{"id":3171,"date":"2017-06-14T11:00:52","date_gmt":"2017-06-14T15:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/?p=3171"},"modified":"2017-06-14T00:22:57","modified_gmt":"2017-06-14T04:22:57","slug":"wonder-woman-the-baby-sitters-club-and-the-idea-of-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/?p=3171","title":{"rendered":"Wonder Woman, The Baby-Sitters Club, and the Idea of \u201cEnough\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first time I saw myself in fiction, the character didn\u2019t actually resemble me much at all. <\/span><\/p>\n

I was in elementary school, reading Ann M. Martin\u2019s The Baby-Sitters Club <\/i>series for the first time, and immediately fell in love with the character of Claudia Kishi (who I still maintain is hands-down the best BSC member, fight me<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Claudia and I were nothing alike. She struggled in school; I was in the gifted program and got good grades without much effort. She had an insatiable sweet tooth; I have always preferred a second helping of potatoes to dessert. She was cool and outgoing; I was awkward and shy. She was artistic; my best attempts at re-creating the techniques that Bob Ross\u00a0<\/i>demonstrated on\u00a0The Joy of Painting\u00a0<\/em>looked like the concentrated efforts of a precocious chimpanzee. She was fashion-forward; I had a pair of those chunky black Steve Madden sandals in my closet until last year<\/i>.
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(Sidebar: As soon as I got rid of them, Steve Madden brought them back<\/span><\/a>, because we are living in a weird fashion zombie apocalypse where no trend will ever just stay dead.)
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Even in the one way we were alike, we were not alike. She was Japanese-American, and I was half-Chinese.
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Claudia covers of The Baby-Sitters Club\u00a0(1986-1988).\u00a0Photo credit: Scholastic<\/p><\/div>\n

But it didn\u2019t matter. At nine years old, seeing this beautiful, cool Asian-American girl getting to be awesome in stories where she was a main character \u2013 and occasionally even the star \u2013 was huge<\/i>. I wanted to be Claudia in a way I have never wanted to embody a character since. I rocked side-ponytails and brightly colored oversized sweaters. I hid candy all over my bedroom, even though my parents were totally fine with me eating candy and also I barely even liked <\/i>candy. (This turned out to be a terrible idea; I was still finding smushed Reese\u2019s Peanut Butter Cups under my mattress years later.) I even dressed up as Claudia once for Halloween, which made for a tedious Trick-or-Treating experience, since I kept having to explain at each house what The Baby-Sitters Club <\/i>was.<\/span><\/p>\n

Claudia was formative to me in a way that no other character was for a very long time.\u00a0Remember her. I\u2019ll come back to her in a bit. For now, fast forward with me a few decades, past Buffy Summers and Sydney Bristow, past Natasha Romanoff and Jessica Jones and Kara Danvers, to 2017\u2019s Wonder Woman.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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Diana Prince, Wonder Woman\u00a0<\/em>(2017).\u00a0Photo credit: Warner Bros.<\/p><\/div>\n

There has been an interesting wave of reporting in the wake of Wonder Woman, <\/i>the most successful superhero film with a female lead \u2014 and a female director \u2014 of all time. There have been pieces on why some women are crying at the fight scenes,<\/a>\u00a0and others on why some viewers from marginalized backgrounds were left cold<\/a>. Some reviewers praised the film for being groundbreaking and important<\/a>, while others seemed positively baffled that the movie was not about Diana drowning in a sea of unwanted sexual advances<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

In her piece on socially conscious criticism<\/a> at the A.V. Club,\u00a0Katie Rife writes, \u201c\u2026everyone appreciates things (or doesn\u2019t appreciate them) for different reasons, making the social context of a film essential to gauging its quality. Sometimes dismissed as a politically correct \u201cpurity test,\u201d by these metrics an otherwise flawed film can be great if it empowers its fan base, or an otherwise well-made film can be a failure if it alienates segments thereof.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Basically, what this boils down to is that you can’t analyze a film without taking into account the people watching it. And just as people are infinitely unique, so too will be their viewing experiences.<\/p>\n

Which explains the widely varying Wonder Woman <\/i>reactions. To some, it is an emotional, glass-ceiling-shattering leap forward for women in film. To others, it is yet another entry in a long string of disappointments when it comes to Hollywood\u2019s portrayals (or lack thereof) of people of color. To a (seemingly not-insignificant) portion of male critics, it is a decent superhero film that is somehow confusing in its lack of leering up-the-skirt shots.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Diana Prince, Wonder Woman\u00a0<\/em>(2017).\u00a0Photo credit: Warner Bros.<\/p><\/div>\n

Personally, I loved everything about Wonder Woman. <\/i>I loved that Diana was allowed to be brave and strong and courageous, while also <\/i>getting to be feminine and gentle and kind. I loved that the Amazons could be unparalleled warriors and also have wrinkles. I loved that their costumes, while beautiful, actually looked like armor and not glorified bathing suits. I loved the epic score and the way the men followed Diana into battle, and I loved the themes of love and sacrifice and hope.
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I loved Wonder Woman <\/i>as a life-long fan of superheroes and comics, and also as a mom trying to raise two daughters. I loved that Diana was such a strong role model, who enthusiastically embraced her own strengths while lifting up those around her. I loved that she was the star, the hero, and that it never even occurred to her that she might not be the best person for the job simply because she\u2019s a woman.
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I connected with her in a way I have not connected with any fictional character since Claudia Kishi. When I first came home (sobbing) from the theater, I found myself incredibly defensive of Diana and her movie, instantly bristling at any reviews that claimed that Wonder Woman<\/em>\u00a0wasn’t feminist enough or diverse enough, because she was enough for me, <\/em>and did they even\u00a0watch\u00a0<\/em>the movie, and they clearly were just looking for nits to pick, and ugh, the Internet is the worst.<\/p>\n

And yet. They were right.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me be clear: I’m not saying those reviews should be held up as definitive analyses of the movie, or that I necessarily even agreed with their points. What I’m saying is that they were right that\u00a0Wonder Woman\u00a0<\/em>was not enough for them<\/em>, which means that it was not enough, period.<\/p>\n

In a world that is infinitely diverse, where there is always another intersectionality to keep moving the goalposts of adequate representation, the idea of any one character or story being enough <\/i>to satisfy any entire subset of the population is a fallacy. There will always be a group that is underserved, there will always be voices clamoring for better. <\/i>And here\u2019s the thing, no matter how much I loved Wonder Woman<\/i>\u2026 they won\u2019t be wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Amazons, Wonder Woman<\/em> (2017). Photo credit: Warner Bros.<\/p><\/div>\n

For many of us immersed in the world of fiction and pop culture, what we are yearning for lives at the crossroads of identity and aspiration, where a character can meet us where we are while simultaneously showing us where we\u2019d like to be, and that crossroads is at a different place for everyone. <\/span><\/p>\n

For me, as an awkward, shy nine-year-old, Claudia Kishi met me at the pieces of my identity that I connected with the most strongly (Asian-American, female, suburban) and also embodied who I wanted to be (namely, cool and popular).<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout my adolescence and much of my adulthood, the heroes I admired have offered the aspirational piece without the identity piece, while the characters who carried the identity pieces lacked the aspirational ones. I could aspire to be heroic and brave and loyal like Aragorn, but I would never be white and male like him. I could identify with Princess Buttercup\u2019s gender, but I didn\u2019t yearn to be a helpless damsel. <\/span><\/p>\n

But now, as an adult and a mother, I saw Diana Prince, with whom I could identify as a woman, and who also embodied so much of what I\u2019ve always admired in both male and<\/i> female characters: heroism, bravery, kindness, compassion, loyalty, optimism. She joined Rey from Star Wars <\/i>as a heroic woman my kids can look up to who is not defined by her love interest or her appeal to men, but by who she is as a person. No, I did not identify with her racially, but she hit enough important parts of my personal<\/i>\u00a0(identity + aspiration) formula that for me<\/i>, I wasn\u2019t bothered that I didn\u2019t spot any Asian Amazons on screen. <\/span><\/p>\n

Personal anecdote time. A couple years ago, both of my daughters decided to cut their hair to chin-length. Neither of them liked how tangled their long hair got, and this seemed like the perfect solution. But not long after they\u2019d received their haircuts (which looked adorable, for the record), my youngest came to me, tearfully saying that she\u2019d decided she wanted to grow her hair back out.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI thought you didn\u2019t like having long hair?\u201d I said, puzzled. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThen why don\u2019t you want to keep it short?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I want to be a hero when I grow up, and girls with short hair can\u2019t be heroes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I was baffled. \u201cOf course they can! Why would you think they can\u2019t?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She looked at me, equally baffled. \u201cBecause I\u2019ve never seen one.\u201d
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She had seen all sorts of movies and shows with heroic women and girls in them, so I\u2019d thought her formula should\u2019ve been complete. I\u2019d assumed girl <\/i>(identity) + hero <\/i>(aspiration) would\u2019ve been enough. But she needed girl + <\/i>short hair<\/i><\/b> + hero <\/i>to find her way into the story, and as of that point, she didn\u2019t think it existed. <\/span><\/p>\n

I had two choices after this conversation. I could tell her that her hair wasn\u2019t important and it shouldn\u2019t matter to her, and show her all the heroic women and girls in the stories she loved and tell her that they should be enough. It would have been a valid enough approach; her worth doesn\u2019t lie in her hair, after all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or I could do what I did, and try to find some short-haired female heroes for her. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Twitter, help me out: I need female heroes with short hair (besides Black Widow) that a 6yo might have heard of.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Lauren Thoman (@LaurenTHCW) June 20, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But my personal formula isn\u2019t going to be yours, or anyone else\u2019s. The things that didn\u2019t bother me would be deal-breakers to someone else, while things that meant everything to someone else (such as casting a Jewish woman to play such an iconic hero<\/a>) were barely on my radar. We all have our own precise mix of things that must be present for us to feel truly welcome in a story, and that’s okay.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n