Hello lonely readers, I want to talk to you to day about a very
serious problem plaguing our favourite fictional universes: the damsel in
distress. You know the girl she’s beautiful and nice and small animals flock to
her when she sings. She’s generally a joy to be around. The problem is that
she’s constantly getting herself kidnapped and locked in a tower and/or tied to
a train track. This results in an extreme level of manpain and the
overpopulation of white male heroes. While manpain driven hero narratives are
okay in moderation, in abundance they can be really fricken annoying, not to
mention problematic but we’ll get to that first let’s talk about the damsel in
distress.
The damsel in distress trope is fairly well known – but in case
you’ve been living in space for the last 3000 years here’s the low down. Wikipedia says: “the damsel in
distress, or persecuted maiden, is a classic theme in world literature,
art, film and video games. She is usually a beautiful young woman placed in a
dire predicament by a villain or monster and who requires a hero to achieve her rescue.” Basically
she’s the one that gets the ball rolling, she is kidnapped or lost of hurt and
they hero must rescue/enact revenge on those that dared to harm her.
There are a lot of things wrong with this trope – it’s often a point
of discussion for feminist scholars – but for me the worst part is that this
trope is so engrained in our cultural consciousness that you don’t even notice
it most of the time.
A female character that is close to the male protagonist – usually a
love interest, sister or daughter but occasionally a mother – is taken from him
by the villain. This works as a catalyst for the adventure. That sounds
familiar right? That’s because you seen and/or read that same story a million
times before. It’s employed because it’s so recognizable, it allows the author
to bypass the backstory and jump right into the adventure. The audience
recognizes the familiar narrative and fills in the blanks. While this use of
tropes in this way is actually a useful storytelling device, it also often
results in people ignoring and/or dismissing the problematic aspects of the
trope… and there are a lot of problematic aspects to the damsel in distress.
The most obvious (or what should be the most obvious) problem with
this trope is that it turns female characters into objects. Think about the
idea that the damsel is taken from the hero – this presents her as an object, a
thing, a belonging that the hero must get back. If you think about it, you
could replace the damsel in this situation with an inanimate object, like a laptop
and it wouldn’t really affect the narrative. If you think it’s a little silly
for someone to go out a dangerous quest to rescue a laptop then you are
severely underestimating how much I love my laptop and you’re also proving my
point… if a character can be replaced with a laptop then that’s a pretty
pointless character.
Beyond the problematic gender power imbalance inherent in this trope,
the damsel in distress as catalyst for a hero-driven quest narrative is just
bad writing. It’s boring and there is very little substance to it. Like I said,
if you can replace a character with an inanimate object (see the Sexy
Lamp test) then it’s not only a waste of a character but it also undermines
the hero’s emotional journey. If we don’t care about the girl he’s trying to
recuse – and the relationship he has with her – then why should we care about
the pain he’s experiencing.
Now before you all start yelling about stereotyping I am aware that
women that are relegated to the role of damsel can be well-rounded
three-dimensional characters but that doesn’t really make the trope any less
problematic. We may have progressed a lot since Snow White and Sleeping Beauty
were stuck in an unconscious state until the hero rescued them but the damsel
in distress is still defined by her lack of agency. She still has to sit around
and wait to be rescued.
There is a genderflip version of this trope, which is generally referred
to as the distressed
dude. The distressed dude has become more visible in recent years –
although it’s hardly a new idea – but it doesn’t have the same connotations as
the damsel in distress. There’s also the fact that the distressed dude if much
more likely to either rescue himself or be rescued by a male character than he is
to be rescued by a female character. On the occasion that the distressed dude
is rescued by a female character it is often played for laughs. So while it’s
nice to know that guys get captured too, the distressed dude is not nearly as
progressive as you might expect.
Due to the prevalence of this trope and increasingly genre savvy
audiences, the damsel in distress is often acknowledged and played with in some
way. She screams less and snarks more, occasionally she is allowed to help the
hero and she (and others) will often refer directly to her damsel status. But
these superficial changes and genre commentary don’t actually alter the
essential nature of the trope. A damsel who is aware she’s a damsel is still a
damsel.
Look I’m not saying that nothing bad should ever happen to female
characters, or that they can never be kidnapped or harassed or killed. And I am
not saying that if bad things do happen then male characters should just sit
around and do nothing. But we need to let go of the idea that in order to give
one character heroic agency you need to take it away from another character.
Part of the hero’s quest often involves him being captured or placed in a
perilous situation of some kind and occasionally they even need a little help
to get away. But the difference between the hero and the damsel is that they
hero is given the opportunity to get himself out whereas the damsel must wait
to be rescued.
This is problematic because it perpetuates the idea that women are
inherently victims, which gives the male characters a lot of power over them.
The damsel needs the hero because she will literally die without him whereas
the hero just wants his laptop back. That’s really not a good message to be
sending, let’s just not do that anymore.
