Skip to main content

Bond Girls and Representations of Women

By Virginia Plas
I don't know why I watch James Bond movies. The car chases are too unrealistic, the actions scenes don't interest me much, and the representation of women within them leaves me incredibly frustrated. Like many other films and media, the 007 franchise often offers viewers representations of women who are helpless and inserted into the story mostly to serve as a love interest for the hero.

Some of the Bond girls


The James Bond film franchise, which began in the 1960s and still continues, provide several examples of women being portrayed as objects of romantic, or more often, sexual desire for the hero; as well as an example of the limited portrayal of women in film. In each of the twenty-four 007 films, there is at least one ‘Bond girl’, or romantic interest for the main character. Representations of these characters range from femme fatale to damsel in distress, often with several such characters per films. The Bond girl characters are often seen wearing little clothing and conform to beauty standards, representing them as desirable because of their bodies. It is not unusual for one of them to be kidnapped, showcasing another common representation of women: damsel in distress. This is a representation that has been used throughout time and is especially common in fairy tales.

These representations are common throughout many types of media. Action movies, fairy tales, and adventure books among other types of media use these tropes again and again and again. All too often, women are represented within these narrow parameters and other aspects of their stories aren't developed. A study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that in the 100 top-grossing films of 2016, female characters were 21% less likely than male characters to be shown to have work-related goals, and 21% more likely to have goals related to their personal life. In short, they found that women were represented as more likely to be pursuing relationships than careers. 

When it comes to my thoughts on the topic of representation of women over time, I'm often annoyed by representations of women. A lot of the women I see represented in film, and to some extent in other texts, are like those shown in the James Bond series. I'm also aware that throughout time, many representations of women have been similar, and that this is likely linked to the belief that a woman's domain is the home and the kitchen. However, I would like to see women portrayed in more diverse ways, and especially in leadership positions. I know that such representations have been becoming more common recently, and I'd be interested to learn if there has been any point in time when this has also been the case, whether in Western culture or not.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This sounds fun

By
My first thoughts when I read the course name was that this would be a very interesting course for me, since I'm a pretty big feminist ( I mean otherwise I probably wouldn't have picked this course so duh), and that we'd be looking through old texts and artworks, slowly building our way up to the present. However, from what you've showed us so far, we'll be looking at much more than that, and I'm excited to see what it teaches me about the representation of women in more than just modern day times. So far in my life, girls and women have been portrayed as (usually; there are some exceptions) two dimensional beings who are there either there only as the main character's love interest, as some faux attempt at equal representation (in which they don't speak a word), or as a villain. It has been getting much better but there are still many cases where the roles of females was severely lacking or two-dimensional, eg. the majority of women in media repre...
1 comment
Read more

Girl With A Pearl Earring

By
Girl With A Pearl Earring Johanne Vermeers' Girl with a Pearl Earring Painting In the novel "Girl with a Pearl Earring" the story rotates around the character "Griet" and her life as a maid for the painter Johannes Vermeers' family, and all the ups and downs of her life working for them, including when Vermeer paints her for his, now world famous, painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring." Griet comes from a protestant family with three children (Griet (15/16), her younger brother Frans (~14-15) and her younger sister Agnes (~12)) living in the dutch town of Deflt which is shown as a relatively small town. Griets' family falls to poverty after her father is blinded in an accident with a kiln explosion, taking his craft of tile-painting when he is blinded. This means Griet has to go and work for the Vermeers' where the painter needs a maid who can clean without moving anything and Griets parents volunteer her. There are a lot of small...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ideal Women

By
Representations of women have varied enormously throughout history and across cultures, but one thing remains constant, and that is usually a prominent representation of women are those of the ‘ideal woman’.   This is a representation of women that I find interesting as you can find almost anywhere as it can be found in nearly all media we consume today, such as social media platforms, television, websites and advertising from the fashion and cosmetic industry.  An idea of a ‘perfect’ female has been, and will continue to be a constant representation of women due to the fact that many societies function by having high-status figures that act as an ideal way of being, physically, socially and economically. ‘Ideal women’ can be found in many differing forms throughout many different eras and across a diverse range of cultures. These individuals are looked up to by societies usually due to possessing features, traits or characteristics that, in their context, are deemed d...
1 comment
Read more