Guts and Glory: When Do Women Get Their Share?

I took my kids to see “The Mask” in Glendale recently and I came away feeling, why do men get to have all the fun? Why do they have the monopoly on guts and glory? It didn’t just begin with the movie. The first advertisement on the screen was about the courageous 1993 Los Angeles Raiders, oozing all their pride, honor, distinction, talent and team spirit. Naturally, the short piece, set in a sweaty post-game locker room with team balls and team spirit, was performed by men, directed by men, written by men and produced by men.

The next piece to be shown concerned a battered women’s shelter in Orange County where women learn life skills, how to cope with their abusive, drug-dealing men and basically how to avoid raising their children in a station wagon. The dichotomy of the two pieces, L.A. Raiders and abused women, set the tone for the next couple of hours.

The previews followed with your basic “guns and boobs” movies or young men finding themselves and avenging the past. The women in all the previews were either lovers, mothers, prostitutes or already dead.

Then came “The Mask.” Jim Carrey is hilarious and the computerized special effects were spectacular, but how come in the movie only the men and the dog get to try on “the mask?” The good guy wears it, the bad guy wears it and the dog wears it. The women, on the other hand, stand around either waiting to be rescued or back-stabbing the good guy in order to save their condos. As for the guy thieves, the only questions I came up with were, “Why? Who cares? How many times have we seen this before?”

My kids didn’t walk away outraged at the implications of either the previews or the film, but how long will it be before it seeps into their subconscious that men play football, wear wildly outrageous masks and have fun, while women go to homeless shelters to be saved from their gross guys by learning smart business skills?

When one of my friends and I talk movies, he dismisses anything without a male protagonist with a kind of megaphoned warning, “Whoaaa! Chick flick, chick flick.” Is he the quintessential Everyman that Hollywood producers are trying to appeal to?

Why can’t men and women take turns at this guts and glory thing? Why couldn’t “The Mask” have been a woman?

And what about instead of using the L.A. Raiders and a homeless women’s shelter as advertising previews, why not use a women’s basketball team or the LPGA tour as a symbol of guts and glory, and then advertise a men’s homeless shelter in the next trailer?

Why does it have to be drilled in kids that a boy will grow up to be a superstar athlete but a girl will grow up to be battered if she doesn’t heed her man? Let the men go learn to type for a while, and let the women pop open the champagne to celebrate their own honor, distinction and victory for once.

Until all kinds of stories get told by all kinds of women, men, girls and boys, then little girls will aspire to be hot, slinky, please-save-me “smoking babes,” hoping to avoid homeless shelters, and little boys will grow up thinking they own the world as long as they have a gun and can throw a football. It’s fantastic to see television shows like “My So-Called Life” being made because rarely do we see such high-quality stories with a girl protagonist. Films should show kids that guts and glory transcend all sexes and girls can be heroes too.