Heroine worship: How women conquered culture

Accelerated by the Me Too movement, women are finally evening the scoreline – at least when it comes to the worlds of film, television and literature.

Not that long ago, women were mostly corralled into a second tier of culture. Roles were stereotyped, the big jobs and acclaim nearly always went to the men – culture felt dominated by the guys from Hemingway to Hollywood.

That’s all changed, though. Instead of the male view of the world dominating culture, the female view of the world is now just as powerful.

From high art to low art, men are having to make space for talented women. The most complex, high-profile and nuanced roles are no longer the preserve of male actors. Women are now commanding the top spot and the most lavish praise, and revivifying culture from books to movies to TV.

Comic books

The latest step forward is to be found in the most unlikely place: the new Asterix book.

The Asterix books have been heavy on testosterone since the first edition in 1959. It was all fighting, banter and laddishness as the Gauls battled the Romans. But now, in its 38th book, the writers have taken a different approach. The series has its first female hero in its 60-year history with the publication of Asterix And The Chieftain’s Daughter.

Tweaking the gender imbalance in comic books may sound insignificant – but it’s not. Comics are one of the first places where boys and girls learn what the world expects of them. If comic books tell girls they can be heroes just as much as boys, then that change matters.

Some have called this addressing of the gender imbalance in culture “the Pink Wave” – but that’s a pretty stereotyped way to describe a cultural shift which is about killing off female stereotypes. What’s happened is that women are just getting the same chances as men when it comes to art and literature, and finally making the mark they’ve always deserved to make.

The blockbuster

In terms of the so-called “feminisation of culture”, nothing rocked the boat as much the all-female Ghostbusters. Mostly, the recent changes which have seen women increasingly taking their seats at the cultural top table have gone relatively unnoticed by the public – a TV series here would get a more balanced cast, or a feminist novel there would become a bestseller. But when a beloved movie franchise like Ghostbusters gets “girled”, people sit up, take notice, and have an opinion.

The female reboot came out in the summer of 2016, just a few months before Donald Trump’s infamous comments aired about grabbing women “by the p***y”. Looking back, it became an unlikely vanguard film for the changes that would follow.

The internet blew up with outraged men. Kristen Wiig, one of the stars, said the controversy was down to the simple fact “we were women”.

By the time 2018 rolled around and there was an all-female reboot of the Ocean’s movie franchise hardly anyone batted an eyelid. Ocean’s 8 swapped George Clooney and his gang for Sandra Bullock and hers. This year Dirty Rotten Scoundrels became the all-female The Hustle with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson. Mel Gibson’s What Women Want became Taraji P Henson’s What Men Want.

Art house

The problem with most blockbusters which got an all-female reboot is that they weren’t that good. But that’s half the point – women now get to make bad films, just the same as men. Failure isn’t about gender, it’s about talent.

Films like Lady Bird, however, are bravura works of art where men mostly take a back seat. The coming-of-age story about the relationship between a mother and daughter stars Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf. It was released in 2017 and showered with awards but missed out on the Oscar. It was beaten by The Shape Of Water – a film which ostensibly tells the story of a strange merman type creature but is actually driven by the emotional inner life of the female lead played by Sally Hawkins.

Not so long ago these stories would have been about the relationship between a father and son, or a man falling in love with a mermaid – remember Splash? Now the dynamic has shifted, and the stories are told from the perspective of women.

Of course, throughout history women have always created great art – it’s just most of it went unnoticed by the men who ran the cultural world. Still, many women were so talented that even ingrained discrimination couldn’t hold them back. When it came to writers like Sappho in the ancient world or Edith Wharton in the early 20th century, or actresses like Mary Pickford and Katherine Hepburn, the genius of some women was too great to be constrained.

Books

Literature has always had much more room for women than most of the other cultural worlds. But until recently the idea of what it meant to be a writer was dominated by the concept of “the great man of letters”.

In the 20th century, figures like Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, William Styron and John Updike were seen as the personification of literary genius. Today, Margaret Atwood, idolised for The Handmaid’s Tale, has replaced them. We now have women refashioning the very idea of storytelling. Madeline Miller is one of the most exciting writers around today. Her novel Circe reimagines the Greek myths – the foundation stone of Western literature – from a woman’s perspective. It’s inventive, new, and quietly revolutionary in its view of men and women.

Pat Barker, one of Britain’s greatest writers, has retold the Trojan war from a woman’s point of view in her latest book The Silence Of The Girls. Barker takes one of the minor characters in the Iliad, the enslaved woman Briseis, and tells a story of war stripped of glamour and reduced to ugly, bestial horror.

However, it’s in mid-market fiction where you’ll find the real dominance of women. Just think of the biggest titles of recent years: Gone Girl, The Girl On The Train, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It’s a crude and reductive way to put it, but by and large it’s women who are reading, writing and publishing fiction these days.

The stage

The new stage musical & Juliet has just premiered in the UK. It takes Shakespeare’s play Romeo And Juliet and imagines what would have happened if Juliet hadn’t killed herself but realised – quite rightly – that she should go on living even if her young lover was dead.

It’s a jukebox musical – like Mamma Mia – and cleverly plays with big female anthems by artists like Britney Spears. In the play, Juliet gets over the loss of Romeo by heading off to Paris to party with friends. It may just be highly enjoyable bubblegum entertainment, but the musical shows that you can take a cultural classic, lop off its male centre, give it a female twist and it will still appeal to the masses. It’s a sign that the feminisation of culture isn’t just ubiquitous, it’s now almost pretty much expected.

Heroes and villains

The damsel in distress. It may well be a story as old as time – but it now looks like time’s up on what’s become the ultimate cultural cliche.

Women are no longer frail creatures who need a man to save them. Women can be utter monsters now too. Take Killing Eve, developed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge – now one of the biggest and most powerful names in British TV. It’s an intensely female story.

The villain is a true psychopath – Villanelle, played with impish sadism by Jodie Comer – murderously besotted by the morally ambiguous “hero” Eve, played by Sandra Oh. By rights, Villanelle should be in the cell next door to Hannibal Lecter – she’s a vicious predator who upends every female stereotype.

Heroes have changed too. Superhero movies are now yawningly prevalent, but the most interesting films in the genre focus on women. Wonder Woman – directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Godot in 2017 – took all the tropes of the superhero movie, all the wham-bam explosions and the threats to humanity, and wrapped it up in a story which said “if women ran the world there would be far fewer wars”.

The best TV shows present women as good, bad and indifferent – just as men have been presented for generations. Game Of Thrones is probably the clearest example. You’ve truly monstrous women like Cersei, the wicked queen, brave women like Sansa Stark, morally dubious women like Arya Stark, and women who go from victim to villain and hero to monster all in one character arc like Daenerys Targaryen.

Television

TV is perhaps where the most interesting changes are to be found. Netflix seems to specialise in analysing the female experience. Series such as 13 Reasons Why and Unbelievable explore rape, bullying, sex, and violence all from the perspective of women. The fact that such shows target a youth market means the message about sexual violence is reaching young men in a way previous generations of boys never experienced.

Big Little Lies has a stellar cast of women including Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern and Meryl Streep. The women are wrapped up in a murder investigation, and the male actors provide the supporting parts. The Vikings mini-series features one of the most powerful female characters ever to appear on screen: Lagertha, the Warrior Queen. She’s a leader who never compromises her femininity, and a loving mother who would happily put your head on a spike.

It’s almost as if every day a new show appears where producers have thought “hang on, this part was written for a man, but it could easily be a woman – in fact, it should be a woman”. So when a series like The I-Land arrived on Netflix not so long ago, the fact that it featured a violent, dark, unlikeable female lead was no surprise. That’s not to say The I-Land is good – it’s really bad, but not because of the women in the show, because of the terrible writing ... by a man.

Outlander comes with an overt female gaze. Where once the camera lingered over women’s bodies, in Outlander it ogles Sam Heughan. Written by a woman, Diana Gabaldon, the story is driven by a woman, Caitriona Balfe playing Claire Randall. Roles are pretty much reversed. Heughan’s character Jamie Fraser is raped and abused; Claire is the rational voice of intelligence and wisdom.

In the current TV adaptation of The Name Of The Rose, female characters have been added and enriched to make up for the quite large flaws in a great work of literature. In Umberto Eco’s novel, and the film version starring Sean Connery, women were pretty much an afterthought, with the one proper female character – the Rose of the title – being little more than a sex symbol. Now, the new TV series has given the Rose a deep backstory and invented a swashbuckling female assassin to round out the drama.

Comedy

Ten years ago we had The Inbetweeners. Today, we have Derry Girls. In truth, there’s not that much difference in the two shows – both are about a group of foul-mouthed kids. What matters is that among all the new comedy series arriving on our screens, it’s a story about a group of girls that’s been the biggest hit.

If this had been Derry Boys, it would all have felt a bit tired. But with the growing influence of women in culture, we’re hungry for more female-centric stories. We’ve had the dramas and the thrillers, now we want women to make us laugh. Queue the success of comedies like Lena Dunham’s Girls, and Fleabag, the dirty, messy, angry, horny tale of a modern woman – also by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Given the success of women in comedy today, it’s bizarre to imagine that just a few years ago the nation was still talking about whether “women were funny”.

The final frontier

Women have even managed to add some nuance to the ultra-blokeishness of computer games. Lara Croft from Tomb Raider is now a brave young woman in sensible clothes, not a pixelated pin-up. Most games today feature the option to play as a woman rather than just a man as before.

However, there’s no greater bastion of the male in modern culture than James Bond – although it looks like women are coming to conquer that citadel as well. That’s definitely a good thing. Even from the point of view of most teenage boys, Bond has become a bit daft. He’s a walking stereotype.

Just this week, Lashana Lynch was attracting hate over reports she’ll take on the role of 007. However, once Bond is female, women in culture can pretty much declare Mission Accomplished.