He perceives a danger signal from the environment, she perceives that something is bothering him
Yemima Evron, Haaretz, voila!
From "The Fifth Element" (top), "Matrix" (center) and "Special Report". The dichotomy between the sexes is maintained
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In the book "Living in a Strange Land" Robert Heinlein describes a futuristic society that lives fifty or a hundred years after the author's time. And with all the changes that have taken place in the futuristic world, one thing remains the same: the place of women in society and the nature of the female characters. Although there are women in the book, which was published in 1961 - or at least a mention of them - but they do not actively participate in the plot; There are nurses there, as models, housewives. This is also the case in Isaac Asimov's "The Institution" series. In Asimov's books there are statesmen, thinkers, sociologists, warriors, but the vast majority are men.
"How is it possible," asks Dr. Liat Friedman, a philosophy lecturer at Bar Ilan University, "that in a futuristic world, which defines different laws of nature, what remains the same is the differences between women and men?" This question is part of a more comprehensive research work that Friedman is doing in which she examines whether the human mind is able to break away from accepted assumptions of differences.
An acceptable discount, for example,
It is that a woman is different from a man because she has female organs. Friedman rejects the idea. "In every field there are basic assumptions like this, which are taken for granted and help to organize thought, and I try to see how it is possible to recognize something as different, but without falling again into the categories by which we think of ourselves as unique." And in the gender context - she tries to check why exactly a certain characteristic defines a woman as a woman and a man as a man, and if it is possible to imagine other characteristics.
One of the fields in which it is convenient to test the freedom of thought is science fiction. Since there is fiction on the side of science, this is an area where it can be assumed that thought will be freed from the known and known. Science fiction is supposed to allow completely imaginary worlds and changing world orders.
But despite the freedom of thought, Friedman suffers disappointment. "The twentieth century was the first century that recognized women as human beings with equal rights, but in the science fiction created in this century, the social system remains the same as the one that exists today, with the same forms of dictatorship and tyranny and with the same traditional dichotomy between women and men."
She does not only mean obvious cases like the women in Asimov's and Heinlein's books, but also later products of science fiction. In the film "The Fifth Element" directed by Luc Besson in 1997, for example, the woman is the destructive force. It is first of all depicted as something perfect, a fantasy village, but it is also not rational. Already in the first meeting with the new woman, those around her realize that she does not master the language, the "masculine" rational tool. In order to go out into the world, she must create some kind of verbal communication, speak the language of the men around her and be in awe of the magnificent creation. To impress the first man who treats her well, she uses distinctly "feminine" tricks - her self-evident beauty and crying. Why is a woman now created according to a DNA template supposed to know that crying is the ultimate tool to get a man's attention and affection? The filmmakers have solutions. In any case, the creators of the genre managed to create a world without gravity, where cars fly through the air and a new and unknown element threatens its existence - and only the woman went back millions of years, to non-verbal communication.
"Not only does the character of the heroine remain feminine, but even when there are women fighters, they use tools considered 'feminine' to save the world or their loved ones," Friedman adds.
In the field of fantasy, you can find warrior women, who use their feminine side to defeat the dark forces, also in JK Rowling. Throughout each of the five books in the Harry Potter series, the creator makes it clear again and again that Harry was saved from Lord Voldemort thanks to a mother's love. In the last book his survival even depends on his hated aunt, his mother's sister. The world of Harry Potter is different and magical, yet, according to Rowling, when women struggle, their best weapons are motherly love and family ties.
"These are more problematic differences in the representation of men and women," Friedman says, "because they are hidden differences. Even when it seems that we come across a woman who is an equal participant in the plot like anyone else, in the end the motivation and emotions of the female characters remain as they were before. The women still act out of love, out of compassion, compared to the man who acts out of a desire to understand and save the world."
And so, for example, at the beginning of the second film in the "Matrix" film series, Neo perceives a danger signal from the environment and Trinity, on the other hand, immediately perceives that something is bothering him. She is sensitive to a man while he is sensitive to changes in the environment. "In 'The Matrix' the female dimension is the giving and loving dimension," states Friedman. "He is the nourishing, satisfying, protecting dimension. A woman has the role of a mother, despite being a fighter."
Distinct "female" motives can also be seen in Steven Spielberg's film "Special Report". The murder detection mechanism was discovered by a man and a woman together by mistake, when they tried to reward drug addict children. But the man used the discovery to serve humanity, while the woman believed that they should have continued to take care of the children and save them, instead of turning them into living dead who would save the world. That is, the female approach and the male approach to the same invention derive from a completely different starting point for life. One is sympathetic to the individual and the other is trying to change society - and also promote the personal interests of the male inventor.
The other central female character in the "special report" also serves society with "feminine" tools: Agatha the "seeer" is the most talented of the three "seeers", because only a woman can be so good in places that require a "different" vision, Intuitive, not realistic.
The creators who managed to break through human thought in the technological field and build a different universe
His own rules have not yet succeeded in breaking through the boundaries of thought regarding the distinctions between the sexes. If we rely on science fiction, "the conclusion is that humanity has not yet begun to ask questions about the differences that we take for granted today," Friedman says.
And yet, it seems that the attempt to define differences differently from what is accepted is futile. Is it really possible to get rid of the idea that it is the obvious physical differences that distinguish a woman from a man? Or to avoid the perception that humans' ability to use language is what distinguishes them from animals? The attempt to break free from the familiar concepts is somewhat reminiscent of the farmer who was asked how he differentiates between his two horses and after adopting his thinking came to the conclusion that the black horse is 20 centimeters taller than the white horse.
In view of the description of the differences between the sexes in science fiction, one can also wonder if the problem is the limitation of thought or if there is room to examine the choice of the creator. Is it possible to say, like Friedman, that there is still a problem in human thinking, which is unable to imagine a mental change in humanity and therefore describes the woman as she is even when everything around her is different. And yet the question remains, if it is possible that a team of writers as talented as Spielberg's did not examine the possibility of defining the differences differently. Is it not possible that the creators rejected this possibility consciously and by choice, because a different starting point guided them? Perhaps what guided them was the knowledge that the technology created by mankind is advancing at an extremely fast pace, so much so that it seems almost anything is possible. On the other hand, human psychology, and not necessarily the ability to break through the boundaries of thought, has remained almost unchanged for thousands of years.
The science fiction connoisseur
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