Avengers in High-Heeled Shoes

Dear friends,

(note) I have been rather sketchy in my male/female = biological sex, men/women = social gender distinction. This arises out of an uncertainty as to which I am talking about with respect to the subject matter in question: characters don't tend to actually disclose either of those facts about themselves and body type is supposed to represent the whole thing. Sorry for inconsistency and what not, also sorry this ended up so damn long. (/note)

Last night I went to the pictures to watch the almost universally praised film The Avengers, in 3D no less. We drove out to one of those big multi-plex shindigs with popcorn on the floor and young people all over the place. I enjoyed the film very much, but as a feminist beer enthusiast with an awesome haircut who was sat near me frequently pointed out, the female protagonists were inexplicably wearing high-heeled shoes in the unrelenting combat sequences. I think her problem with it was that it was unrealistic and seemed like an attempt by the filmmakers to crowbar their hero into conventional beauty standards.

This is the part where I write about the film, high heels, and high heels in the film.

The film's director, who also wrote the script, is Joss Whedon. The geeks love him. He is the creator of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse and his 2009-made film The Cabin in the Woods was just released, after MGM went bankrupt delaying the original release. Whedon is reckoned to be one of the more feminism inclined writer/director/whatevers in Hollywood. He got his break as a writer on Roseanne, where he was praised for being able to write women quite convincingly, and the show itself was groundbreaking in its portrayal of the powerful, non-standardly beautiful titular woman. He also does work for Equality Now. I am hesitant to condemn the heel situation, mostly becuase if Whedon decided to do it that way, there may have been a good reason.

Here is a roundup of possible explanations for the heels situation:
1) Stature. Scarlet Johannson is quite short, at 5'4", and it may be that she consistently wears heels for compositional reasons, particularly in a film where the tallest of the Avengers, played by Chris Hemsworth clocks in at 6'3".
2) Power. I have no source for this, but I trust the reader also lives on this planet and has heard or read about women feeling more powerful when they wear high heels, because of the height added I suppose but also possibly because of the striking image and associations.
3) Idealisation. Just as male comic book heros tend to exemplify a mainstream idealisation of the man, so do female comic book heros for women. Or at least, idealised women as far as men are concerned: remember that super-hero comics have traditionally predominantly been aimed at, produced by and consumed by men.
4) Canonicity. Black Widow, the main female protagonist in question is ALWAYS depicted in the comics as wearing heels. Whatever else Joss Whedon is, he is also a massive comic books nerd and also the creator of several rich universes, and is probably more than a bit into canon.

Helpfully the first three are also good lead ins for a blog post on high heels. I don't think I would say much in that I didn't in the make-up post. I am aware they are very different topics but my approach would have been similar even if the conclusions would be different. I might still return to this to discuss high heels in real life at some point.

Points 3 and 4 really drives home a theme I want to return to quite a bit. This film is based on a series os super-hero comics, and compared to the portrayal of woman superhero's in the source medium The Avengers was actually an exercise in restraint. There are tonnes of problems with the portrayal women super-heros. The preposterous proportions are one, as well as the ridiculous costumes and the provocative compositions of the frames. Women super-heros are infantilised by the epithet Girl (as opposed to Man) and in the emphasis on their much smaller frames than their male counterparts. Comics are a very stylised medium, particularly in the super-hero genre, and it was actually quite bold of the Avengers to tone down Black Widow so much. If you look at the image results produced you will notice this incarnation is relatively normally dressed, and on the whole is a lot less objectified than in the comics.

Super-hero comics mirror mythology. The character of Thor is a conscious reference to this fact. Myths are about archetypes, and are about the struggles of coming into adulthood and of facing your own mortality. They are typically life-affirming, dealing in themes of confronting great adversity and overcoming personal tragedy, and they centre around the relationship between an individual and a community. Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces remains essential reading for everybody interested in mythology or in super-hero comics.

Mythology paints on a canvas larger than life. It deals in powerful archetypes. By exaggerating our basic human struggles to epic proportions it is supposed to help us come to understand the realities of our own existence. Mythology is tightly connected with rituals concerning birth, growing up, getting married and dying. Subtlety and realism are have no place in this.

Where super-hero comics deviate from this is that they take the fact that mythology is actually about us, ordinary humans, and misuse it. Super-hero comics become a form of wish fulfilment where instead of using unrealistic characters to tell us about our own lives, they start from our lives, and invent characters more reflective of our unfulfilled fantasies, all of the confrontations we wish we had won or been brave enough to enter into, all of the people we wish we could protect, all the glory and adulation we wish we received or were worthy of.

The inclusion of powerful warrior-women in super-hero comics actually represents something of an improvement on previous similar media. Women are shown to be capable of succeeding in the traditionally male dominated spheres of saving the world, etc. Campbell's book includes a discussion of the strong association between heroism and masculinity. However super-hero comics, perhaps by their very nature, are preoccupied with the praising of traditionally male interests. They are almost universally combat-heavy, and the relationship between men and violence is while regrettable well precendented.

The problem is that women are portrayed as the comic creators imagine men fantasise them. I think a similar problem which is underlooked is the representation of men, however. Perhaps partly reflecting their audience's fantasy-self, male characters are portrayed as muscular giants. Super-hero comics reinforce people's ideas of what men and women are supposed to be with their idealised and homogenised bodies. However their bodies appear, there is actually more than one type of female super-hero. I know it is difficult to believe but it's true, there is more than one. There's two.

The first is the wholesome super-hero. This type is best represented by Wonder Woman. This archetype is associated with virginity and purity. They represent the (male) audience member's desires for marriage and stability, a trustworthy partner and potential mother to their offspring, as well as representing an idealisation of their own mother. Their unimpeachable virtue will be expressed in the conflicts by their devotion to justice and unwillingness to use morally questionable means to achieve their ends.

The second type is the vampish super-hero. There are fewer examples of this type. They are more likely to perform heel-face turns. They are not necessarily different in body type to wholesome heros, but they will have more revealing outfits tending towards darker colours. They are often morally ambiguous, willing to manipulate others to achieve their ends, which will sometimes be personal and sometimes magnanimous. They represent the audience members repressed sexual desires, and their impulses towards greater sexual freedom. Their darkness represents the secrecy of their associated desires as well as moral ambiguity and sexual "impurity", which is a particularly nasty Abrahamic concept. Black widow is a vampish super-hero. That is why she does, and must, wear high heels, because of the fetishistic position they occupy in our society. The aggressive shape of the heel is associated with the vampish super-hero's overt sexuality, which is threatening but also appealing to the audience member. Wholesome super-heros will seldom wear high heels. Vampish super-heros will rarely fail to.

Is this a good thing? Probably not, though there might be one or two good side effects. Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods deals with this topic in discussing the archetypes of "whore" and "virgin", and when you put it like that it seems pretty damn harmful, but it probably doesn't have to be. Vampish female characters might help heterosexual or bisexual male audience members come to terms with aspects of their sexuality that they previously found hard to put into a frame of reference. I think the main point here though is that both of these archetypes exist for the benefit of audience members who are men attracted to women. This is fundamental failing of the genre. It undermines the apparent gain made by introducing heroic women if they are only heroic as a pretext for revealing outfits, suggestive frames, and to increase their attractiveness to the audience member. Women super-heros should be written and drawn with women audience members as well as male ones in mind, and should either have more complex sexualities instead of basically fitting into one of two types. They can be role-models, wish fulfilment, or larger-than-life mythic figures, whichever the creators intend, as long as it is for women and not just for men.

Really I would like to see more gender-queer super-heros, who's gender is undisclosed and unimportant. Hell, it would be great to have transvestite or transgender super-heros, or asexual alien super-heros from Asgard or similar. This would actually help super-hero comics and films to fulfil their mythologising role by making them more universalising.

I realise I have gone on too long here, but I wanted to go into some depth about this. The question was why does Black Widow wear high heels. The answer turned out to be quite complicated. In the end I think the problem isn't that she was wearing high heels, but that the super-hero genre is too men-oriented and mistreats the issue of female sexuality, effectively making it all about men and not, as it should be, about women. This will, I think, actually enhance super-hero stories as they benefit from more complex characters and a wider potential audience. In addition they will hopefully stop reinforcing unreasonable and unrealistic impressions of women in people's minds. Is anything actually going to change? Maybe.

A heads up to two excellent bloggers notes from the vulvaground and blokeahontas, who's awesome recent posts on feminist topics made me want to write this piece. You should check them out.

I also read a blog on a similar theme before reading this that focused on realism. I will have to write a piece on realism in films and comics soon in response, but one of the links should hopefully get you it.
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/feminism?before=1316731922
http://livingthegeek.tumblr.com/

All the best.