The Culture: Mainstream television beginning to challenge established gender roles

I'm not opposed to the damsel-in-distress paradigm per se — Disney movies are great for a reason — but sooner or later it gets boring.

That’s why I love seeing new kinds of female characters. And luckily, we live in time where women are emerging as a powerful force in entertainment.

Television is changing. In the past few years especially, female roles have expanded. Women are becoming leading comedians and action heroines. They can crack jokes, fire guns and take on responsibilities traditionally reserved for men.

This January, we saw Tina Fey and Amy Poehler shine as hosts at the Golden Globes.

Their respective shows, Parks and Recreation and the recently-retired 30 Rock are female-driven comedy triumphs. Both share a kind of self-mocking liberalism. At the same time that they make fun of flawed but determined women, they ultimately assert a powerful feminist perspective.

In Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler plays Leslie Knope, a local government employee who is as naïve and overly-cheerful as she is self-sufficient and ambitious. She is also extremely funny, provoking the audience to laugh both with and at her.

Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon may mark the height (so far) of post-feminist comedy. Lemon is a paradox: single, successful and creative, but in many ways a confused mess. 30 Rock makes her an amusing vehicle for exploring the complexities of modern feminism.

But above all, Liz Lemon is lovable. Although her problems are often absurd, they still manage to remain raw and relatable.

Also, it helps that Tina Fey was the boss at 30 Rock (as she’ll tell you in her wonderful book, Bossypants, which presents its own spin on feminism).

What Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock do best is craft distinctive female characters with enough personality to drive a TV show.

We’ve seen the nice, pretty girl with the stock insecurities. Or the hot girl whose contribution to comedy is to make men act stupid.

That is not Leslie or Liz.

Instead, these women are unique, pathetic, heroic and hilarious.

Hopefully, 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation indicate a positive trend. But the future outside the world of comedy also appears bright.

This is undoubtedly thanks in part to the great writer/director/producer Joss Whedon. One cannot discuss feminism in television without giving him due credit.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Whedon creates an unparalleled female heroine. Buffy doesn’t really want to, but she fights monsters and saves people. And she’s really good at it. She is a former cheerleader, cute and blonde, but also deadly.

And not in a clichéd, over-sexed femme-fatale sort of way.

Buffy is what happens when you give immense power to a young woman. She faces innumerable setbacks, but ultimately rises to the occasion. In the process, she becomes a hero of comic book proportions.

As she tells one particularly nasty vampire, “I am the thing that monsters have nightmares about.”

Besides Buffy, Whedon is also responsible for a host of other complex female characters.

In fact, tomes have been written about this guy’s feminism. (Look it up, it’s all over the Internet.)

His shows, including the Buffy spin-off, Angel, and the cult classic, Firefly, undermine female stereotypes by revealing women’s strength.

To Whedon, women are heroes, but he never forgets their humanity. His female characters aren’t perfect or impenetrable, but they wear their vulnerabilities with an undeniable sense of power.

In addition to Joss Whedon’s heroines, the sci-fi/fantasy world offers other interesting women.

For me, the biggest challenge to established gender roles seems to come from another member of this genre, the surprisingly un-famous Fringe (which as of this January, has just left the air).

Besides being a fantastic show (season three is some of the best television I’ve ever seen), Fringe is remarkable because of its central character, Olivia Dunham.

Olivia is an FBI agent who investigates inexplicable phenomenon. She is assisted by Peter and Walter Bishop, a father-son team that uses fringe science to fix the problems of one or more universes.

The first thing that struck me about Olivia was her image. Now I realize reducing women to their superficial qualities is not exactly helping my cause, but Olivia’s appearance is worth mentioning because it differs from the norm.

The actress, Anna Torv, is an attractive blonde woman, but the show does next to nothing to make her on-screen perfect. Olivia hardly wears any makeup and her clothes are stiff and boring. Half the time, her hair is in a simple unbecoming ponytail. All in all, she remains fairly unsexualized.

To watch a show where a female character is a person before a sex object is still a novelty, so I find Fringe especially refreshing.

Next is her demeanor. Olivia carries herself with assertiveness and purpose. She is somewhat stoic, and even the way she walks and speaks doesn’t fit a narrow definition of feminine.

On the other hand, Olivia embraces certain aspects of her femininity and even challenges the way emotions are dismissed in the workplace.

For example, she tells her boss, “I understand that you think I acted too emotionally. And putting aside the fact that men always say that about women they work with, I’ll get straight to the point. I am emotional. I do bring it into my work. It’s what motivates me.”

Olivia is also great with children. But none of this gets in the way of the fact that she is strong, driven and good at her job.

Fringe refuses to stick to gender stereotypes. In fact, it’s mostly Olivia who saves the guys, putting her in the traditionally masculine role.

I also remember one instance where Olivia calls her partner and love-interest Peter for help when her apartment is broken into, but she’s already got the bad guy immobilized by the time Peter arrives.

It’s a promising time for women in entertainment, and with more and more barriers being knocked down, we can hope to see strong, complicated female characters become a television staple.