Recently, Chris Hemsworth, that Australian hunk of “Thor” fame, said it was time for a woman to play James Bond. Last year two actresses, Priyanka Chopra and Emilia Clarke (of Game of Thrones fame), voiced their potential interest in taking on such a role.
As much as I love women and believe they are wonderful role models, in movies and in real life, it’s a stupid idea for Hollywood in all it’s progressive glory to flip the script on a classic male role, solely in the name of gender equality and political correctness. The fight for women not just to be equal with men but surpass them in terms of rights, opportunities, and activities is one of the most bold, important cultural movements at play — if this succeeds it will not resonate well in our society long term.
Teaching young women they are empowered, strong creatures who can do wonderful things, such as fill vocational roles in the past filled by men, is not inherently bad. Lego’s production of “female scientists” is inspiring, for example.
But ridding the Bond films of a male James Bond and replacing it with a female Bond is a hallmark of feminist messaging: Whatever he can do, she can do better. This push for equality via an over-competitive edge really doesn’t do men or women any favors, primarily because men and women are wired differently and the way they complement each other is a boon for society.
This spring, Stanford Medicine released a study of major differences between the male and female brain. This isn’t environmental, or nurture differences as the adage goes, but actual hard-wiring differences between which transfer into obvious behavioral differences between the sexes.
Women excel in several measures of verbal ability — pretty much all of them, except for verbal analogies. Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They outperform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They’re more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory.
Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two-or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects, and at aiming projectiles.
Having a woman star as James Bond goes against the very essence of a James Bond story — nay, the beauty of traditional male and female dynamics (err, immorality aside).
Teaching young women they can do anything boys can do is not only illogical but stupid. Do we likewise teach our boys they can be anything? If your child consistently makes poor grades in Math but excels in English, would you sincerely tell him he could be an astrophysicist? Of course not.
Yet society insists on wildly pearl-clutching feminist talking points to the point that we give permission for our boys to kind of be boys, and our girls, to kind of be girls, but also kind of boys, if they want. This neutering of the sexes only produces gender confusion; not to mention, girls who are whiny and boys who are wimpy.
This is not to say that women should purely be sex objects in films, but neither does that mean we should emasculate and strip men of their testosterone-laden selves either. Most females are hard-wired with incredible gifts which serve a vital role in society. Most men also possess a unique but altogether different set of gifts, which can work in tandem with women quite well.
A woman doesn’t need to be James Bond to prove she’s important and gifted and men don’t need to relinquish that role to prove he views her as his equal — in movies or in real life.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
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