AfterEllen.com - Television and the Threat of the Lesbian Action Hero

Buffy Summers. Sydney Bristow. Xena. Sara Pezzini.

What do all of these TV characters have in common? They are all women who kick ass (literally) on a weekly basis. And they're all straight.

In the last seven years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of shows featuring women as the action hero who routinely puts herself in harm's way to save others or to achieve a greater good.

The trend started in the mid-70's with Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, and Charlie's Angels, then died down again in the 80's, partly due to the backlash against feminism that swept the decade.

Then the mid-90's came along, launching Xena the Warrior Princess, La Femme Nikita, and the show that finally kicked the trend into high gear, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Xena and La Femme Nikita had strong and loyal fan bases, but because they were on cable, they took longer to build up the same visibility and ratings momentum that Buffy received in the first year.)

Other shows like Charmed, and Dark Angel tried to capitalize on this momentum, and 2001 saw the introduction of Witchblade and last year's breakout hit Alias, proving this is not a trend that is quickly going away.

Ann Millar Daugherty's description of Buffy in her essay "Just a Girl" from the anthology "Reading the Vampire Slayer" is actually a good description of most of these female action heroes:

At the same time, there has also been a rise in the number of recurring lesbian characters on primetime television (see the timeline for details). Prior to the mid-90's, the few lesbian or bisexual women on television were usually minor supporting characters, when they appeared at all.

But around the same time the "female action hero" trend started to take off, so did the inclusion of lesbians (and to a much lesser extent, bisexual women) as primary cast members on shows like Relativity, ER, NYPD Blue, Once and Again, and, of course, Ellen.

The parallel rise of these trends are not unrelated, for a society that is willing and eager to embrace female action heroes on television is also one that is more likely to accept lesbian characters on television, since they both share the underlying message of female empowerment.

Given their shared theme and similar fan bases, it seems natural that these two trends would overlap, since what makes more sense than an ass-kicking lesbian? And, let's be honest, if the number of lesbian and bisexual women in the average sample pool is 10%, it's even higher among women who have black belts.

So how many of these new female action heroes on television are explicitly lesbian or bisexual? None, of course.

Some of these shows do have lesbian or bisexual characters: Willow on Buffy and Original Cindy on Dark Angel, for example. But they are not the characters who do the ass-kicking, they are the supportive friends; they might occasionally fight in self-defense, but they are not the "hero" of the show.

This is not a coincidence. The networks are likely to be afraid of the Lesbian Action Hero, because she is threatening on several levels:

1) She threatens men's assumption of sexual access to women. The (heterosexual) female action hero is always very sexy (not just feminine), and the shows go to great pains to reinforce her heterosexual desirability to and interest in men. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) gets blonder every year, Sydney's (Jennifer Garner) sexy outfits are already legendary even after the first season, and Xena (Lucy Lawless) took great pride in her many casual affairs with men.

Those characters who are largely "asexual" (i.e. focused on their careers) or who are clearly not lesbians but whose (bi) sexuality is still ambiguous like Nikita or Sara Pezzini (Yancy Butler), are at least conventionally feminine and attractive, and assumed by most people to be heterosexual since an attraction to men is demonstrated and an overt attraction to women is not (although it's often subtly implied).

2) She threatens the notion that women need men to survive. The heterosexual female action hero and lesbian characters in general already jeopardize this assumption, but men are somewhat appeased by the fact that the female action hero at least needs men for sexual relationships, and with lesbian characters like Willow on Buffy or Rhonda on Relativity, men can still provide physical protection, brotherly/fatherly advice, or emotional support.

But if a woman is smart, self-confidant, capable of defending herself, and interested primarily in women, then she has no obvious dependencies on men to survive (procreation notably excepted). There are many other ways in which men can enrich the lives of the Lesbian Action Hero, of course, just as many lesbians have friendships with men they value very much, but the fact that their relationships with men are "optional" rather than necessary is threatening to most men.

There are also many men who are not threatened by the Lesbian Action Hero, who don't assume automatic sexual access to women and who don't need women to be dependent on them to define their self-worth. But sadly, these men are still outnumbered by the ones who do (many of whom don't even conciously realize they're threatened.)

Cop shows suffer from the same dilemma, which is why even though a large number of female police offers in real life are lesbians, you'll rarely find one on TV - even in shows set in San Francisco like The Division. The lesbian cop on HBO's new series The Wire is a notable exception, and NYPD Blue's Officer Abby Sullivan (introduced in 1997) also stands out - but her lover was killed by a jealous ex in the second season, effectively removing the "evidence" of her lesbianism and reinforcing negative stereotypes of the "deranged lesbian" at the same time.

3) She threatens the ratings. Clearly a lesbian/bisexual subtext exists in Xena, as even the producers of the show have acknowledged in public statements. This kind of subtext can be found in most of the other "female action hero" shows as well, to varying degrees: actress Eliza Dushku (Faith on Buffy) has admitted that she deliberately encouraged the sexual undercurrent between her character and Sarah Michelle Gellar's during her stint on Buffy, and Sara Pezzini's heterosexuality was so obscured in Witchblade's first season that the producers had to be engineering it deliberately to attract the lesbian/bi fan base (by the second season, the obscurity around her sexual orientation was gone).

But subtext is not text, no matter how much slash fan fiction is written about the torrid love affair between Xena and Gabrielle, the slaying-and-shagging antics of Buffy and Faith, or the secret relationship between Sydney and Francie.

If shows like Xena and Alias can continue to attract both queer and straight audiences by keeping the female action heroes heterosexual (or at least sexually ambiguous), they can only lose fans (and money) by making her explicitly lesbian. As Elyce Rae Helford explains in her essay "Feminism, Queer Studies, and the Sexual Politics of Xena" in the anthology "Fantasy Girls:"

All of which means we're unlikely to see a Lesbian Action Hero on television anytime soon. The only new series debuting this fall that features a female action hero is the WB's Birds of Prey, based on a comic book about three women with special powers who fight evil, and all three women are heterosexual.

Of course, one obvious solution to this dilemma is to make some of these women bisexual, as the Xena producers implied about Xena but refused to outright show. Unfortunately, this is actually the least likely development to occur, since bisexuality is one of the last remaining taboos on television (as you can tell by the myriad television characters like Willow on Buffy and Dr. Kerry Weaver on ER who suddenly become "lesbians" when they start dating women, even though they have dated men exclusively prior to this. In real life, at least some of these women would consider themselves bisexual, but on television, apparently none of them do.)

The message is clear: television shows that advocate female empowerment are okay, as long as they don't cross the line to emasculation. Which means we're in for another several seasons of sexy outfits, long hair, and heterosexual encounters in between ass kickings and a flirtation with lesbianism that never goes anywhere.

Sounds a lot like high school, actually, and God knows four years of that was long enough. I'm not looking forward to the same interminable wait for the Lesbian Action Hero to become a reality on TV.

Update: Witchblade was cancelled shortly after this article was written. But surprisingly, Buffy introduced a new lesbian slayer named Kennedy in December, 2002, and although she's still a secondary character on the series, this is definitely a sign of progress. Maybe the wait won't be so long after all.