Grrrl Power in Disney's Prince of Persia

Later this month, Disney is releasing the film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, based on the similarly named adventure video game series. When I saw the trailer, I noticed that it looks as if the main female character, Princess Tamina, has been turned into an action girl. She can be seen wielding a sword and fighting with it. It's interesting to contrast her role with those of women in the Prince of Persia video games.

In the game in which the movie appears to have been based, the eponymous Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, there was a female protagonist (Farah) who followed the Prince, but she was an archer. Also, in the 2008 reboot, simply titled Prince of Persia, there was a woman (Elika) who accompanied the Prince, but she was a magic-user, not a warrior. Both of them essentially ended up as damsels in distress, though not in the traditional manner.

Evidentally, Disney decided that female archers and mages don't have enough "grrrl power" so they turned her into a warrior. I'm not really surprised, since Disney has made a habit out of making anachronistic "empowered woman" characters, such as in Pirates of the Carribean and Alice and Wonderland. And in modern film and TV, writers are not creative enough to demonstrate a woman's empowerment besides having them kill one or more men in physical combat.

Also, in the video game and its sequels, there were female villains and generic enemies - corrupted harem concubines and sorceresses, among others. Somehow, I doubt that there will be any female enemies in the film. Female enemies are ubiquitous in video games, but are nonexistent in action and adventure movies.

Remember, according to Hollywood, even though female-on-male violence is "empowering" and "kick-ass," male-on-female violence is "abusive" and "misgynistic." And in Hollywood, if one woman dies it's a tragedy (unless an Action Girl kills her), but if a dozen men die it's entertainment. Disney in particular has been promoting both of those (look at Pirates of the Carribean for plenty of examples).

On the good side, it looks as if Disney is depicting the Persians as white, unlike in other films such as Alexander where the Iranian wife of Alexander the Great was played by a mulatto and in 300 where they were a motley assortment of dark-skinned peoples.

More on Female Violence in the Media

Last Friday I wrote a post about the prevalence of female violence against men in the media and the double standards regarding it versus the portrayal of male violence against women. Then later in the weekend, I saw the first episode of Farscape for the very first time (yes, I realize that it came out eleven years ago). Early on, there's a scene where a human man from Earth is in a cell in an alien ship with a figure in a flight suit and helmet. The person takes off their helmet, revealing a female human face. The man goes over to talk to her and the woman apparently thinks he's a deserter or spy and proceeds to attack him by kneeing him, punching him, knocking him to the ground, and standing over him with her foot on top of him. Naturally, she suffers no consequences for her brutal assault, whereas in TV and film, any man who merely hits a woman will have something bad happen to him, usually at the hands of the woman he hit and probably involving a groin kick.

Now, if the roles were reversed, even today feminist blogs would still be ranting about this as evidence of the "prevalence" of "violence against women" in movies and TV. Instead, this kind of assault is viewed as empowering grrl power, even though the man basically did nothing wrong. Indeed, it seems to be a requirement that if a woman is to be shown as a "strong, empowered woman" she has to beat up one or more men. The only exception I can think to this trope is in Starship Troopers (the movie, not the book) when Dizzy fights a drill sergeant for the right to join his training unit... and ends up loosing (though the drill sergeant respects her and ends up accepting her into the unit).

I've noticed that a lot of this grrrl power and glamorized female-on-male violence comes from movies and TV directed at nerds, such as sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book films (such as in Iron Man 2 - discussed today by Elusive Wapiti at The Spearhead). For a while I've been thinking that Ferdinand Bardamu was correct when he called gamers and nerds manginas over at The Spearhead and that I was wrong when I defended them.