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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48107
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48107
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

There is always an issue in literature with how strength, or any other human trait, is portrayed. In movies and TV in particular, that which is within can only be shown by external action. Books can look inward, but even so, representing qualities through action is still a major part of how books operate, especially in popular and genre works.

This creates a problem in the portrayal of strength in women. I'm going to get myself in trouble here, probably, but the characteristic strengths of men and women are different. To paint the matter with the broadest brush possible, strength in men manifests as daring; strength in women manifests as patience.

This is not to suggest that there are no daring women or that there are no patient men, simply that one it more commonly found in one than in the other. It makes evolutionary sense that it should be so. The male activities of war and the hunt (male because until very recently entirely dependent of physical strength) require moments of great daring. Those moments are of high intensity but short duration, and we all go get drunk afterwards. The female activities of caring for the children and household (while waiting in fear to see if the men return unharmed and successful from war or the hunt) require patience. (Children are charming in small to medium doses, but incredibly tedious if you have to spend many hours with them.)

Patience is just as important to human thriving as daring. Arguably, it has become more important over time as the need for acts of daring has decreased.

But when it comes to telling a story, and particularly to making a movie or TV show, acts of daring are easy to show, and acts of patience are not. If the stories of men have occupied a greater part of literature, it is because acts of daring -- typically though not exclusively male acts -- make a better story than acts of patience.

It is a common technique, in film in particular, to represent qualities and emotions through physical actions. Thus the daring of a stockbroker is dull and we seek a way to get them into a physical fight or chase to express their daring in more visual terms. In The Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan is a CIA analyst who comes up with a daring analysis of the intentions of Marco Rameus. That is his essential contribution to the drama, but that does not make good TV, so the movie flies him out to an aircraft carrier, then to a sub, and finally has him in a gunfight with a Soviet saboteur in the missile room of the Red October: intellectual daring transformed into physical daring for the sake of drama.

This transference of qualities into action is bread and butter to the movies, and to books, to a lesser extent. It applies to showing the qualities of women as much as those of men. But it is hard to translate patience into action. So to portray "strong women" the movies often resort to having them perform physical acts of daring that are more typical of male strength than female.

Now one could make a good argument that in the modern world the need for daring is diminished and the need for patience is universal, so these distinct areas of strength are irrelevant now. But just because the need is no longer there does not mean the characteristic behavior is not there. Men are still bigger risk takers than women, for instance.

Some will argue that this is baked into our DNA and portraying it otherwise is mere propaganda. Others will argue that it is a mere social construct and that by portraying daring women in equal (or greater) proportion to daring men in media, we will undo that social construct and replace it by an equivalence of strengths between men and women in real life -- equalizing daring and patience in the behavior of both sexes.

This is the battlefront in the culture wars at the moment. There are land mines everywhere (placed by both sides). Be careful where you tread.

Original score: 2