"I AM NEYTIRI" - by black lily

Sheroes. Heroines. Little girls growing up in a world full of gender inequities don't always have the same, immediate access to powerful images of our strength as our male counterparts. Don't get me wrong - sheroes are out there, if we look for them. One of my most treasured personal possessions is a children's book called ‘Changing Woman and Her Sisters: Stories of Goddesses from Around the World.' In this collection, bold author Katrin Hyman Tchana, shares inspiring tales of strong women from both real and mythological history. Stories that make little girls sit up straighter and feel their innate worth. But I want more.

What we don't have with very much frequency or depth, are female action heroes. The sort of pop culture, blockbuster, ‘she just saved the day' (or the world) type of validation that boys get all day, every day. It can make a girl so hungry for confirmation of the existence of feminine power that she blindly gobbles up the few, flawed images available to her; images which are often cheesy, sexist or blatantly misogynist. But, they're all we have and, if you're hungry for validation of female strength (and, oh - I am, I am), you end up taking what you can get.

For me, it meant that, as a little girl, I lived for shows like ‘Charlie's Angels,' ‘Wonder Woman' and ‘The Bionic Woman.' Sure it bothered me that these sheroes didn't look much like the women I knew, but they were the only thing going, so I held onto Jaime Sommers like a life raft. As I got older, the women's movement began to have more influence on the culture at large, and more subtle, complex images of female power hit the screen; films like ‘Girlfight' and ‘Alien' definitely changed the game and became essential to my personal canon of faves. But, as far as most blockbuster flicks went? There was usually a ‘catch' that came along with the enjoyment. Either the heroine had to be fetishized in a slightly, or overtly misogynistic way - with sexploitative costuming adorning the perfect bods of Cat Woman, Elektra, Aeon Flux, Bandidas, Lara Croft and La Femme Nikita, or she had to be ‘Pseudo Dude,' a muscle-bound, thinly disguised copy of male power and testosterone-ridden action stars (‘G.I. Jane' and ‘Terminator 2'). What was missing for me from the sheroe game, especially in the big-time movie biz, were images of women whose strength emanated from their femaleness.

That is........until I recently went to see ‘Avatar' and, let me tell you, I was knocked off my stilettos, girls. I'd heard the buzz, so I was expecting great special effects and the big-budget, Hollywood ‘shock and awe' thing. What I wasn't expecting was to find such a beautiful depiction of female strength and power, which rang true to my own experiences and beliefs. I'm not suggesting that the sheroe Neytiri is a ‘realistic' character, by any means (she's a 10-foot tall, blue-skinned, extra-terrestrial who rides flying dragons, for crying out loud). But, I am saying that the qualities that make her admirable, noble and powerful are the same qualities that I associate with true female strength.

Look, it may be reductive, but I definitely think that women's strength is forged from a very different kind of metal than that of men. The women I've known, loved, watched and admired have a quiet strength which emanates from compassion, love and interconnectedness. It's wise, it's intuitive, it's soft, but it's super-fierce and it's strong, all the same. Believe that! The women I call role models have been truly human warriors; women who work two and three jobs to feed their children when ‘daddy' disappears into the ether, women who take suicidal, sexually abused children into their homes and love them back into life again. I'm a witness. So, thanks to Neytiri for representing us properly and for reminding us that the ultimate in feminine strength comes from the courage to love and to honor the inter-connectedness of all things.

Oh yeah, and the girlie is pretty handy with a bow and arrow too!

Read the original on Powder Room Graffiti (a UK ezine the modern, cantankerous woman/goddess warrior!!) :

http://www.powderroomgraffiti.com/love-it/films/i-am-neytiri.html