Written by Paavani Lal Das
You have met a Dumbledore, or a Donald Trump, or a Dwight Schrute. Not for who they are, but for how they are treated. A man who is deeply and widely respected, or who is widely known for his narcissism and misplaced confidence, or widely mocked and equally tolerated despite his fixture quirks. And while Donald Trump may not, regrettably, be a thing of fiction, he is the same as the rest: a character.
Everyone has the ability and the tendency to mold their outward persona. There is a certain level of information about ourselves that we are willing to share with others. The shift between these personal dimensions is ‘code-switching’, when our language and the way we communicate the allowed information changes with our environment.
This is not exclusive to any one gender, but our ‘personal dimensions’, or ‘forward facing personas’, and ultimately the impressions we leave on society are determined in some part by our gender.
Like anyone else, women are pigeonholed. There exists a trope for every type of person. But the stereotypes we see in the media don’t carry over directly. They exist as reactions, exaggerations of real life. It is not a two-way street, in which men see Adam Sandler and adopt his persona. There have been millions of Adam Sandlers that allow any and all Adam Sandler movie characters to convincingly play the role of ‘funny guy’, as audiences have met him before in their own personal lives.
Take Albus Dumbledore and his progeny. By this, I mean the man you’ve met that is revered, loved, mostly because he is taken to have some sort of ‘wiseness’ to him. The concept of a wise man goes back to the Biblical Magi. “Wiseness’ seems to be only applicable to men. A wise man is associated with an elderly or reserved man, with deep searching eyes and a moderate to negative rating on the attractiveness scale. Some man who chooses his words carefully and is maybe the slightest bit avuncular, bright-eyed, and caring, but not enough to fall into the ‘stupid big oaf’ trope. In real life, men like this may be ribbed a bit, may be teased, but at the end of the day, those around him treat him with a level of respect that hinges on this ‘wise man’ perception. One doesn’t have to have met him, interacted with him, or received something useful from this interaction to participate in his reverence. It is because of the knowledge he is presumed to have that he is given social standing, he is given power.
Whereas the ‘wise woman’ doesn’t exist. Women who have power already are seen as sharp in a distasteful way. They are severe, uptight, strict. Elderly women are either batty or matronly. If a woman is, somehow, portrayed as wise, chances are she is some celestial goddess, some divine being that is inhumanly gorgeous and probably omniscient, and still absurdly maternal.
Men are able to play into characters to put themselves at an advantage; women who are anything less than well-rounded are noticed negatively. It’s not that women have to be attractive, kind, and clever, but that they should be. These are the traits that receive positive interest. Whereas men can be funny, odd, or ingenious. Their public images are sharper. They don’t have to be beautiful or nice or witty to be accepted, and they certainly don’t have to be all three at once.
Could there be James Joyce’s Ulysses for a Stephanie Dedalus? Is there Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis for a Gregoria? Is there J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye? Would Dead Poet’s Society work in an all-girls school?
There is an argument for the significance of these characters as men. There is no one better as a vehicle for the lessons of life than the everyman. The ‘everyman’, in literature, is the average working person who is stuck and uninspired by the circumstances forced upon them by an unfair society in the Western world. This person is a man.
Men remain the face of the workforce despite that women work just as much, and in the past century have been competing with them in the same fields. Though the labour force participation rate for both men and women has been declining over the past decade in the EU, the decline in women’s participation rate has been slower than that of men. In the United States, female employment has doubled to 75% in 2024 from 38% in 1955. The working woman has existed throughout human history; domestic labor is essential work that has been shouldered by women, just unpaid.
And yet, the vessels for larger, universal themes like freedom, independence, the conviction of personhood, or the search for ambition are not so easily extracted when–if–they are shown through women. There is a certain loadedness to the female character. You cannot remove the fact that she is a woman from who she is. As a symbol, a female character’s actions are always balanced against the permanent weight that comes with being a woman.
If the character is unambitious and searching for meaning, she is making a statement by wrestling with societal expectations. If the character is carefree and happy with being aimless, she is definitely a pretty woman and obviously a bimbo. If the character has a passion and is pursuing it, she is a prodigy who struggles against the male institution and is perpetually going against the odds.
It is a curse to be forever intertwined with identity. Media is a mirror image of reality, where men can let their attributes and actions speak for them; women currently cannot. The question left is if–as the world evolves and people begin to share spaces that were formerly restricted by gender–that reality will persist. Could the next generation’s Donald Trump be Donna?