The women of The Boys
Warnings: Major SPOILERS for The Boys season 1.
Mention of rape and feminicide.
If there is one TV show that is aptly named, it is The Boys. Amazon Prime new creation is about, well, boys, some with super powers, some without, but mostly about boys and for boys. Set in a not so distant future, the story revolves around Hughie, whose girlfriend is gruesomely killed — although accidentally — by a superhero. In an attempt at justice (or more like revenge), he pairs up with sketchy former C.I.A. operative Billy Butcher, to go hunt for the truth about Vought, the big corporation who owns the sups and their real-life careers as well as their onscreen adventures. Hughie and Billy, are, with another few vigilantes, the aforementioned boys.
It took me a little while to really pinpoint what bothered me watching the Boys, when I actually and honestly enjoyed the show. The series features a great cast, snappy dialogs and a perfect rhythm that will undeniably let you hooked. I binge-watched the whole 8 episodes in one week only. But at the end, I knew something wasn’t landing right. And I think it’s time we speak about the women of The Boys.
Thought out as an edgy parody and critics aimed at traditionnel superheroes stories, The Boys often trips over itself and ends up repeating the same questionable tropes we find in the comics and movies it wants so badly to mock. And most of them are related with the ways women are depicted and treated throughout the series. Despite its pretty high number of female characters, the series is not really kind to them. Not that’s it’s not ok to have women be baddies on screen or suffer adversities, it’s more about how rather than what. Or more precisely, it is about the point of view you embrace as a writer and director. Speaking of behind the scenes roles, it’s interesting to note that there are only 3 women among the 13 writers credited and only 1 female director versus 7 male directors. By interesting, I mean that it probably is a good beginning of an explanation of the subtle misogyny of the show.
The women in the Boys are all seen through male eyes, and I’m not speaking only about the aesthetic aspect of the male gaze, but about the whole package: their psychology, their emotions, their story arcs. Take Starlight for example. The young woman is cast by Vought to be the next heroine in their headliner team of superheroes called “The Seven”. But when she joins the prestigious company, she is taken aback by the real and symbolic violence she faces: from her sup coworker who rapes her on her first day to her female boss who forces her to wear a revealing leotard as her superhero costume, just after she reported said rape live on TV. I don’t think we need another storyline involving the rape of a woman in a TV show, but my issue is not about the topic. It is about the fact the consequences of all this violence is not really addressed by the series, when it is the case for the traumatic things the two other main protagonists Hughie and Billy have experienced. Onscreen, Starlight doesn’t suffer from flashbacks or panic attacks or emotions instability, she can have sex with her new boyfriend without problem, and when she tells the world what had happened, it’s more about rebelling against her fame-obsessed mother and Vought than anything else. Yes, she reacts to her rape — she confronts her rapist when she’s forced to work on a mission with him, she brutally stops two guys assaulting a girl in a parking lot, she does a big grand speach on TV — but she doesn’t seem affected by it.
All those things, public speaking, intimidating your abuser, beating up other sexual criminals, those are usually the ways men think they would react to being raped, not the way women actually do.
On the other hand, Hughie has numerous visions of his murdered girlfriend complete with auditory hallucinations, and Billy is stuck in the past, obsessively watching the last known video surveillance footage of his missing wife. We are inside their heads, we have access to their own perspectives, when Starlight doesn’t benefit from the same treatment.
Another major problematic aspect of the show is the fridging of its female characters. “Fridging” refers to the trope of torturing and/or killing a female character to further fuel a male character storyline. The Boys literally begins with the very graphic murder of the hero’s girlfriend, and this is this event that will allow the plot to unroll. Later, one of the lead female characters, Popclaw, is killed by her boyfriend, and this feminicide serves as one more tragic elements to the backstory for this character. We also learn that Billy’s wife has been missing for years, likely raped and killed by superhero Homelander, leader of The Seven. And even if in a plot twist, we discover she’s still alive and well, it happens during the very last few minutes of the season. Some will argue that since she’s alive, it doesn’t count as fridging but her missing is the number one motivator for Billy’s storyline during 8 whole episodes, so yes I’m sorry to tell y’all she still is one of the women in refrigerators. Finally, Vought top executive Madelyn is murdered by her lover Homelander — for real this time. The assassination of Madelyn is played as a shocking twist at the end of the season finale, and despite her being depicted as “one of the bad guys”, she is yet another woman killed by a man in an appalling way.
What about the other women of the show? Well, when they’re not raped or killed, they are likely to fall into one of the stereotypes usually associated with female characters. Madelyn’s assistant is “the bitchy manager”, who only think about her career. Starlight’s mom is the cliché of the “mean pageant mom” who lives vicariously through her daughter, without caring about her well being. We also meet Chérie (French for “darling”), one of the Boys’ girlfriend, who is this sexy biker-like girl, here to help them, and then is never to be seen again. I would be surprised if she had more than 10 lines of dialogue. And then we have The Female — yes, that’s how she’s credited. She falls into several tropes: she is the mysterious asian girl, with huge powers but an apparent lack of control, she’s mute and has a child-like attitude despite being a grown up woman, and she needs to be saved several times by the Boys, one of whom she seems to form some sort of romantic bond with.
Ironically enough, The Female is played by the same actress who also played Katana in Suicide Squad, a mysterious and mute asian girl with huge powers. Way to deconstruct the tropes…
We also have to mention Queen Maeve, the only other heroine of The Seven, who is criminally under-developed in the series. She’s supposed to be the Homelander counterpart, but has so little screen time, that the only thing we know about her is that she had a girlfriend once and had also been in a relationship with Homelander, but that’s it.
Notwithstanding its flaws, I think The Boys is still worth watching. However, it is not the type of show it thinks it is. Despite trying at all costs to be subversive, The Boys does nothing more than shifting ideas and lines from one speech bubble or one panel to the other. Making the supposedly good guys bad is not “deconstructing the tropes” but rather repeating them on a larger scale. Because now, not only are criminals still raping and killing women, but so do superheroes.
