So now we know how it started, pretty much. But the amazon superninja didn’t immigrate from comic books to movies right away. And when she did, it was a gradual incursion.

The idea of a  120 pound woman physically dominating a 180 pound man in any kind of combat is laughable. So it’s fitting that the first cultural conditioning began in comedies.

(Even male couch potatoes are easily stronger than the average female. Yes, martial arts can make up for some physiological advantages, and according to action movies, every woman is a master; but I’d wager there are still a lot more men studying martial arts than women…in the real world, anyway.)

(You might want to skip forward to 6:40 or so in the clip below.)

The gender role reversals were very subtle in, say, the Howard Hawks comedies. But the more zany the comedy, the more masculine the women and effeminate the men. One would think people watching a comedy would know better than to take anything in it seriously, but when watching a movie, a person’s defenses are significantly weakened due to their suspension of disbelief, and ideas can infest directly into the subconscious. Hollywood knows this, of course, and has used this technique to influence the thinking of Joe Public regarding nearly every subject–especially politics.

By the 1970s amazon superninjas began showing up in non-comedy genres to a noticeable extent. By the 1990s it was obligatory in action movies, and becoming so in adventure fiction. Of course comic books were way ahead of the curve, having started down this road in the early 1940s.

TO BE CONTINUED…