Apparently, I need it to be the perfect Bond Girl. Well, I also need a few other things, like turning 26 again, but, um, why ruin an otherwise perfect Sunday morning? After all, I do have longish dark hair and I can talk Southron some…
Academics who set out to discover what makes the ideal Bond girl found that apart from having long dark hair, she is likely to have an American accent – and to carry a weapon.
[…]
Their report says: “The women of Bond are eternally attractive. Their typically slender body type … is unchanged over time.
“The women of Bond continue to be portrayed in a rather limited and sex-stereotyped manner. The ultimate penalty for a woman in a Bond film – death – seems to accrue from promiscuity and daring to threaten the ultimate iconic masculine hero, James Bond.
“This study provides further evidence of the continued sexualisation, marginalisation, and disposability of women within Bond films. The Bond films glorify the sometimes chauvinistic persona of Bond.
Whadayamean, sometimes chauvinistic? It’s not like we hadn’t noticed, you know? Bond is Bond, and those of us who like him like him anyway, so there.
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“Disposability” is the perfect word to describe something I’ve felt about women in some films that are primarily geared towards men. They have limited purposes for being in the film. It is as if their only real purpose for being there is to cast an attractive woman who will eventually yield somehow to the main (male) character. A long time ago this used to be more transparent since they wouldn’t even let the girl participate in fight sequences, and she’d just be standing aside looking frightened. Now, they usually have her participating in some way, which is a step-forward, but doesn’t necessarily convince you that the movie would have been much different without her there.
So, in that sense these movies only use a woman as a source of titilation with some token amount of utility. Not much effort is often made to demonstrate that she is truly indispensable. In fact, the qualifications for the role probably end at how attractive she is and her ability to do some light action scenes, but otherwise the role could be just as well performed by any other actress.
I wonder if this is indicative of how men are tempted to view women, or at least the ones they don’t know very well?