Female Warriors, a metaphor with troubles.

I struggle with depression and anxiety.  I’ve recently adopted a personal metaphor of being a warrior against the parts of my brain that don’t function as they should.

So occasionally I search for a female warrior image that matches the emotional state of my struggle.

And this is when I became hyper aware of the weird fetishizing of women as warriors.  Maybe I shouldn’t even call it a fetish because those images predominate.

It is nearly impossible to find an image where the breasts are not carefully delineated and huge.  And many just show the breast naked. I’ve seen images where the woman is naked and has a leather strap around her waist while she carries a sword.

Then there’s the weird poses.  You know the ones I mean.  Just look at the cover of any book or movie poster with women in action roles and they are arching their back awkwardly to push forward the breast or their hips.  They are angled so their butts show, their dress is slit and their leg is up to show the thigh.  And generally the perspective of the viewer is such that a body part like the breast is the predominant feature of image.

In other words they are selling sexual suggestion.  The thing is that this is so predominant that it’s normal and I never paid much attention to it.  It’s been that way my whole life.  But when I wanted to select images that reflected my particular emotional state it became suddenly clear that finding images with any emotional state besides sexuality was going to be something of a challenge.

So I try very hard to avoid images that turn the woman into a sexual object instead of a warrior.  Its so demeaning to the very concept of warrior, isn’t it?  It basically says this woman is actually just a toy for men that is playing at being a fighter.  Don’t take her seriously.

I prefer my images to be she’s serious and possibly deadly.