Women’s Day

Happy International Women’s Day everyone.  A day on which we recognize how far we have progressed from thirty shekels, and how much more work is still to be done. Usually, I refrain from discussing fiction on this blog; I have no interest in being a media critic. A compelling story at the right time, with characters you connect with, can make a huge impact on your life. That’s why people can react with so much zeal and tenacity to a critic: the meaning of the art is very personal. I have a lot of sympathy for this, I’m likewise disinclined to listen to some dimwit oafishly lambasting stories that are close to my heart. A political blog is tiresome enough, you don’t need me to opine fastidiously on the missed opportunities for character development in a plot. And, although I won’t abandon that ambition today, I will bend my rule slightly. Because I think it’s worth pointing out how much progress could yet be made for women in fiction. There are some truly superb and heroic female characters out there, my three favorite fictional characters of all time are women (but two of them didn’t get much time in the spotlight, a consequence of my preference for characters over story). Yet there are some roles women just haven’t gotten to portray, my go-to example is Jason Bourne. Watch the first or second Bourne movie and gender-swap him in your head; have you ever seen a woman rely on her training, skill, and intuition like that? There are many more characters out there that would fare brilliantly being of the opposite sex and are types of roles women don’t get to portray. I encourage you to think of some, just use your imagination. For all of this ostensible appetite in the entertainment industry for powerful feminists, the results can often be a bit confounding. One example of this happens to be Irene Adler from the Sherlock Holmes series. She first appeared in A Scandal in Bohemia, written by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1891. Spoilers ahead as I will summarize the story for you… Sherlock Holmes gets hired by the king of Bohemia to find an “intimate” photograph of him and his previous secret girlfriend, Irene Adler. A mind game between Sherlock Holmes and a woman, what could be easier? Holmes disguises himself and meets with Adler, he is unsurprised when he deduces the secret location of the photograph, but when he smugly returns with Watson and the king, he finds a letter addressed to him. Adler saw through him and writes that she won’t blackmail the king or ruin his marriage but will keep the picture, as she had, for insurance. The king is pleased and offers Sherlock a buffet of riches, but Sherlock only asks to keep a picture of Irene. He underestimated a woman to his peril, and she ends up humbling him. For a nineteenth-century story written by a man, it’s quite progressive. Fast forward to 2012, when season 2 of BBC’s Sherlock aired A Scandal in Belgravia, a modern take on the story which featured Adler as a dominatrix as opposed to an opera singer. When Holmes first meets her, she is completely naked. And the measurements of her breasts, end up being the code to the safe. The fact that sex typifies her character wouldn’t even be such an issue but for the ending; she almost ends up beating Sherlock but makes one fatal flaw: emotion. Sherlock tells her she could have set her password as any random phrase and she would have won, but she suffers from something he does not—love. The code is S-H-E-R(locked). She tearfully begs him not to deprive her of her blackmail, her “protection,” as without it she would surely be killed by the men she blackmailed. The episode ends with Sherlock secretly and gallantly saving her from execution. Watson does remark how Sherlock has a deep respect for her, but she doesn’t humble him, does she? It’s pretty vacuous when he bested the lady by making her fall head-over-heels for him. So just keep in mind, for all the progress we’ve made for women’s rights in the West, we can still be out- feminist by a man from 1891.