'The Flash' Can't Handle Its Female Characters
The Flash has always had a problem with its women. With little room in the plot for the development of its two regular female characters, it’s no wonder that any additional female characters are usually incidental or villains of the week who are never seen or heard from again. Given all that, it was a surprise to discover that season four’s “Girls Night Out” was meant to function as the show’s “very special feminism episode,” complete with several “hashtag feminism” jokes. The fact that no one says “hashtag feminism” in earnest was a clear and early indication that the plot wouldn’t be doing anything other than paying lip service to women’s empowerment.
In the episode, Iris, Felicity, Caitlin, and Cecile (Joe’s fiancée) convene for Iris’s bachelorette party. They plan for a quiet night, but things go awry when a villain from Killer Frost’s past disrupts their plans and forces them to take down an enemy while the men of Team Flash are unreachable, drunk at a strip club for Barry’s bachelor party.
Most of the narrative focuses on Iris’s quest to convince Caitlin’s alter ego Killer Frost that she doesn’t have to be a villain because...friendship and freedom and girl power. While Frost wishes to dispatch her enemies on her own, she agrees to work with the others to claim victory and eventually opens to up to the rest of the team about her secret double life.
Though the episode superficially tries to incorporate the pop-cultural ubiquity of feminism into the plot, it never bothers to meaningfully engage with how these characters would actually interact with feminist concepts. Other than the fact that the episode puts the female characters front and center (one of which is borrowed from another show), there’s nothing about this particular plot that’s explicitly feminist. It’s a toothless take on “girl power” that “allows” the women of the show to solve a problem without the help of the men - something we’ve always known they could do, even if they rarely get the chance to demonstrate it.
Then there’s the inexplicable B plot in which Cecile’s daughter Joanie - in her second appearance on the show - is revealed to be dancing at the strip club where the male characters end up. When confronted by Joe (her future stepfather), she explains that she’s writing a book on the female experience and dancing at the strip club because “we live in a society that’s dictated by the male gaze.” She says she wants to “control the narrative of feminism” by showing the world that “a powerful strong woman can wear anything, be it a bikini or a pantsuit.”
Noble as her goals are, these are surface-level critiques that do little to get into the weeds of what it means to be a woman in the world. Largely, these are battles that have already been fought and won. Joanie’s ideas show that she has no context for the existing scope of feminist scholarship, likely because the show’s writers don’t either. Why not discuss the double standard in the public-policy treatment of sex workers, despite the continued heavy patronage of their services, or the way that race intersects with the stigma of sex work to compound the oppression of black and brown sex workers? Instead, Joanie’s proposal rehashes basic concepts that have already been debated to death, without any nuance or additional insight.
Unfortunately, these problems aren’t really new. The Flash has a poor record when it comes to the treatment of its female characters, most notably its female lead Iris West. Despite being an original member of the cast and Barry’s true love, Iris’s development has suffered under the steady bloat of the cast, as regularly introduced new (male) characters get entire narrative arcs of personal growth while Iris is shunted to the sidelines. In four seasons, Iris has transitioned from waitress to grad student, from city blogger to journalist, and finally to leader of Team Flash with little to no explanation of how her ambitions have evolved over time, or how she might even have acquired the skills she now uses. Her aspirations always appear to be determined by plot mechanics rather than naturally following the arc of her character. As far we can tell, Iris is currently unemployed and planning a wedding on Barry’s public servant salary. What was she doing during the six months when Barry was presumed dead? How did she cope? How did she support herself? Does she even exist outside of her relationship to Barry?
On the other hand, the newly introduced character Ralph Dibny has appeared in a grand total of four episodes and has already been given a backstory, a redemptive arc, and a place on Team Flash. His quick entry into the main cast signals that yet again, Iris’s character development will likely take a backseat to the the men in the story. Even Caitlin’s exploits as Killer Frost have largely happened offscreen, while coworker Cisco Ramon’s evolution into Vibe has been given not only significant narrative weight but made him an even more indispensable part of the team. In contrast, Caitlin’s powers have explicitly made her a liability to Barry and the rest of Team Flash.
Of the several television shows in the CW Arrowverse, The Flash is the only one that regularly fails the Bechdel test. In fact, "Girls Night Out" only passes because the villain of the week is a woman. Even with both Caitlin and Iris in the main cast, the two characters rarely if ever directly interact with each other about anything that isn’t Team Flash–related, a fact that the writers lampshade when Caitlin points out to Iris that they are only “work friends” and not close enough to confide in each other. Considering how closely they work together and the eerily similar circumstances under which both women previously lost the men they loved, it’s strange that after four seasons they aren’t any closer than when they first met.
While it’s commendable that The Flash’s writers understand and acknowledge that feminism is an important part of our current political moment, they would have been better off slowly incorporating a more feminist moral landscape into the show than trying to shoehorn every millennial girl power trope into one episode. What they’ve done instead is flatten a diverse and widespread political movement into a pithy slogan rather than exhibit a substantial understanding of how feminism affects the lives of everyday women, and there’s nothing empowering about that.
Follow Cate on Twitter and Cosmo Celeb on Facebook.
You Might Also Like