Debunking 5 Myths About Femininity And Female Empowerment In Modern Movies

I see it everywhere in the movies these days: female characters prominently placed in the front of a poster, telling stories about independent young women who are battling against a group of bullish bad guys (all of whom are men). We’re supposed to be living in an age of better female representation on screen – and if you measure by the number of stand-alone female leads, that may be true.

I often can’t help feeling that the characters we see on screen are a mirage of real representation – narrative types regurgitated from one movie to the next to fill a quota of “empowered females” in the movies. At best, this type of movie lacks the subtlety of really great art. But this kind of female character often does more damage than that. More often than not, the female characters we see on screen affirm myths about what women want and need – and in the process, cause women to believe untruths about themselves.

Well, good news, ladies. There are movies out there that uphold your feminine instincts, that honor your feminine desires, that see the womanly struggles you face in real-time. There’s just one catch: Most of them were released before 1960. If we step inside the time machine of classic Hollywood movies, we see a different picture of women presented – one that’s both more nuanced and more in tune with our true feminine desires.

Myth #1: Sexy Women Are Always the Bad Guy

All you have to do is peruse the top nominated films of the Oscars every year to see this modern myth about women illustrated. Every year, most of the female characters our culture uplifts as “daring” and “original” and a “tour-de-force performance” are women caked in blood and dirt, with matted hair and bruises. Modern depictions of heroic women tend to be gritty and realistic, which, to be clear, isn’t inherently a bad thing. But sometimes I leave the movies, and I wonder: Where did the positive portrayals of sexy women go?

This problem isn’t a new one. As long as humans have been telling stories, less nuanced storytellers have categorized women into two groups: sexy women who go around stealing other people’s men and good-hearted but plain girls who you bring home to mama. And just because it’s an old story trope doesn’t mean people are done using it. It’s part of the core showdown between Cady Heron and Regina George in Mean Girls. After watching movie after movie where the sexy girl gets put in her place and the geeky girl gets the man, it’s easy to associate sexiness with meanness. 

Being sexy doesn’t make a girl the bad guy, though, and the 1940s gave us plenty of stories to prove it. Take Katharine “Sugerpuss” O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a nightclub dancer on the run from the police to protect her gangster boyfriend in Ball of Fire (1941). O’Shea hides out with a group of eight professors who are working on an encyclopedia, and she repeatedly uses her feminine wiles to hoodwink the youngest, Professor Potts (Gary Cooper) – until O’Shea slowly finds herself falling for the gentlemanly intellectual.