One of my writing mentors is … well, the inimitable Sarah Taylor-Spangenberg, which speaks for itself.
- One of my motherhood mentors told me once that plastic Solo cups are the best way to keep your kids from knowing what you’re drinking.
And so on.
These are, all four and many more that I’m not bringing up, incredibly strong woman that I …
… admire greatly with every ounce of my being.
So why the hell would I be pondering “Where Are All the Female Mentors”?
In all of the films, shows, and books I can think of, the woman’s mentor is normally a male, either gay or a potential love-interest. If a woman happens to give the heroine some mentoring, it’s limited to certain advice-giving incidents, which are often questionable and sometimes destructive.
The Devil Wears Prada and Miss Congeniality provide adorable and hilarious examples of the gay male mentor. These guys get the heroine into glamorous clothing and force her to stop whining about how unfair their life is. Dangerous Liaisons, in contrast, has the wickedest pair of faux-mentors (older female and male) that a young impressionable girl could ever have. In Gigi, the far less sinister incarnation Aunt Alicia gives her niece lessons on how to be a dazzling courtesan, but the film makes it evident that all of her advice is superficial and useless.
Yup … but it’s entertaining as hell.
Literature isn’t much more encouraging. In Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, four young women try to make it in New York during the 1950s and much heartbreak –- personal and professional –- ensues. More importantly, there isn’t a female mentor in sight. The only potential one, Caroline’s boss Miss Farrow, is the grandmother of Miranda Priestly. To be fair, the men don’t particularly try to mentor any of the women (other types of relationship are on their minds), but the one possible female mentor is a shining example of everything Caroline doesn’t want to become.
Um … let me reiterate that The Best of Everything took place in the ‘50s. That’s more than half a century ago. Furthermore, the piece itself shows how a mentor can, like everything else in life, be a positive role model by sucking.
I say to my students all the time, “I probably learned more from my bad teachers than from my good ones”, and it’s the absolute truth. The people you deal with, the experiences you have, those are the things that shape your own personal mindset, morals, and values.
To think that some glowing fictional female knightess in shining armor is going to pave the way for women to aspire to greatness is just … well, kind of ridiculous.
If women are that easily influenced by TV and books, then after the soap operas and romance novels of the sixties and seventies, there should have been millions of women having torrid affairs.
Not to worry, though … the Jezebel piece does address the very real possibility that men can in fact serve as mentors to women.
It’s not that I think a man isn’t an appropriate mentor for a woman. I’m certainly not suggesting that women collectively hate each other. And I’m not accusing Jane Austen or anyone else of trying to push an agenda, but this seems to be a dominant pattern in storytelling. I’d say it’s the result of a combination of factors.
First there’s the strength of the Pygmalion myth (and its Broadway cousin), wherein a man creates his ideal woman and falls in love with her, the modern riff being the gay stylist who enables the woman to get the man of her dreams. Second, the heroine often needs to be parentless/lacking a mentor in order for the story to unfold (or the conflict has to be with the parenting figure). If the statistics of film, television, and literature held true in the real world, the percentage of orphans would be astronomical.
I mean, it seems like the writer’s subtext is that women will be brainwashed into thinking only men have something to teach them. To me, that’s a pretty chauvinistic premise.
Look, I am very proud of being a feminist, but even more so, I am a humanist. I believe in equality for everybody.
I get annoyed as hell when people slam on those of us who identify ourselves as feminists for trying to turn everything into a gender issue when, in my opinion, those are the minority.
That being said, I also get annoyed as hell when women make mountains out of molehills in the name of feminism, which is what I’m seeing in this piece.
Am I way off base here?
Can’t remember what series of links I followed that ended me up here…
Anyway, yes, fictional female mentors are important. As a child, I obsessed over books and TV. When I was VERY young, like most little girls, I always pretended to be the girl character in the shows I was watching. But I distinctly remember the age when I stopped liking the only female character in TV shows I watched (Cheetara in Thunder Cats, etc) and realized that the male characters were cooler. Better. Stronger. And the females were just getting rescued.
As I grew older, I developed a passion for writing and art, so eventually I began drawing and creating my own characters and stories. All of the characters I drew were male. I couldn’t bring myself to identify with female characters because the vast majority of them were either uninteresting or weak or relegated to the Smurfette-type role of being “the girl.” I believed, implicitly if not explicitly, that only male characters were complex enough to be worth writing/drawing about, so that’s what I did. For years.
I think it’s obvious that this is a destructive attitude for a little girl to have. We look up to our fictional heroes and internalize ideas from the books, movies, TV shows, etc that we love. When the things we love tell us one gender is inferior, we internalize that message, too.
At least I did.
Everything G.B. Skye said.
After our parents, the first people that children look to as mentors are characters in storybooks, on TV, or in movies. The Disney Princess franchise is proof enough of that. It’s absolutely necessary that all children have characters that they can personally identity with.
Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, was inspired by Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek series. So was Whoopi Goldberg who, at the time, was astonished to see a Black woman on TV – who wasn’t playing a maid!
If the Jezebel piece was instead wondering where all of the female presidents and senators and governors are, would you wonder if they were making mountains out of molehills in the name of feminism? The lack of female mentors in media is just an extension of our cultural understanding that women are too emotional, too gossipy, too fragile, too lovestruck, too female, to have anything worthwhile to teach us. It is an extension of the cultural understanding that a woman’s lived experience is not as important or enlightening as a man’s. It is an extension of the cultural understanding that a woman’ success is measured by her family and domesticity, not her career or her achievements or her character.
Media and popular culture simultaneously reflects and shapes the society and culture in which we carry out our lives – a lack of female mentors in media just reflects and reinforces the fact that women in the real world have nothing worth teaching, worth learning, worth listening to. This is an important issue – it’s not something that we can change overnight, which is why it might seem like a futile point to make. A cultural shift in attitude will have to happen and that’s a big job – maybe if we make enough noise, media can start the ball rolling and create, reflect and reinforce that shift.
I was thinking the same thing about atheist characters just the other day. I’d been lamenting the fact that just about every openly atheist character I’m aware of in film and television is either emotionally crippled in some way or socially inept to the point of almost being unable to function in society. And they almost always have to have a scene (or, in the case of TV, a whole episode) dedicated to the subject where the atheist’s views are either made to look like they come from their emotional trauma (I’m so angry at god that I refuse to believe) or just out of touch and silly (I know I’m off topic. Trust me, I’m swinging it back around to feminism). To be honest, I hadn’t paid much attention to the same issue when it comes to female characters. Since I hadn’t paid much attention, I honestly don’t know how bad the deficiency is, so I can’t comment on “where the hell” any of them are. That said, the larger issue about whether or not we should care is a resounding YES. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a mentor in real life, however almost everyone can read books or watch TV. In a personal example, I always saw Atticus Finch as a sort of role-model for myself; I don’t often live up to his example, but it gives me something to strive for. And while I had the soft-spoken paragon of virtue, others deserve their fictional role-models and mentors. The Uhura example was already mentioned, but it deserves reiteration. Fictional characters can serve to show us what may be possible: a strong woman, a noble hero among the apathetic, or an unlikely person given a huge responsibility. In my humble opinion, these characters are important. Is it as big a deal as inequality in wages, or sexual violence? No, probably not, but it is something that deserves attention.