Tropes vs Women

Watch all 6 videos

This series of six videos explain six common tropes regarding women. This series is aimed at Hollywood films, television series, video games, and comics though they are found elsewhere as well. The first trope is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a "bubbly shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach brooding, soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures"-Nathan Rabi. The second is about Women in Refrigerators. This trope was coined by Gail Simon and features female superheroes who have been depowered, raped, or cut up and put in the refrigerator. Third is the Smurfette Principle. This is the tendency for works of fiction to have only 1 female amongst an ensemble of men, despite the fact that roughly half the human population is female. Next came the Evil Demon Seductress. This one is pretty self-explanatory, a female demon, vampire, alien, etc. uses her sexuality to seduce, manipulate, kill, and sometimes eat men by luring them into her evil web. The Fifth is the Mystical Pregnancy. This dates back to the bible. Characters are reduced to their biological functions. This is also called reproductive terrorism or torture porn. The last, and very destructive is Straw Feminist. This trope involves the distorted view of feminism, an exaggerated character is created and filled with misrepresentations, oversimplifications, and stereotypes to make it easy to discredit feminism.

I loved The Avengers, but think about how the women are portrayed.

For me, these videos were eye-opening. I can say I had noticed some of these things before but never knew they were used as often as they are. A common thread for most of them is the women are highly sexualized and objectified. The exception was the straw feminist, who is portrayed as more masculine and pushy, unattractive, often fanatical. The biggest danger of these is their overuse. They paint women in a bad light, they perpetuate stereotypes, and they encourage disrespect and mistrust of women. These attitudes and beliefs make it harder for women to achieve equality. They make us look like either dumb, shallow, helpless creatures, or evil and crazy. These messages are found everywhere on social media, in advertising, in literature. When I really started to think about it, the examples are staggering.

No better example than the cover of a men's magazine.

The information in these videos ties in nicely with other materials we have explored. I feel these tropes also fit in with the video for this module on African American women and sexuality. I think they are portrayed often as part of the Evil Demon Seductress trope. While not always a demon or vampire, they are portrayed as using their sexuality in a manipulative way. This series also mentions the Bechdel Test as part of the Smurfette Syndrome trope. The concept of the Male Gaze is also prevalent in these tropes. Women are objectified, they are a muse, and if they resist and fight to be more, they are crazy.  

Succubus Sexy and Entertaining; Incubus... Terrifying and Rapey

The Evil Demon Seductress is a trope described by the YouTube channel Feminist Frequency as “Supernatural creature (i.e. demon, robot, alien, vampire) disguised as a sexy human female.” Commentator Anita Sarkeesian continues to give a large list of examples within the film industry in which this trope can be found. Popular examples included characters such as Jennifer Check (played by Megan Fox) from Jennifer’s Body (2009) and Mystique (played by Rebecca Romijn) from X2 (2003). It sounds harmless in that the characters make for good entertainment, but Sarkeesian identifies the underlying misogynist stereotype behind it which is that women primarily use their sexuality to manipulate, trick, and control men. She continues to add that this may give women the impression that their only social power is their sexuality.

The trope can be seen all throughout popular culture, but the video focuses on the film industry. Returning to the examples provided, we can see Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body (2009) is a cheerleader (an already hypersexualized trope) possessed by a succubus. For those unaware of what a succubus is, they are in, in demon mythology, female demons which seduce and have sex with men. In the case of the 2009 horror flick, they are killed as well. The succubus lures men in with her sexuality to ultimately kill them. There’s a perfect scene where this is portrayed, in which Jennifer lures a football player into the woods, seduces him, but they stop due to all the creatures in the wood staring at them. Jennifer realizes she’s lost his attention, and unzips her shirt to reveal that she is wearing nothing underneath. Whilst he has her attention once more, and ends up turning into her succubus form and kills him. This same theme repeats with her other victims. The next example used was Mystique from the movie franchise based off the Marvel comic series X-Men. The movie specifically named was X2: X-Men United (2003).  There is a scene in the movie where Mystique seduces a security guard. She brings him over a couple of beers, which are drugged, and eventually she lures him into the bathroom, where he finishes his beer and he becomes unconscious, and from there she can complete the mission, injecting him with iron.

There are many more examples of The Evil Demon Seductress, for example the POV horror anthology V/H/S (2012) includes a segment in which a vampire-like female  demon devours two men. Sarkeesian notes that this trope is popular in that it gives into objectifying females. This is appealing to the male audiences. It is not, however, rare to see this role switched, in which a male would seduce a female and ultimately kill her, but rare for it to be a male supernatural being unless we’re speaking of examples like The Incubus (1982). Most of the time, the sexual circumstances are depicted as rape instead of something seemingly consensual (aside from being murdered, of course), found in horror such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968).  Honestly, other than Rosemary’s Baby (1968) male incubus-like horror is not as popular. Interesting to note that the popularity of the evil demon seductress trope is contingent on the women being the offender, otherwise it would be a disturbing supernatural rape scene instead of a sexy woman seducing a man. Neither are positive things.