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Zanaria McCray
Professor Sullivan
English 1102
April 22nd 2013
To Be a Woman
My mother has always raised me to be strong and independent. She would always tell me
that as a woman I would have to work twice as hard as any man to get what I wanted out of life. I
never understood what she meant by this until one day it all started making sense. I was running
for class president of my grade level against a male opponent, but I was a much better candidate.
I was an honors magnet student, a member of the cheerleading squad, president of several clubs
at school, and a devoted volunteer. When the winner of the presidency was announced I was
beyond shocked to find out that I had lost. I started hearing rumors that students did not vote for
me simply because I was a girl. They believed that I would not be able to lead competently or
handle myself in high pressure situations. I had never noticed that my school rarely ever had
female class presidents; in the 8 years previous all of the presidents had been male. It was at this
moment that I realized that by being born a female I had been born disadvantaged. Women are
believed to be less intelligent, inferior, and weaker than our male counterparts. The female
characters in V for Vendetta are depicted in this manner; these women are weak and cannot help
themselves and are easily controlled by their male dominated government. In this essay I will
explain how the women in the film are being portrayed as naïve, subservient, half citizens who
are only necessary for sexual pleasure and task that the men deem beneath them.
Feminist author of “Men and Women in Media”, Paula Marie Poindexter, speaks to how
society, at large, sees women and how that is portrayed in the media. “Women are generally
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portrayed in the media through the lenses of the patriarchal society; reinforcing the concepts that
women are only responsible for taking care of the household, their husbands, and their children”
Poindexter means that a male dominated system came up with the manner that women are
represented in media. This male dominated society has the idea that the only thing that women
are capable of doing is taking care of the family. And women, who do not submit to taking the
inferior position, are punished.
Poindexter’s idea about society’s belief in female inferiority is in the portrayal of all of
the female characters that appear in the film. In V for Vendetta, the action packed film released in
2005, one of the main characters, Evey, and the few minor female characters, all are either forced
to submit to dominate male power or be persecuted for not doing as such.
One of the opening scenes begins with the main female character, Evey Hammond, on
her way out past the high chancellor’s strictly enforced curfew. We are led to believe that Evey is
on her way to “visit” her male co-worker. While making her way through a back alley trying to
avoid being detected, she is caught by the chancellor’s secret policemen called “Fingermen”. We
can only assume that she is about to be raped when V, a man who wears a Guy Fawkes mask,
comes in and rescues her. He kills Evey’s attackers and introduces himself. In this scene Evey is
the classic naïve helpless woman who gets herself into a situation that she cannot get out of. If
she had obeyed the chancellor’s rules she would not have been in that position. This scene is a
perfect example of how women are punished for not obeying her male superior. She then needs
to be saved by a man because she is not able to help herself. She is the classic damsel in distress
that female characters always seem to play.
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As the movie progresses there is a scene where Evey is kidnapped and tortured for
information until she is near death. Her torturer, who turns out to be V, shaves her head. Evey
cries as her hair is buzz cut in an act of punishment and dehumanization This seems to be a
symbol of her losing her femininity because society so often associates female beauty and
sexuality with “beautiful” hair. Evey’s forced head shave is an act of punishment is a time of
intense personal growth. But Evey does not become like a man, she remains a woman who,
although becomes fearless, bust still has no real power. This is done to say that a woman even
when she has been stripped of her own feminism.
“The Woman in Room Four”, we later came to know as Valerie is another character who
is a prime example of the persecution and singling out of women who do not submit to the male
power. She is a young actress and is also lesbian. She falls in love with a woman and lives with
her for many years - the best years of her life. However, once the Chancellor comes to power,
homosexuality is forbidden and both Valerie and her lover are taken and to a concentration camp
where they are both killed. Valerie wrote a letter on toilet paper, as her last testament, to be
found by the next inmate.
The last character that I will speak on is Doctor Suridge she was over the Larkhill camp
who V kills by lethal injection. Surridge apologizes to him in her final moments of life. She is an
example of when a woman has to do a job that males do feel to superior to do. Dr. Surridge
believed that what she was doing was for the good of her country but in actuality she did not
know that she was destroying it. At the time, she had no idea what would happen when the
facility was destroyed and she was able to look at the outcome of her work, she realized what she
had done was contribute to the country's destruction.
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Lynnette Monagan Sharmon, author of “Patriarchy: Perpetuating the Practice of Female
Genital Mutilation." Writes, “The women’s role has always been consigned to childrearing and
sex.” This is very true and what is put in front of us every day. A woman’s role is to be that
mother and sex partner to her husband. This is what our male dominated society teaches us. The
women in V for Vendetta who did not participate in the norm were treated very badly or shunned.
The main issue is that media displays male dominated cultural biases, what the public
want to hear and what it supports. Sexism can be found in multiple sources anywhere from
magazine advertisements to movies, all of which support or portray women in a submissive or
inferior and attack women who do not follow this example. Women can be shown in two ways in
films; one, pretty, innocent, obedient, and dependent or two, strong, independent, and sassy but a
half-clothed sexual object. V for Vendetta has several classic examples of how society defines
what a woman is and how she is to act.