top five fictional ladies that changed my life

I grew up with some pretty cool fictional ladies in my media. Though they were far outnumbered by vapid, two-dimensional background girls, we’ve been blessed by quite a few gems. This is my list of the top five awesome fictional ladies.

5) Usagi Tsukino/ Serena Tsukin, Sailor Moon

If you watched Sailor Moon without the scenes in which Serena became Sailor Moon and was a total badass, you would’ve never guessed she could be someone who saved the world. She was a hungry, whiny crybaby who spent all of her time playing video games, reading manga or sleeping and didn’t do very well in school (note: this is me. All of this is me.)

(Look how cute she is, too!)

As Sailor Moon, Serena was a leader- she was strong, and she could kick ass- but that didn’t mean she had to be a leader all the time. She wasn’t always put together and her life wasn’t planned out, but she was still incredible when she was needed.

 4) Mabel Pines, Gravity Falls 

Mabel Pines is absolutely wild. Her fashion choices include nacho earrings, light-up sweaters, and huge hair bows. She’s as stereotypical tween as they come; socially awkward, boy crazy, and really just weird.

Who wants to buy me this sweater?

Mabel might not look very threatening, but she’s smart and silly and she’s able to figure her way through the mysteries she comes across with her twin brother because of her eccentric personality, not despite it. Mabel is so infectiously loyal, positive, and loving, it’s hard to end an episode without a huge smile.

3) Daria Morgendorffer, Daria

Daria Morgendorffer is everything I wish I could be. She’s tough, she’s sarcastic, and she just doesn’t care. Her fuck-it-all attitude is so refreshing not only because it’s not a quality we usually see in fictional girls, but because it’s in the protagonist. She wasn’t a weird side character who had one-liners for the audience to laugh at, she was the normal one surrounded by bland and one-dimensional secondary characters who usually weren’t very smart.

Her attitude gives me much happiness.

Sure, Daria was a social outcast, but she didn’t care, and that made her cool. 

2) Princess Jasmine, Aladdin

Now I know what you must be thinking. A princess? How shocking!

Jasmine means a lot to me as a Moroccan woman. When I was growing up, there was no one on TV or in any movies- animated or not- who looked like me. If there was, it was always some background character. The only people I could kind of identify with Jewish characters who were white as snow and shared no cultural background with me- and Princess Jasmine.

Okay, so she was also super hypersexualized and that’s an issue for another day.

Jasmine was smart, independent, and didn’t care what people thought of her. She wasn’t afraid to break the rules and explore. Most importantly though, she was the first princess of color. There was finally a princess that girls who look like me could look up to and identify with. To this day, she’s my favorite princess, and though I know there’s a lot about the Disney company that is problematic, having representation for all little girls of color is so important. Little girls of color need to know that their existence, their being smart and active agents in their own lives, is important. We need more (though non-sexualized) characters like Jasmine.

1) Buffy Summers, Buffy The Vampire Slayer 

Buffy Summers is the Strong Female Character, and it has nothing to do with the fact that she hunts vampires. Sure, she kills baddies better than anyone ever could (your fave could not compete- don’t even try.) and her skills are way beyond any normal teenage girl, but the best part about Buffy is that she’s still that; a teenage girl. She has real teenage issues (besides for the whole soulless boyfriend, though I wouldn’t have complained about having one of those in high school), she’s a real, complete person with a full set of emotions and reactions that are completely realistic. She isn’t strong 100% of the time. That’s the thing that male writers, and let’s not kid ourselves, the majority of the writers in Hollywood and both white and male, like to conveniently forget: women are people. You aren’t doing your character any favors by writing them based on half-assed stereotypes. Buffy breaks the mould because she wears cute clothes but can still kick your ass.

Like can i be u

submission: for the love of god, can we please stop using superpowers as a metaphor for sexuality?

The following is an anonymous submission from a bisexual friend of mine. Take the next while to think about the way we look at anyone who is “marked;” anyone who isn’t male, straight, white, and/or able-bodied. Do we use their “marked” quality as a way to define them? Do we see them as only their marked quality? Do we “other” them?

Enjoy and get angry!

xoxo Rachel

After hearing tons of hype about the movie from a variety of sources, I decided to check out Frozen. I thought it was pretty good, but it had some issues. The vast majority of these would be better discussed in a movie review, and I won’t go into them. However, there is one thing about the movie that really bothered me, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was until a few days later.

Frozen has received a lot of praise for its progressiveness, mainly its portrayal of two strong, independent female protagonists. And I’m inclined to agree. It’s not the characters themselves that I take issue with, but rather one of the movies main messages, self-acceptance. As encapsulated by the film’s most famous song “Let it Go”, the central theme of Frozen is Elsa coming to terms with her “powers”, accepting them and realizing that she should no longer be ashamed of them. From my perspective, this is quite clearly a metaphor for sexual orientation. It could be several other things, but this is the analogy that makes the most sense.

The beginning of the movie, where Elsa must hide her powers, mirrors in many ways my emotional struggles growing up as a bisexual male, and I found that the emotions were in many ways portrayed accurately. But what bothers me about this metaphor is what they chose to compare sexuality to: super powers.

I really don’t like this metaphor. I disliked it when X-men used it, I disliked when Frozen used it. It boils down to two main points: 1) It grossly misrepresents how we (LGBT people) live our lives, and 2) It reinforces the idea that we are somehow “not human”.

When I say that that it grossly misrepresents how we live our lives, I mean that it reinforces the idea that we cannot live our lives just like everyone else. In X-men and Frozen, it is made clear that because of the way these people are born, their lives are irrevocably different from everyone else’s. In Frozen, Elsa is cast out because of her powers. That part doesn’t bother me. What bothers is what happens after she is welcomed back by the people. She radically alters many things around town, and she is still known as “The Ice Queen”. Why this bothers me is that Elsa will always be known as “the girl with the ice powers”. She can never lead a truly normal life. She will always stand out, and be treated differently, even if it is in a positive way. I can’t speak for all LGBT people obviously, but for the most part, we don’t want to be known as “the gay person”. We don’t want to go through life with our sexuality as our defining feature. These movies portray it as something that is all-important to these characters, probably their most important attribute, whereas my bisexuality is but a tiny part of my greater person, and I’d like to be treated as such.

The second reason the “Superpowers as metaphor for Sexuality” bothers me is because it sets up a real barrier between heterosexuals and everyone else. X-men is the worst offender in this regard. In fact, the first movie explicitly states that Mutants are not human (as in Homo Sapiens). Having that in and of itself in the movie is fine, but then going on and comparing the LGBT struggle for acceptance to theirs is a bit insulting. Mutants are genetically and physically very different from the “normal” human. There are concrete and very extreme imbalances between Wolverine and the average person. This is not the case in the real world. I am no different from the average heterosexual man, except for one small point. I am human, just as human as anyone else, and I dislike it when the metaphors used to represent me are individuals who are fundamentally not human.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an alternative just yet, but I do have guidelines. First and foremost, this characters need to be humans. Not humans that can fly or shoot lasers, just ordinary people. As well, what makes them different cannot be their defining characteristic. It can’t be their singular trait. I understand that these works were made with entirely good intentions.  I understand what the message id, and appreciate it. But this message is in dire need of a different vehicle. For the love of god, can we please stop using superpowers as a metaphor for sexuality?