Okay, I’ve seen a few posts aimed at dude bros in the whole She-Ra debate that I’m not a fan of. They consist of something like, “Dude bro criticizes new She-Ra for this, but look at old She-Ra and see how it’s exactly what the dude bros are criticizing,” and sometimes get downright disparaging, and I’d really like that sort of thing to stop.
Why? Because it’s cannibalizing something that’s a part of the history of girls in a reactionary argument, tossing it out with the bathwater to score a few points.
I’m 45 years old. I was a He-Man fan as a kid. My brothers had all the toys, and I would sit down with them and play He-Man too. I was glad Teela and the Sorceress were there because it gave me an opening into the series a lot of shows aimed at boys didn’t, But then came She-Ra.
Look at that fucking pose. She could kick ass.
At first it was something like a 4 or 5 parter on He-Man that introduced her and let me tell you, it was fantastic. It was a revelation not simply because of the introduction of a girl with a sword, but a girl who went from evil to good, who had the kind of character arc girls rarely got, and who, at the end of it, was the Princess of Power. Not the Princess of Rainbows, or Pony Princess, but the Princess of Power. And she had that sword.
Man, we never got shit like that. We also never got a whole cast of female characters with individual personalities, or a fantasy setting all our own where women held power. We never got amazing action figures. We never got a whole mirror world that was every bit equal to the show it had been spun off from.
This was a crazy wealth of women in an 80s cartoon, and it’s not even all of them in the show.
She-Ra was something very special for a lot of women my age.
I wanted these so bad. Alas, it was never to be.
That doesn’t mean it was without its faults. The characters run around in questionable outfits and there a big lack of diversity, and those things deserve to be discussed in proper context. But they aren’t reasons to cede ground to dude bros for the whom the show was never for, especially when people are also jumping over themselves to lionize He-Man and his two-minutes be-good-to-each-other ending remarks to score more points against the dude bros. There’s no way we should be finding ourselves in the situation where we will rip apart what was important for us but put dude bro history on a pedestal. Seriously, the foundation of dude bro arguments is often that some piece of culture was made for them and we should keep our female/queer/etc. hands off it. Well, we could simply point that out to them, then tell them to fuck off with regards to She-Ra because it was made for us.
Take on the dude bros people, just don’t give up pieces of your own history to do it.
God, all of this. I haven’t seen The Discourse on this one (thank goodness), but She-Ra was unbelievably important in little Ardatli’s formative years for all of the reasons above.
(Crystal Swift Wind, She-Ra and a handful of the girls came with me when I moved out for uni, ftr. I can’t find his other wing right now and Thing 1 pulled She-Ra’s head off when she was three, but I will never throw them away.)
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