The Trouble With Heroes

Like many, many other people I am hooked on Heroes. It's important that you understand this is a near-miracle. I've never been a fan of TV dramas, and NBC's ridiculously overblown promotion of the series (starting from February last year for a fall premiere!) was enough to put anybody off it just to spite NBC. But the premiere was fantastic, and the quality of the episodes has flagged only slightly since, so I'm happy to give lend it my eyeballs for the hour.

Also, one Mr Mohinder Suresh, though ludicrously named, is rather easy on the eyes. :)

Except it bothers me. This niggling thought has been at the back of my mind for a few weeks now, but it grows stronger every week: Heroes is blatantly, insufferably sexist.

1. No female Hero has control over her body, her powers or her life. Claire Bennet is a minor at the mercy of her father (who until recently was possibly The Diabolical Villain). Now The Haitian and her biological grandmother have her. She's consistently kept in the dark about who she is, who her parents are, what dangers she faces, who's running her life - all in the name of "protecting" her. Her memories have been repeatedly erased, the final attempt was the only exception. Some Invincibility! Niki/ikiN (old habit, before Jessica had a name, we had to call her something), who I'll discuss in detail later, are at the pinnacle of this loss of control: Niki strips for a living, and she's helpless against ikiN who is ripping her life apart. The supposedly evil ikiN has no agenda of her own either - she's Linderman's stooge. And, mesdames et messieurs, that's it for the major female Heroes, a grand total of TWO. The minor ones are no better off: Claire's biological mother is a deadbeat loser who lives in a trailer, reduced to angling Claire as bait for a few thousand dollars from The Male Power in her life, Nathan Petrelli. That woman with SuperHearing was dead after speaking three lines flat. You won't remember Eden McCain, that pixie-ish chick who hung around Mohinder Suresh and was in reality a pawn of the "Paper Company". Another such pawn is the recently introduced Candice Wilmer, who we know next to nothing about except that, once more, she's a female Hero working for Men with Plans.

2. No strong woman is stronger than the men around her. I refer to ikiN, of course. Her supposed ability is SuperStrength, but when do we see it? In the first couple of episodes, the SuperStrength comes out when she's threatened with rape. After that, nada, no more. Her (ex?) husband D.L. comes along and overpowers her easily with his SuperPenetration (oooh, how manly). The only time we see her use her SuperStrength successfully in the later episodes is when she escapes from a female shrink - only to be easily subdued by male orderlies. WTF?

3. The female Heroes are not heroes. Jessica is a curse to Niki, because God forbid a woman enjoy her SuperStrength or do noble things with it. Even when ikiN uses her powers "for good", it is within the straitjacket of "womanliness" - to defend herself from rapists, to protect her child (ugh!). Niki has no personhood outside the "hot single mom" stereotype. And then there's her trip to the crazyhouse. Hey, women, show us your wildcat side and we'll lock you up! ikiN's done enough to deserve jail, maybe, but what's with the padded cell? This explicit reduction of Niki's "superpower" to actual insanity is not only emasculating (what a word I'm forced to use!) but also disturbing in its connotations. For two thousand years wombs were regarded as the seat of illogic and insanity, leaving us to deal with the remnants of those misogynistic suppositions even to this day via words like hysteria, hysterical, hysterectomy. And what can I say about Claire Bennet? She's just the Damsel in Distress - remember "Save the cheerleader, save the world"? Two perfunctory Heroic acts are thrown in to mix things up a little, but Claire, too, firmly and inexplicably regards her SuperHealing as a curse. Neither she nor Niki are heroes at all as long as they keep regarding their powers with such suspicion.

There is no use pointing out to me the men who suffer from some of the same symptoms I've mentioned above. Nathan Petrelli is trapped in a stereotypically male role of protector of his little brother, is lied to about his daughter by the mother, etc. Hiro Nakamura is the the stereotypically cute and fluffly Japanese kid with a comic-book fetish. Sylar, you might say, is a bad, bad man, and why do they always make men the serial killers? And yet. Nathan is a complicated character with more to him than just "the protective elder brother". Mr. Bennet is far more than just "dad", as important as that role is to him and his story. Hiro, though a stereotype, is still his own agent in control of his own destiny - his father's objections to his quest were easily dealt with. More importantly, for every stereotypical male role in Heroes, you'll find two others that are not stereotypes. The very dearth of women Heroes makes the stereotypification of the availables ones more damning.

Now I must point out that there's one item I am deliberately not including in this list: that apart from Claire Bennet, all the female Heroes are evil (or generally bad eggs). The reason I am not complaining about this is that it doesn't matter whether a certain set of people (women, Germans, Black people, fat people, whatever) are shown as heroes or villains in the stories they appear. You heard me. It doesn't matter one whit. You could consistently make Muslim fanatics the villains in every one of your stories, but that wouldn't automatically mean you're racist or anti-Muslim or any of it.

Why? Because villains can be cool. Often they're so much cooler than the very-vanilla heroes, they take over their stories: think Hannibal Lecter, Gabbar Singh, Darth Vader. These people inspire fascination, even admiration. They're mysterious, complicated and smart as a whip.

That is the factor that shows Heroes up as sexist: are the female Heroes awesome? Do they get treated with the respect reserved for several of the male characters? Because it's no use having tons of female Heroes on the good side if they're just damsels in distress or bit parts... they should have important things to do, big shoes to grow into, just like the men. And there's no use having tons of Hot, Diabolical Wenches on the villainous side if they're just going to be following the orders of the men in charge... they should have their own agendas, their own minions, just like the men.