by Donald Jeffries

Created on: August 12, 2009

The other night, I was watching the Nickelodeon teen show I Carly with my kids. It's usually a pretty decent show, but it has a strain of ugliness in one of its characters that really came out full force in this episode. Carly's best friend, Sam, is a girl who is constantly portrayed as a physical threat to everyone. She is not big. She is thin. She doesn't look to be into bodybuilding at a very early age. In short, it's ludicrous to suggest she could easily beat up almost any male. But that is just what this program regularly shows her doing. In celebration of her birthday, all her friends lovingly recount the past times when she has physically assaulted and/or beaten up someone. Eventually, she begins to feel sad and rather unfeminine, and vows to change. Nice idea, but by the end of the show she attacks and overpowers a much, much larger female bully.

This has been a consistent theme in movies and television for many years now. In fact, I would say that females beating up males has been the single most enduring theme coming out of Hollywood for at least a decade. This isn't played for comedy any longer, as it was in the days when Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble would beat up Fred and Barney, or when Mary Tyler Moore would beat up Dick Van Dyke. In those days, there had to be a "gimmick" utilized to explain the obvious improbability of smaller women overpowering larger men. Usually, as was the case with shows like The Flintstones and The Dick Van Dyke Show, this was because the women had been trained in judo or karate, which was then becoming in vogue.

Now, the female characters simply are able to punch out a larger male, and no questions are asked. The females are almost always the pretty, thin, super model-types Hollywood regularly employs. On the rare occasions when a fat or large boned woman does the beating up, then it is done for comic effect. The females are not merely defending themselves from male ogres, either; more often than not, they appear to actually be looking for a physical fight. They wear the same mean spirited, I-don't-take-any-shit expressions that nearly all actresses seem to wear nowadays, and often they start the fights. Well, it's not usually much of a fight, because the man usually is knocked cold (or at least down) with one mighty feminine blow. The Lois Lane character on the otherwise excellent show Smallville is one such bully character. She has been beating up men, often armed (once she overpowered a huge SWAT team member in

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