I promised more posts, but I didn’t promise that they’d be about history or that they’d be any good. As well as writing a book I’ve been watching some rubbish 80s TV. You can see some complete episodes of He-Man and She-Ra on YouTube. On one level this is harmless fun that you don’t have to think about, but there are also plenty of Fedex arrows that can be spotted without having to try too hard. Obviously with something called He-Man there are going to be gender issues, and there are going to be even more gender issues when they make what is basically (and almost certainly intended to be) ‘He-Man for girls’. The very existence of She-Ra signifies that He-Man itself wasn’t for girls and they weren’t supposed to be interested in it. That’s already a big ideological assumption, because why shouldn’t girls be interested in violent hypermasculine men, and conversely, why should boys be interested in that? There’s a whole other post that could be written on how the writers mistreated Teela, but for now let’s take it for granted that this is all ‘just how it was’ in the early 80s. Taking He-Man as a starting point, what does the realization of a ‘He-Man for girls’ tell us about how gender ideology was (or wasn’t) contested in that period?

The first thing to note is that the creators were really trying to avoid some of the more obvious stereotypes. He-Man was a very stereotypically muscular hypermasculine man, like a cross between Conan and Superman. A similarly hyperfeminine mirror image would be something like Barbie, but She-Ra is usually as strong, active and violent as He-Man (when I say violent I should point out that being 80s cartoon series aimed at fairly young children, the violence is quite gentle, but they’re still a whole lot more violent than My Little Pony or the Care Bears). The devil is in the detail. If we carefully compare the standard opening sequences of an episode of He-Man and an episode of She-Ra, we can see the subtle semiotics of gender differences at work.

First of all, the music is noticeably different. He-Man has a stirring orchestral theme but She-Ra gets some cheesy synth-pop that could have been produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

Almost immediately we can see that She-Ra most definitely isn’t equal to He-Man:

I am Adam, prince of Eternia…

Adam/He-Man is an important person in his own right.

I am Adora, He-Man’s twin sister…

Adora/She-Ra is defined in relation to a man.

Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me…

Adam/He-Man has powers, which is not altogether surprising considering that he’s a superhero. Presumably his sister has the same powers too.

Fabulous secrets were revealed to me…

Oh no, she only has secrets. Despite the full title of the series being She-Ra: Princess of Power, the writers go out of their way to avoid Adora/She-Ra using the word ‘power’ during the opening sequence. The emphasis on secrets also connects with the stereotype that women are mysterious and impossible for men to understand.

the day I held aloft my magic sword and said: BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL!

He-Man has power and Castle Grayskull serves him.

the day I held aloft my sword and said: FOR THE HONOR OF GRAYSKULL!

She-Ra doesn’t have power, and she serves Castle Grayskull.

When Adam turns into He-Man he gets struck by lightning and looks active and confident.

When Adora turns into She-Ra she’s surrounded by swirls of sparkly glitter and looks more passive and slightly bemused.

Then they shout:

I HAVE THE POWEEERRRRR!

He-Man’s still got the power.

I AM SHE-RAAAAAAA!

She-Ra still doesn’t got the power.

Then each one points hir sword at hir pet to transform it into a war mount.

He-Man points the tip of the sword at Cringer, and the magical beam shoots out of the tip. How much more phallic can you get? (Quite a bit more in Thundercats actually, where the Sword of Omens grows in size as Lion-O shouts ‘Thunder… thunder… thunder… thundercats HOOOOOOO!)

She-Ra holds her sword upright with the tip out of the top of the shot. The magical beam comes from an oval stone set into the hilt, which kind of resembles a vagina. (But then so does the Eye of Thundera, so I’m not sure what to make of that.)

He-Man rides an armoured tiger, which he describes as ‘the mighty Battlecat’. He then says ‘and I became He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe’ and punches the camera (just like Jack Regan in the titles of the fourth series of The Sweeney) before telling us who else shares his secret and who his enemies are.

She-Ra rides a winged unicorn with pink trappings. She doesn’t say or do anything between the pet transformation and telling us who shares her secret and who her enemies are.

So before the story even starts we’re primed to see She-Ra as more feminine and less powerful. In fact the stories make it fairly clear that She-Ra is just as physically strong as He-Man. And she gets some extra powers too. But wait, these extra powers are healing and empathy, which are stereotypically feminine and would probably be seen as emasculating if He-Man had them. The paradox is that having more powers effectively makes She-Ra appear inferior. (We can also infer that she has the supernatural power to stop anyone from ever seeing up her absurdly tiny and strangely physics-defying skirt, but that’s probably not ‘canon’.)

It could be worse (just google for the feminist reaction to the horrendous misogyny in the recent DC comics reboot) but it could be better. Looking at the relatively recent past should remind us that gender and patriarchy aren’t fixed or natural, but that we’re not making inevitable progress against them either.

In the last few weeks lots have bloggers have been discussing whether humanities subjects are in decline and how to protect humanities from spending cuts. It seems obvious to me that independent critical thought, textual analysis and the ability to construct and destroy arguments are all very important skills, not just for individuals but for society as a whole. It’s equally obvious why politicians, businessmen and journalists might be hostile to those skills. When humanities departments ask for funding, they’re effectively saying “please give us your money so we can teach people to see through your lies”. That’s going to be a hard sell, and probably explains why defenders of the humanities tend to use vague euphemisms rather than putting it so bluntly. The paradox is that the humanities have to cover up their main selling point so as not to appear threatening to the people with money and power, but that makes it easy to represent the humanities as useless. It reminds me of the old essay question “Richard II was deposed because of his strength rather than his weakness. Discuss.”

This is what some other people have written:

Brett at Airminded rounds up lots of links, and puts them under the best title ever. (I have no hope of beating it, but still desperately attempted a pun on second rate 80s cartoon series Defenders of the Earth.)

More links from Penelope’s Weavings and Unpickings, showing that academics in the humanities have lots of experience of trying to defend their subjects and that humanities subjects have economic value.

At Crooked Timber Michael Bérubé points out that in the US, humanities subjects (along with most other subjects) declined from 1967 to 1987, but have been stable since then.

Meanwhile it appears that the “omg! military history is dying!” meme still refuses to die, but Mark Grimsley is doing a good job of refuting it. The death of military history is a standard story regularly wheeled out by lazy right-wing journalists, especially in the US. It’s not quite as nasty or frequent as “immigrants are taking all our jobs”, “the PC brigade has banned Christmas”, “computer games are corrupting our children” or “science proves that men are naturally better than women” that we get in the UK, but that’s not saying much. I took on the last one in my article “What Changed Your Mind” in issue 2 of PEP (free PDF), showing how journalists repeat the same misogynistic and homophobic cliches regardless of the facts, and suggesting that they might even help to cause the effects they claim to be reporting. Incidentally, by writing the article I showed that humanities graduates are perfectly capable of writing about science. My textual analysis skills transferred easily to newspaper articles and science papers, and I could see dubious ideological assumptions which the scientists themselves were probably unaware of. The enemies of humanities crumble in fear and confusion!

Someone just found this blog by Googling for “What happened to Lady Brilliana Harley in the English Civil War”. Well, Lady Brilliana Harley is famous for taking charge of the defence of her home when it was besieged by the king’s soldiers. This was something she did. She wasn’t a passive object that things just happened to. This is only one example, but I suspect that it’s not unusual to ask what happened to a woman during a war and to ask what a man did during a war. Actually both women and men do things and and have things done to them in war and peace. This is basic empirical fact. But language and culture bias us to think of men as active and women as passive.

Following on from my last post about ideology, I want to introduce a new concept which I’ll probably be mentioning a lot in the future: the FedEx Arrow. I got this from yukie1013 via Debi Linton. The basic idea is that the FedEx logo has an arrow in it. Some people notice it and some people don’t, but once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. This is analogous to ideological assumptions in texts (and for the historian this applies whether those texts are fiction, primary sources, or secondary works; it also applies to films, comics, art and any other cultural artefact you can think of). Some people notice ideology in a text, and some people don’t. Once you’ve noticed it you can’t make it go away, and that changes the meaning for you.

Probably my first major experience of this effect was the film The Spitfire Grill. Maybe it was never a great film but I used to really like it. It was kind of like Twin Peaks re-imagined as a chick flick, which somehow appealed to me. But then I read somewhere on the internet that it was anti-abortion propaganda funded by the Catholic Church. That wasn’t particularly obvious from the film itself. Although it was obviously very sentimental and manipulative, Percy’s situation was so far removed from reality that I didn’t connect it with real women having real abortions. It doesn’t really matter whether the rumour is true or not, because once the possibility was there in my head it wouldn’t go away and I started to notice things in the film which were definitely there but which I hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly it became unwatchable because it seemed so misogynistic. The message I get from it now is not only that if you have an abortion you’re a murderer who deserves to die, but that if someone rapes you and gets you pregnant, and you decide that you definitely won’t have an abortion, but the rapist beats you up until you have a miscarriage, that you’re still a murderer and deserve to die. Now it doesn’t quite say that explicitly. Percy doesn’t actually get tried and executed for the death of her unborn baby. But it’s strongly implied that she has an unbearable burden of guilt that won’t ever go away until she dies. No-one ever tells her it’s not her fault. Yes, I’ve spoilt it now, but spoilers or not, just don’t watch it. I’m never going to watch it again.

But as Debi says, seeing the arrow doesn’t have to ruin something completely. It’s still possible to enjoy something while seeing the arrows in it. I really like old TV action series like The Sweeney and The Professionals even though they’re full of casual racism, misogyny and homophobia. Actually, having watched every single episode of both of them earlier this year (there’s a limited range of things you can do when you’re recovering from RSI) I think they’re not quite as bad as they’re often assumed to be, but there are still lots of problems with them. I can still be influenced by Nietzsche even though I can see that he had some very dodgy ideas about race and inadvertently encouraged the Nazis. The Smiths will probably always be my favourite band despite Morrissey’s blatantly horrible misogyny in songs like “Pretty Girls Make Graves” (and the fact that it’s such a great song probably just makes it all the more dangerous).

So that’s the FedEx arrow. Try and spot some. They’re everywhere even if you don’t realise it.

On YouTube you can watch a fantastic video of Lucy Worsley doing Henry VIII’s weekly shopping, followed by a virtual autopsy to show what all that food did to his body. I don’t buy the diabetes diagnosis though. It was obviously his humours getting out of balance. Can we have Lucy shopping for William Cavendish and his horses next?

[Edit: but there's a FedEx arrow. Go and read Innerbrat's critique of L'Oreal's pseudo science then see if you can spot it.]