|
My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
|
11:52 a.m. - 2003-07-29
I love you, Lara Croft. I'm stoked to see the new Tomb Raider movie. I liked the first one a lot. I liked it even more when I found out Angelina Jolie does most of her own stunts. Both Angelina and her alter-ego Lara kick ass. I was of two minds about the Tomb Raider video games. On one hand I was delighted that there was a wildly popular video game with a female hero, a video game BOYS played. Let's face it, boys rule the video game market. There ARE games designed for girls but they suck and are even more sexist and stereotyped than I could have imagined. I mean really, how Earth shaking is it that there's a CD-ROM game called "The Olsen Twins Bust a Move at the Mall"?? On the other, there was the automatic disgust that while Lara Croft might have been the main character, she was as aerodynamically as unsound as a bumble bee. Enormous hooters and a waist so tiny it would completely inhibit digestion. Oh, the progress society has made, right? I softened my stance some after some covert research at video arcades. (With game junkie Alex as a son, I've spent A LOT of time hanging around video palaces waiting for Alex to finish 'just one more round'.) I looked at the other video games and 99% starred ridiculously overbuilt steroidal male characters, so it wasn't just Lara who got the impossible physical standards treatment. But more importantly I never heard Tomb Raider players say, "Man, Lara Croft makes me horny." No, they cheered and howled just as they did with other, male charactered, games, "WOW! Did you see that mummy's head fly off!?!" "Cool, dude! She's got the machine gun with the laser sight!" When I heard they were making a live action movie based on the video game, I was again half cheered and half leery. Would the real life Lara Croft be an overly bosomy bimbo? Bosomy she was. Bimbo she was not. Nor had Hollywood reduced her to second banana status and written a story where she gets her lily white tushie rescued all the time by the big stwong men she shared a screen with. Okay, there was a "Yentl" subtext with Lara's "Papa, can you hear me?" fixation, but on the whole Lara OWNS the Tomb Raider story. She IS the Tomb Raider by gum and woe to the bad dudes who forget that. As a properly conditioned feminist, I still had that knee-jerk reaction to the rather pneumatic rack Lara sported. "Couldn't she have been a Tomb Raider with regular sized boobs?" And then I REALLY thought about it. DUH! I was being prejudiced against women like me! Why NOT an action hero who looks like a goddess? How DARE I insist on Lara Croft being reduced to Everywoman? Me, especially! Hadn't I spent nearly 25 years fighting just that pressure and stereotype? Hadn't one of my biggest griefs always been how the world dismissed me as just a pretty chick with fabulous boobs? Hadn't I sat in dozens of sales meetings and had my strategies denigrated or ignored because the male management would NOT accept the suggestions which came from 'Ms Tits'? Management who firmly insisted my success on the sales floor was due entirely to my cleavage? (As if a pair of knockers could hypnotize a customer so thoroughly that the product and the bottom line became moot! I don't care how good looking the salesperson is, at crunch time it's still ALL about the deal.) Haven't I had to prove over and over and over and over that the brain behind the pretty face was 100 times more valuable than the sexy body below it? Wasn't I the one who sat red faced and angry on the first day of Honors English 10 while the teacher sneered that she would be grading our work on its MERITS and that SHE wasn't going to be bamboozled by "other factors" as OBVIOUSLY some of her colleagues had been? (BTW, not only did I ace that course, I received an award from the English Dept for a Arthurian Legend puppet show I made and presented to the elementary schools for extra credit. Heh, fuck you, Mrs. Swift.) How many times had I gone to the auto parts store to get stuff for the Mustangs and VWs I was rebuilding only to have a smirking clerk smarm at me and ask how many inches of brake line did MY BOYFRIEND want? Or that maybe MY DAD should come in and pick out the proper transmission differential? How many lectures from older counter guys about how silly I was to be trying engine work? Why a girl (harrumph) LIKE ME couldn't possibly know what she was doing? Sometimes the gods are just generous, you know? And as unbelievable as it is to so many, being gifted in one way doesn't automatically preclude competency, even genius, in other ways. Lara Croft is tough, brilliant, brave, AND gorgeous. And I for one find this pretty cool. Pretty cool, indeed. Go get 'em, Tomb Raider, and kick some ass for all the women like us who have to repeatedly climb over the mountains we carry in our bras before we're allowed to do anything else. ~LA
|
