Let me create the scene: the guy has just broken the girl’s heart; she reaches for the trusty tub of ice cream and starts processing the emotional trauma one delicious spoonful at a time, while usually watching other Romantic movies. Is there any scientific reasoning for this? According to a recent study on the Brain’s pleasure zones ice cream shows an immediate response to pleasurable taste, meaning eating ice cream gives us pleasure, but surely so does eating most food?
Ice cream has become the symbol in movies for the grieving recently-dumped girlfriend. This is probably due to the fact that eating ice cream appears ‘prettier’ than say stuffing one’s face with a few hamburgers. Also audience members might start to feel uncomfortable if the heroin were to drown her sorrows in a bottle of Vodka. Yes, ice cream seems to be the more socially acceptable vice and has now become a movie staple food when dealing with troubles of the heart, but after reading some comments from soompi.com it’s clear that most women rather reach for the tissues than ice cream and find eating the creamy dessert mixed with tears unsettling. As Mythbusters might say, this myth is busted.
We would like to believe that female superheroes have come along way since the 1996 adaptation of Barb Wire, where Pamela Anderson played a bounty hunter and wore a black leather corset outfit, but is this truly the case?.
After almost a decade female superheroes are still being typecast as glorified beauty queens who happen to have superpowers and an attitude. These so called superheroes are dressed as every teenage boy’s fantasy, in either black or red leather with the customary thigh high boots, i.e. Cat woman, Aeon Flux and Electra. In my opinion and according to the IMDb website ratings, female superhero movies deviating from the customary acrobatic sex symbols do quite well at the box office. For example Alice from Resident Evil, although very attractive is a bad ass female superhero who uses her martial arts skills to kill zombies and mutant dogs without the help of any tight fitting, boob revealing outfits.
Another one of my favorites is Hit girl from the movie Kick ass. An eleven year old superhero girl, no sexy outfits or seductively husky voice, just amazing gun wielding abilities and a vocabulary that would make most grown men blush. Female superhero movies could become just as popular a franchise as that of Spiderman and Batman if the focus moved away from their dangerous curves towards their dangerous abilities and attitudes.
