Boys watch He-Man.
Girls watch She-Ra.
This is what you learned as a kid growing up in the late 80's. It was a strange time. As I was young, I don't remember a lot except for "formative" memories. This story will be an amalgamation of those. As we are currently seeing a resurgence of misogyny, I believe it is important for everyone to examine themselves. That said, let's get back to the show...
I very distinctly remember at an early age watching She-ra...on the one hand, I knew socially, I was NOT supposed to be watching it, because I was a boy. However, I have a sister. This meant that if I watched He-man, she got to watch She-ra. That was the rule. We didn't live in a democracy. It was a very top-down hierarchical structure. Our votes did not matter. If either one of us made a fuss about "he's watching too much he-man" or "she's watching too much she-ra", we both lost television privileges...
i'm not saying it was "prison", but when you're like 8 years old, not getting to watch cartoons 24/7 kind of feels like prison...that is beside the point...
what i started to realize being the older brother is that my sister NEEDED she-ra...she couldn't be "he-man"...well, the science just wasn't there at the time...but again...tangent...
what i am getting at is that it became very clear to me at a young age that as a female, she needed her own heroes, or in this case "heroines"...
After sitting through so many she-ras, it started to bother me less and less, and after a while, i noticed the cartoons were pretty much exactly the same...there was very little difference between he-man and she-ra content-wise...the chick just carried the sword...
then "golden-axe" came out for sega genesis...you could play as a female character...this was new in "action" games as far as i could tell...you could be princess peach in mario 2, and she was badass then, but in "action" games, "golden axe" was really the first time i remember seeing female characters alongside males being treated as "equal" on the battlefield...
these things mattered...
while i won't go through the history of video games, i will get to a very specific point where i realized that something was wrong with society concerning how femininity was seen...
in the early 90's, there was a big movement for men to get in touch with their "feminine sides"...while i was young, i did not understand either side really, in the sense of, it seemed obtuse to try and force someone to feel something they did not feel, but on the other hand the people who did not seem to WANT to empathize struck me as oddly scared of femininity...
then one day one of my older relatives said something in reference to this movement:
"everybody is out there talking about you need to get in touch with your feminine side...i don't have a feminine side!!!"
met with laughs from all the males...as a young male, it struck me as so odd that the men needed to identify themselves so much in opposition to femininity...i could not grasp it...
then, as you get older and learn about society, you learn that females are second class citizens...
it is strange to have a female "mother" and be living in a society that seemingly hates females so much...i know as a male, growing up it is taboo to have female idols...to the point that as a grown man, i have to look back and be like "what the fuck?"
why are dudes so scared of having female leaders or heroes? i mean "heroines"...
at some point, dudes are going to have to stop bashing women to define masculinity...
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