Why the Bad Female Leader Is Everywhere Onscreen

why is hollywood so against women being in charge god never intended a woman to rule this land she is the antichrist in recent years tv and movies have focused a lot on the figure of the failed or bad female ruler from making daenerys the ultimate villain of game of thrones to centering dramatizations of real-life cautionary tales like elizabeth holmes popular stories tend to paint women leaders as either too idealistic and emotional ruthless conniving lady macbeth types or self-serving hypocritical girl bosses who tout their gender as a reason to trust them but turn out to be corrupt frauds do you hold yourself responsible for not having critical oversight i'm i'm a better leader now and like i said it's devastating all this is in contrast to plentiful examples of real women past and present who have excelled as level-headed intelligent and inspirational leaders historically women have had less opportunity to take power but when given the chance they've proved just as effective as men and some more so here's our take on the over-represented trope of the dangerous female leader and what we really see happen when women take the reins but for better or worse the crown has landed on my head and i say we go fictional female leaders get painted with the common misogynistic stereotypes that plague all women i can tell you're very emotional because i am very emotional too about this issue women in power are depicted as driven by emotions that make them unreliable if not crazy daenerys targaryen on game of thrones initially presents as a strong-willed self-possessed and effective ruler who hopes to break the wheel of westeros's oppressive government but by the end of the series her urge for revenge turns her into an unstable tyrant who senselessly burns down an entire city in a fit of sudden rage other fictional female rulers lean into a different stereotype of power seeking women as being unnaturally cold and conniving this characterization has its most iconic roots in lady macbeth a woman who manipulates her husband into committing murder [Music] one of the core takeaways and stories about this type of character is that by being so ruthless and ambitious she's trying to detach from her very womanhood on sex me here and fill me from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty the long shadow of lady macbeth strongly informs daenerys primary foil throughout game of thrones cersei lannister we start the series with glimpses of how cersei is trapped in her marriage to king robert i should wear the armor and you the gown which she eventually manages to maneuver her way out of by getting him fatally wounded in a hunting accident through years of machinations she becomes queen in her own right in some ways cersei is the best player of the game of thrones but only because she has no morals holding her back she's willing to do absolutely anything for power including mass murder you felt good to imagine their shock and their pain no thought has ever given me greater joy house of cards presents a similar character in claire underwood who starts out the series ruthlessly ambitious and cold his eyes and only becomes more machiavellian and power-hungry as time goes on presidents aren't allowed to be human you have to choose power or love female rulers are also often depicted as being hypocrites who use nice-sounding rhetoric to gain power then prove to be even worse than the guys of course there have been high profile cases of bad girl bosses in the last decade who have made big promises and failed to live up to their own hype the verdict is in the disgraced theranos founder and ceo found guilty on four of 11 counts in her landmark silicon valley fraud case but our media and pop culture seem set on foregrounding and revisiting these examples repeatedly unpacking exactly what was so bad about them sometimes it's that their dreams are too big and they have too much hubris to listen to the smart people around them or see their own limitations our mission is to unleash every child's superpowers you can't put a price tag on that other times this character is portrayed as just lacking in some basic moral feeling or decency president coyne in the hunger games like daenerys starts out acting like a capable empathetic ruler helping lead the resistance against president snow and the institution of the hunger games miss everdeen this revolution is about everyone it's about all of us and we need a voice but once snow is defeated coin plans yet another hunger games as a way to consolidate her own power this time using the children of the vanquished rulers in order to enact revenge she even stages a false flag operation by bombing and killing civilians she never liked you she doesn't like anybody or anything she can't control there are structural reasons that female leaders may feel more pressure to compromise their ideals and harden themselves against a hostile work environment but instead of thoughtful investigations of that so much of the time we just get power-hungry female characters who are cartoonishly hypocritical and lacking moral boundaries or feelings rebecca webb the desperate ceo of a soul mate finding company in the netflix series the one leaps pretty suddenly to killing one of her best friends when he threatens her business don't we don't get him help he's gonna die maybe this is for the best on prison break vice president caroline reynolds actually poisons the president in order to get what she wants and you said i couldn't get things done madam vice president perhaps we can get together and discuss how to move it is president now madam the female ruler is held to an impossible standard that she should be a mythically feminine caretaker who's simultaneously free from emotion unflappably logical but never cold and always entirely authentic and selfless in helping other women no matter how difficult it is for her to rise up or maintain power in the first place clearly this standard is built for women to fail it and thereby reinforce our cultural expectation of the untrustworthy female leader how about you are you the lady of your manner but just need the title to match this video sponsor established titles can actually make it happen the premise is simple there's an ancient scottish custom which allows landowners to call themselves lord or lady established titles facilitates the purchase of small plots of scottish land so that you can get the title you deserve it means you can officially change your name to lord or lady and get it on your credit card your plane tickets even your dating profile you'll get at least one square foot of dedicated land on a private estate in edelston scotland plus an official certificate featuring a unique plot number with which you can see the exact location of your land and this is pretty cool too the first 200 people purchasing a title pack using my link will be within a few minutes of my plot just think a group of us film analysis fans all in one place 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built on cheryl sandberg's book lean in to argue that women being individually successful is politically important sandberg and the movement did identify some pervasive stereotypes and obstacles facing women as a man gets more successful he is better liked by men and women and as a woman gets more successful she is less liked but the promise of the girl boss was that by simply occupying the same positions as men women could make things better for the world and unfortunately whatever individual successes high-profile girl bosses achieved didn't seem to change anything structurally besides putting a woman on top sandberg is leaving meta under scrutiny about whether she inappropriately used company resources to focus on building her own personal brand senator kirsten cinema uses girl boss energy to attract fun headlines about herself as a disrupter but she's largely channeled that energy into obstructing agendas for change like when she voted down a motion for a 15 minimum wage miss cinema no and a whole series of other women ceos have faced public fails and been criticized for fostering toxic work environments in sharp contrast to their promises of being better ceo steph cory was going into slack and on public channels really berating them when they made mistakes asking them to work harder and longer these failures aren't necessarily rare outliers either but a feature of powerful women who try to follow the old school playbook still pop culture has focused perhaps a bit too intently and gleefully on fallen girl bosses and the stream of depictions and media attention end up replicating the same misogyny we were trying to overcome in the first place women working in silicon valley have commented that they face even more intense scrutiny now finding themselves constantly compared to the specter of elizabeth holmes when done right stories about flawed female leaders can hit on some important insights about why things go wrong for example because women are so often denied power some may be willing to go further to hold on to it or some feel they need to become cruel hard or ruthless in order to overcome structural obstacles with all due respect sir i have done battle every single day of my life the crown offers a three-dimensional exploration of how british prime minister margaret thatcher's conservative anti-feminist stances were partially formed by complex factors like her class background and having to constantly watch her back with the male politicians around her the way those men patronize me lick to me is squires and grandes upperclass bastards the dropout illuminates how holmes case is incredibly complicated it's clear that she did face sexism and at the same time was able to benefit from being a pretty young woman who could charm investors and board members she was influenced by successful male examples into believing that selling a big idea before she had the science was just good business and because people saw her as an inexperienced little girl she felt she had to hide it when she was out of her depth yet while all of that's true none of it excuses the clear ethical transgression she as an individual chose to engage in and she also got ahead by buying into the whole pernicious girl boss myth that feminism is fundamentally about your own self-interest the dropout cuts to the heart of that girl boss mythos in its first episode when elizabeth naively assumes that phyllis gardner a female professor at stanford will be eager to help her just by virtue of their shared gender but gardner is one of the few people who sees from the start that holmes is trying to skip ahead to major success before putting in the necessary time for study and research i just saw it as a as a woman as a woman let me explain something to you you don't get to skip any steps you have to do the work still while everyone loves a good rise and fall story why aren't we collectively giving the same level of attention to the stories of the women who do get it done this primarily negative focus on female leaders is especially frustrating because many of the major historical and contemporary examples of female rulers are in fact positive examples and we can see this in plenty of stories about historical women leaders depictions of queen elizabeth ii emphasize her being grounded and committed to her duty as the queen i declare that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service the crown shows many of the ways elizabeth had to navigate double standards and higher expectations for women but still managed to pull it off the trouble is i have the sort of faces if i'm not smiling and everyone says it wasn't she cross numerous films and shows spotlight how queen elizabeth the first broke the mold as an exceptionally accomplished queen meanwhile the great offers a highly divergent stylized version of catherine the great to paint an aspirational picture of an idealistic ruler who is passionate about wanting to rule well the actual history of catherine's reign is complicated and the show's catherine certainly isn't perfect either she's pulled between her personal idealism and the lures of pragmatism cynicism and revenge but overall the great creates a version of catherine who embodies the potential that women have to rule and usher in progress most women die with an unsaid better idea in their hearts many historical female rulers were royals who took power by virtue of their birth and rose to meet the moment rather than campaigning to prove merit in advance the fact that powerful and competent women have frequently gained their position by accident is reflected in fictional american presidents on tv shows like commander-in-chief quantico and madame secretary all of whom take the job when the male president is incapacitated or forced to resign plenty of countries in europe and around the world have elected women to their top jobs yet we seem further than ever from seeing a woman take over the white house in america replenish such a nasty trust fund many if not most fictional female presidents are loose analogs to hillary clinton because for years clinton was the only female politician even imaginable as a potential president and after clinton's 2016 electoral loss many people seemed to decide the prospect of electing a female president was doomed so now we're in a post-hillary post-girl boss post-lean-in moment where do we go from here part of the solution might be avoiding our instinct to lionize people who hold power simply because they might be a good example and then setting up the inevitable disappointment when they don't turn out to be a perfect savior of humankind there are clearly effective and competent female rulers at least on the same level as male ones but if we interrogate the nature of power itself the truth is there might not be such a thing as a totally good ruler at all my turn [Music] thanks for watching the take make sure to subscribe and let us know what you want the take on next [Music] so you

Channel: The Take

Views: 94,760

Keywords: Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Claire underwood, Rebecca The One, Coin Hunger Games, Rebekah Neumann WeCrashed, Queen Elizabeth, The Great, The Favourite, Political Animals, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Holmes, Sophia Amuruso, Steph Korey, Sheryl Sandberg, Audrey Gelman, Miki Agrawal, Reynolds Prison Break, game of thrones, the hunger games, sex education, the dropout, house of cards, lady macbeth, angela merkel, michelle bachelet, female ruler, leader, girlboss

Id: Z5sKql97P94

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 03 2022