Holding Out For A Hero

I'm going to share an embarassing secret with you: when I was just a wee lass (of approximately 8-10 years of age), I played Power Rangers with my brother. And who did I always want to play? The pink one.

Yes, little did I know that my future gender-norm-unravelling feminist self would cringe at this memory. An article in this past weekend's New York Times Magazine made me think about this today. The author writes about the dearth of female superheros for little girls to look up to these days--a lack of "larger-than-life heroes, especially in the all-important realm of fantasy, where they spend so much of their free time." Where are the Wonderwomen of yesteryear?

I now wonder whether the lack of true women superheroes in my childhood has affected me. Power Rangers gave us the option of two girls--one a pink cheerleader with a penchant for hair ribbons and ponytails, the other smart and slightly dull, perpetuating the notion that you had to pick between the two. But I'm not sure that this emphasis on a one-dimensional definition of femininity is reflected in my adolescence. I'm sure that I filled a quota of nail polish experimentation in my salad days, but I recall also spending much of my free time messing with test tubes in my long-suffering mother's laboratory and devouring piles of library books in several sittings. I was, in short, a pretty rounded kid.

This is not to say that we should stop striving to construct our young girls' role models of stronger stuff than Hannah Montana. But I'm confident that young girls have plenty of female identifiers upon which to feed their imaginations--astronauts and presidential candidates and Hermione Grangers.

If that fails, I can tour elementary schools nationwide with my pink Power Ranger action figure and some Judith Butler--think that'll do the trick?