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The Denver Post
03/23/97
By Page F2
Photo: "Lucy Lawless plays the fierce and fearless warrior princess Xena"COMMENTARY
A look into the feminist overtones of XWP, includes quotes from Sarah Dyer (Space ghost Coast to Coast and Action Girl Comic writer), Robert Tapert, and Kym Taborn.REPRINT
She is being hailed as the "post-feminist icon," gracing the cover of Ms magazine, winning role-model contests among seventh- and eighth-grade girls, and handily beating "Baywatch" in the weekly television syndication ratings. She is Xena, and she is a feminist challenge. Xena is a warrior princess, dressed in a leather bustier and armed with a chakran, a razor-sharp discus weapon she hurls at her enemies. Xena is smart and fearless and strong and powerful. She takes lovers across racial lines, she kills enemies, and she is forever loyal to her sidekick, Gabrielle. She really appeals to younger, post-feminist women and girls," said Sarah Dyer, editor of Action Girl comic magazines. "She wears a skirt, and she proves you can fight really well in a skirt. She has cool-looking hair, but she kills people." If good hair and wearing a short skirt make you a post-feminist, then let's all sign up. Why shouldn't women embrace their own sexuality as power - and use it? If feminists of earlier generations shied away from that most traditional source of female power, it was largely because they had more experience with sexuality as a route to the bottom than to the top. When Xena walks into the room, men look, but they don't dare touch. As for the atrocities people have seen her commit, most of the violence these days is aimed at rapists and marauders, but Xena is not above slugging even Gabrielle when pushed to her limit. Early on, many local TV station managers were reluctant to air the show, according to Robert Tapert. "They thought no one would want to see a woman hitting men." Not so. Tapert and his partner, Sam Raimi, created Xena after building their careers with male fantasy thrillers. The genius of this show, according to its creators and staunchest supporters, is the extent to which gender is not an issue. I believe, in the basest and crassest of ways, that there's a formula to stories about heroes, and no one had ever tried to do this before with a woman hero," Tapert explained. "Or if they did, they made excuses for her being a woman." Kym Masera Taborn, chairperson of the board of the International Association of Xena Studies and editor of the on-line Xena magazine (there are dozens of Xena-related websites), offers essentially the same assessment: "In the past, when a woman was inserted into a basic male archetypal story, they made the female almost too female. With this one, they've kept her pretty serious." Liberal feminism has been much criticized for buying in to the notion that equality consisted of the chance to beat the boys at their own game, while sending the message to more traditional stay-at-home moms, wives and volunteers that what they did was less valuable. Notwithstanding the efforts of feminist law reformers like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to represent men as often as women, feminism's earliest and greatest success has indeed come in allowing women to cross over into a man's world and compete on men's terms, with all that implies about whose world is better. The pendulum of current thinking has swung so far in the other direction that the view that women can be just like men is actually being labeled "post-feminist." Retrofeminism is more like it. Of course women can be as strong and tough and powerful as men. When do we get to stop proving that? In her autobiography, Katharine Graham recounts a moment when she told Warren Buffett, the largest investor in the newspaper company she had just taken over, to be unsparing in his criticism but to deliver it gently. Xena would never say that. But I would, and so would many women I know - and even some men. Xena's way is fine. But so is Graham's. She's my "post-feminist" superhero, and judging from the best-seller list, I'm not alone. Watch out, Xena. Susan Estrich is a law professor and a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times. She was national campaign manager for Dukakis for President in 1988.
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