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PotpourriThe Pot Pourri Page can contain anything. This is where you will find comments on any subject under the sun. If something happens in the world that catches my imagination, then here's where it will be. Previous topics will be found in the archives. Feel free to e-mail any comments to me. Lara, Xena, Chyna and Seven: Modern Pop-Culture And The Return Of The AmazonsLast Christmas, I decided it was time to take the plunge and buy my daughter a PlayStation. The price was $100 less than last year and there were plenty of games to be bought for under $20. So, on Christmas Day, the TV became the focus of attention as we all sat around watching my daughter play “Spiro the Dragon.” It was during this time that I realized that video games can actually be a family activity rather than some autistic, solipsistic enterprise that cuts the player off from the rest of the world. As my daughter flew around picking up jewels, the rest of us tried to solve various puzzles that came up in the game. For example, on one level, we had searched everywhere we could find, collected all the treasure we could, yet we were still 5 jewels short of 100%. So, we spent almost an hour checking and rechecking, investigating possible locations for hidden treasure, and forcing Spiro to perform a range of actions to try and open walls. Eventually, we discovered that you had to jump off a cliff edge an then swing back inwards to find a hidden ledge. We hooted with delight, collected the missing jewels, and made our way to a new level. It was without doubt a family event.
The character of Lara Croft is interesting, because she is a cultural phenomenon. She has appeared on over 200 magazine covers, including Time, and Rolling Stone; she was voted “Sexiest Woman of the Year” by Details magazine; she has over 1000 fan sites on the Internet; and she also holds the Guinness record for “greatest cyberbabe.” Not bad for a video-game character. An Internet survey revealed that 21% of players are teenagers, but 38% are in their 20s and another 22% in their 30s. Add to that the figure that overall, 71% of the players are male. We therefore see a pattern that suggests Lara is a peculiar phenomenon that has developed out of the computer world - the digital sex object. This got me to thinking about placing Lara within a broader, popular framework. As a follower of Pop Culture who is grounded in the classics and stuck amongst the 19th century Romantics, I saw Lara as just one manifestation of a wider cultural event; the rise of the Pop Culture Amazon. In her seminal book, Sexual Personae, feminist critic extraordinary Camille Paglia defines the classical Amazon persona as follows: “She is called megathumous, dauntless, fearless; mnesimache, war-lustful; anandos, living without men; styganor, man-hating; androdamos, man-subduing; kreobotos, flesh-devouring; androdaiktos, androktonos, deianeira, man-murdering.[1]” Such descriptions tend to make the Amazon appear totally unfeminine and, as such, would be unappealing to men. Yet the modern Amazon is far from being repulsive. In fact, physically, she is in many ways super-feminine. Way back in 1969, Desmond Morris wrote The Human Zoo, a follow-up to the ground-breaking The Naked Ape. In the Human Zoo he talks about a phenomenon called “super-normal stimuli,” which he defines as being based on the assumption that “...if natural normal stimuli produce normal responses, then super-normal stimuli should produce supernormal responses(p.198)[2].” He then goes on to apply this to sexual behavior. For example, Morris describes how the adolescent female develops her breasts and hips as she becomes a woman, both these features being a normal stimulus for male sexual responses. However, he says that she can “...strengthen her sexual signals by exaggerating these features. She can raise, pad, or inflate her breasts in a variety of ways (p.204).[3] It takes no time at all to see that the modern pop-culture Amazon makes use of the supernormal stimulus. Lara-watchers have noted how her upper physical attributes have developed with each new game released. There is even a sub-culture of gamers who play “Nude Raider,” a version of the standard game that is hacked into so that Lara appears naked. And even in the standard games, Lara's only significant relationships with men tend to end in her unloading a pistol into them - androktonos indeed!
And how about the women of the World Wrestling Federation. Xena lookalike, Chyna, conforms superbly to the Amazon persona, particularly at a physical level. Like the classical Amazons, she plays the role of being strong, independent, and powerful. It is possible to go on with other examples of the modern Amazon. The cartoon, and later TV series, of Wonder Woman is on of the earlier manifestations, with the Amazonian connection being explicit. In the 60s, the TV series The Avengers introduced the world to the leather-clad Amazon Emma Peel, played by Diana(!!) Rigg. The 70s and 80s had woman represented in a fluffy, non-Amazonian way. But mid-90s on has seen a re-emergence of the powerful woman. Even the heavily-panned Barb Wire with Pamela Anderson Lee was nothing more than another incarnation of the Amazon mythology (as well as a transparent remake of Casablanca but without the class!) So is the rise of the modern pop-culture Amazon simply a sexist male reaction to the 80s feminist PC culture, where all men were potential rapists and all sex simply a form of power struggle between Us and Them? Or is there something deeper? Perhaps we are seeing a move towards a recognition of a Dionysian pagan undercurrent in human behavior, which has always been there but is constantly being suppressed by civilized mores. After all, the myth of the Amazon has been around for thousands of years. The classical story of Diana, the Amazon Huntress, and Actaeon, the son of Cadmus, has been around since the time of the early Greeks. In this story, Diana is bathing along with her handmaidens, when Actaeon stumbles across her by accident. She flicked water in his face whereupon he turned into a stag. Not content with that, “Diana also placed fear in his heart (p.90)[4].” Poor Actaeon runs off, scared out of his wits, into a pack of his own hunting dogs. Needless to say he dies am horrific death, torn to pieces slowly - “Some say, not till he died of many wounds was angry Goddess of the Arrows pleased (p.92)[5].” The modern Amazon therefore combines the ferocity of Diana with the supernormal sexual stimulus, creating a figure to be both feared and desired at the same time - a contradiction. And it is the contradictory nature of this modern image that appeals. She may also present a problem to some feminists who subjugate sexual instincts to be replaced by Power Relationships because the supernormal sexuality is blatant, yet the personal strength and power of this modern Amazon would make her the dominant partner in relationship to a man, rather than a passive object. References [1] Paglia, Camille (1990) Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from
Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Vintage Books: New York. Page 71. Recommended Sites
Recommended BooksThe Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, 1998. Published by Penguin Books. Rational, skeptical analyses of irrational beliefs; astrology, ESP, aliens, crystals and such like. Should be obligatory reading for New Age whackos! The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim. Published by Penguin Books. Winner of the Critics' Choice Prize for the best work of criticism published in the US in 1976. Looks at fairy stories from a psychoanalytical perspective. A fascinating book.Fun Stuff
Copyright Russell T. Cross June 2000 |
The
same is now happening with another game called Tomb Raider. In
this, the player manipulates a character called Lara Croft in an “Indiana
Jones” type quest through caves, temples and ancient cities to
find hidden artifacts. The role of Lara is invariably played by myself,
with my wife and daughters looking on, suggesting where to go an what
to do.
Along
with the digital Lara, there is fleshier exemplar of the modern Amazon
in Xena; Warrior Princess. This popular syndicated show recounts
the exploits of Xena, played by Lucy Lawless, who battles both humans
and gods wearing little more than a leather bodice, short skirt and
boots. As with Lara, apart from what may be best described as “token”
relationships with men, Xena frequently expressed her feelings toward
men using a sword. Indeed, within the Xena-Fan World there are frequent
on-line discussions about her subliminal lesbian relationship with her
partner, Gabrielle. This “apartness-from-men” further strengthens
her Amazonian persona.
Other
contemporary examples of the supernormal Amazon exist in pop culture.
The popular science fiction series, Star Trek Voyager saw its
ratings rise demonstrably after the introduction of a new character,
Seven of Nine, played by Jeri Ryan. Originally a half-human-half-robot
character, she became a blond Amazon clad in a spray-on body-stocking
and high-heels. Her character follows the Amazonian pattern of being
apart from men and domineering. She is both physically and mentally
stronger than many of her male crew-members on the starship.
