The farmer was digging in his field, and his spade hit something hard, that jarred his shoulders. He dug up the offending object, and discovered it was solid gold, and looked like a small bowl. “A mortar!” he exclaimed. “A solid gold mortar! I’ll take it to the king!” He brought the shining thing home and showed his daughter. “Look, daughter!” he said. “I’m going to take this to the king as a gift. You watch. I shall get thanks and a present for my pains.”
The farmer’s daughter chuckled, and told her father, “No, Dad: he’s going to say, ‘It’s a lovely mortar; but where is the pestle?’ and you’ll get naught for your pains.”
“Bah, what do you know, simpleton?” said the farmer, and he went off to the castle.
The farmer managed to get an audience with the king, and presented him with the golden mortar. “Hm,” said the king, turning it around and around in his royal hands, “It is a lovely mortar. But, where is the pestle?”
“Good gravy!” said the farmer, smacking his own forehead. “She knew Your Majesty would say that!”
“Who knew?” asked the king.
“Why, my daughter. She said Your Majesty’d say this very thing, word for word.”
“Hm,” said the king. “She sounds like a clever young lady. Let’s find out just how clever. Bring her this flax, and tell her to make shirts for an entire regiment of soldiers. But tell her to hurry—I need the shirts right away.” The farmer was handed only a few strands of flax. But you don’t argue with the king, so the farmer brought the few sad strands back to his daughter.
“Oh, no need to worry. Here,” his daughter said when he handed her the king’s request. The farmer’s daughter shook the small bundle of flax until she got a small palmful of flax scalings, just bits of chaff, that looked like a pile of white fish scales in her father’s hand. “Take this back to the king. Tell him I’ll be happy to make the shirts, once I have a loom. Ask him to please make me a loom out of these scalings, and I’ll have the shirts to his soldiers forthwith.”
The farmer did as his daughter asked, with dread in his heart. The king was delighted with her response, however, and requested the farmer send her to the castle herself, so he could have the pleasure of talking with such a clever young woman. “But,” the king warned, “mind she comes to me neither naked nor clothed, on a stomach neither full nor empty, neither in the daytime nor at night, neither on foot nor on horseback. Mind she obeys me in every particular, for I am king, and will punish you both if she fails.”
When the farmer delivered this missive, despairing of both his and his daughter’s lives, she only chuckled again, and said, “Don’t be silly—bring the fishing net.”
And so it was that, in the morning before daybreak, the clever farmer’s daughter draped herself with the fishing net (neither naked nor clothed), ate a lupin (stomach neither full nor empty), threw one leg over the family goat, leaving her other foot dragging on the ground (neither on foot nor horseback), and reached the palace just as the sky began to barely lighten (neither day nor night). “Majesty,” she said, “I am here and obeying your order to the letter.”
The king laughed, applauded, and after a long conversation over dinner, he proposed marriage and made her queen. Her father the farmer, though, said when he heard the news, “I’ll keep your work clothes here on their hook by your bedroom door, for whatever the king decides, he can change his mind just as quickly.”
Now it was tradition in this kingdom for the queen to be present at and contribute to all the audiences with the king. This went well for a while, but after only a few weeks of the new queen disagreeing with nearly every decision the king made, he barred her from the audience chamber and the decision making. It was all well and good for the king himself to know that his queen was smarter than him, but the public humiliation was too much for him to bear.
Not long after this decision was made, a farmer came in with a dispute against another. The first farmer had brought his pregnant cow to sale at the market, and, having no available stable, tied it to the other farmer’s cart overnight for safety. In the morning, the farmer had discovered his cow had given birth to a healthy calf. But the second farmer said, “You can take your cow, but that calf is mine. See how it sits under my cart? My cart, my calf.” And so this argument was taken before the king, who decided the calf belonged to the farmer with the cart.
The queen heard this whole thing, and managed to secretly meet with the first farmer. She consulted him on what he must do.
Later that day, the king and his retinue were out hunting. As they passed a long-dry pond, they saw there the first farmer, fishing pole in hand, bait nearby, tossing his fishhook into the dry pond bed and reeling it in. Puzzled, the king asked, “What are you doing there, my good fellow?”
“Greetings, Your Majesty! I’m fishing in this here pond.”
“But there’s no water, nor no fish in that pond.”
“Well, Your Majesty, if a cart can give birth to a calf, maybe this dry pond can yield up some fish.”
“Hm,” said the king. He then knew the queen had meddled in his affairs. He confronted her with this, and said, “Since you did not obey me when I barred you from my audience chamber and kingly decision making, I am sending you home. Be gone by the end of the night. You may take the thing you like best from the castle with you when you go, but you must be gone by dawn.”
The farmer’s daughter agreed meekly. The dinner that evening was large, with many rich meats, creams, and other full foods. Of course it was the queen’s job to set the castle menu. She also opened many a bottle of excellent wine, with which she filled and refilled the king’s cup. “It’s to commemorate our last meal together,” she said. Of course, with all the rich food and copious amounts of wine, soon the king was snoring in his chair. “Quick,” the queen said to the servants once he was out cold, “take up the chair with the king in it, and follow me. Don’t wake him!”
And so it was that the king was carried, by night, back to the farmer’s daughter’s old home. “I knew it,” said her father when he saw her returning, “I’ll just fetch your workclothes again. Didn’t I tell you the king would change his mind?”
“Ssh,” said his daughter. “Don’t wake him.” The farmer’s face fell when he saw the king, sleeping in an ornate chair, being carried into his daughter’s old room. But he shook his head—at this point, he realized his daughter must know exactly what she was doing.
Meanwhile the farmer’s daughter managed to undress the king and get him into her bed without waking him, and dismissed the servants, who brought the chair back to the castle. She got into bed next to the king, as normal. Once, in the dead of night, he halfway woke, felt that the sheets were a little rougher than he was used to, the bed a little harder. He felt his wife next to him, and murmured sleepily, “Didn’t I tell you to be gone?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the farmer’s daughter replied. “But it’s not yet dawn. Go back to sleep.” And so the king did.
The morning broke early, with the rooster crowing loud just outside the window under which the king slept. He jolted awake, and saw the rough, plain sheets, small poor room, and his wife. He cried, “Where am I?”
“You’re home with me,” the queen replied. “You told me to take the thing I liked best from the castle home with me. I took you, and I’m keeping you.”
The king laughed, and begged forgiveness. They both went back to the castle, and lived there happily ever after. And of course, from that day forward, the king never again held audience or made any decisions without the Queen.
Molly Whuppie, Vassilisa the Beautiful, and the above (“Catherine, Sly Country Lass”) are versions of this story from England, Russia, and Italy, respectively. In each story, the protagonist must use her smarts and her bravery to succeed. Vassilisa must fetch light for her abusive stepsisters and stepmother from the dangerous witch Baba Yaga (and receives it, in the form of skulls on poles, whose lit-up eye sockets burn her evil step-peeps to ash. It’s a pretty Metal end to the story). Molly Whuppie, like her male parallel Jack the Giant Killer, must three times visit a giant and his wife, but also she saves her sisters by tricking the giant into killing his own daughters instead, and uses ventriloquism to make her final move.
These stories are all examples of a clever girl that comes from nothing but has a brilliant brain in her head, that undergoes trials because of her ready wit, and ends up marrying the king (or his son). Of course, for a woman in the times these tales were told, marriage was the necessary happy ending. In today’s stories, we’re much more advanced as a culture than to assume the only option for a woman’s happy ending is a good coupling. Our current contemporary badass female characters are much more progressive, unburdened by sexist tropes and systemic misogyny. Right?
I grew up in a trailer park in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, which means that, as privileged as I was to have grown up in this particular well-to-do city, I lacked most of the advantages of most of my schoolmates and friends as I grew up. The yearly high school choir retreat to Winter Park resort, for example, was financially impossible for only me. When the choir teacher, aghast, told me the choir wouldn’t sound nearly as strong without my voice, I was forced to tell her that she could pay for me to go, or they could perform without the only member who couldn’t afford it. I never once went to Winter Park with the choir. Uniforms and my preferred Goth-y high school fashions were beyond difficult for me to keep up with, though my grades were not.
I learned to read when I was not quite two years old, there on the old green shag carpet of the mobile home. I remember our next door neighbor cornering my Mom and me, as we walked across the prairie-dog park on our way to the grocery store. He had a friend with him; both very tall men (it seemed to me, at two years old). He shoved a newspaper’s front page headlines in my toddler face, and shouted, “Look, Tom! She can read!!! Go ahead, Jenny: read this! Read it! You won’t believe this, Tom!” Of course I, terrified, buried my face into my mother’s skirt (as tiny humans tend to do when threatened). My neighbor meant me no harm whatsoever—quite the opposite. But he loomed large and slanting dangerously against the sky, and his strident voice was loud. I could, indeed, read the headlines. I read them inside my head even as I turned away, terrified by the height, and the voices, of the two men that crowded me. But I said nothing about what I could read. My Mom dealt with the overly-celebratory neighbor with grace, soothing me as we got into the store, but that event remains the first time I remember being afraid of men, despite my incredible abilities. Despite their ostensible (and sometimes sincere) friendliness.
I didn’t stay smaller than the men around me very long—I’m a tall, strong woman, and outgrew my male friends pretty quickly, staying a similar size to the teenaged men around me as I grew up, even to the full grown, athletic male colleagues as I ventured into the martial arts in my late twenties. It doesn’t mean the moment with my neighbor was the last time I was ever afraid of a man, though my fear has become much more subtle as I’ve grown up.
I like to think that my intelligence has kept me abreast of society, when my lack of good looks and finances failed me. Of course, it also meant I was a very late bloomer, as the stories I read and later wrote were far beyond what I found in my everyday world. Later, in acting school, I learned the art of stage combat, graduated college with two degrees, joined a wicked band of young men and became one of those swordsmen that perform their skilled badassery regularly to the awe of audiences. At the same time, I joined an aerial dance company, performing as a principal dancer for several shows a year on low-flying trapezes, hoops, and the like. My lats loved it, my parents … well, they loved it, but they worried about my uninsured ass up in the air or armed with four feet of even unsharpened steel.
Having been bullied relentlessly and cruelly on account of my not-so-good looks from elementary school (when a gemini tooth had to catch up with my new grownup teeth, one of which I had broken in half in a dance class, rendering me beyond snaggletoothed), to junior high (when puberty did nothing to increase my attractiveness, only gave me greasy hair, zits, and no clue how to keep up with fashion), being in these two groups didn’t help my body image much. The dancers were all smaller than me, even the men, and the choreographer loved to remind me that I wasn’t a “real dancer.” The swordsmen treated me as one of the guys, and so I languished, like patience on a monument, smiling at grief,1 as that choreographer told me he never slept with anyone he worked with, just after telling me how distracted he was by my long, lean legs.
Soon after, when I was in the peak of my practice and the lead parts of both of these groups, I dropped the theatrical commitments, got into graduate school for writing, and began real martial arts training with the man I would soon marry—traditional Japanese martial arts, which took incredible dedication, discipline, and physical and mental prowess. Basically, I became what history and legend have labeled a total badass: a ninja. No, really. (And now that I’ve told you that, I have to kill you).2
Has my intelligence and/or my ninja training gotten me far? Not nearly as far as clever Catherine in the folktale above, who won a queenship with her smarts (and won it back again, when the insecure king took it away from her). As of this writing, I work as an adjunct professor of English and Theatre, which means I coach and teach and edit and condition and train and guide many students through many of their own creative works, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. Plus there are the younger children, to whom I teach freelance stage combat classes. The skills I help all these students to hone and practice are myriad, and I am accoladed by good student (and peer) evaluations every semester for my labors. Also as of this writing, I am undergoing a long drawn out divorce procedure, and my bank account is almost five hundred dollars in the negative.3
As much as the adjunct faculty plight is not completely relegated to women, there are enough statistics re: numbers of adjuncts who are women, and numbers of professors who move on to getting scarce full time positions as being mostly white and male, that it’s really part and parcel of my whole problem, as an actual badass woman in this world. I mean, how much more qualified, talented, and experienced do I have to be, to be given a good role, or a job with a living wage, let alone a career in life that lets me share my many talents and skills to full effect, to make a change in the world? I’ve taken my Hero’s Journey; I’ve returned with the boon. Why is nobody interested? Because I’m a woman?
The story of Hollywood hasn’t changed: Donkeyskin still runs away from the threat of sexual assault; Catherine, Sly Country Lass still needs must put herself through major humiliation just for the privilege of marrying a rich man, or getting that role of a lifetime. Does the badass (read: courageous, intelligent, strong) woman of today ever fully escape the lecherous or foolish king?
No, she doesn’t, especially today,4 and I have laid out seven tropes that illustrate this problem of the current female badass character, in today’s told and retold stories. The problem that becomes apparent here is that in today’s literature and entertainment, these strong, independent female characters we read about in old stories like Donkeyskin and clever Catherine are subverted, altered, and weakened; either in subtle ways or obvious ways, especially by current pop culture and Hollywood.
So? you might be thinking. Why is this important, and why the heck should I care? Can’t I just enjoy my badass female characters without you ruining it for me with your spoilsport feminism?
Well, no.
Look, I get it. I love James Bond movies as much as the next guy—really, I do. I’ve been known, in my long-gone teenhood, to get a kick out of Disney movies (you should hear my accurate singing imitation of Belle from Beauty and the Beast. I can also do a wicked Ariel). But.
As a real-life badass woman being subverted daily by the culture which surrounds me, I want to bring to light the insidious changes being made to older stronger characters with these current tropes, and question what we as entertainment consumers have been taught to think of as normal badassery. After all, the depictions of females in our entertainment have everything to do with how we view real women in our culture. Our entertainment builds our social mores, enriches our lives, and even dictates the choices we make, and tastes we have. It’s not that I’m saying none of us should be allowed to enjoy the heroics of Imperator Furiosa, Trinity, or Beatrix Kiddo. But. As we enjoy them, we should make sure we have a clear view of what these problematic badass female tropes mean, what they’re doing, and how our absorption and acceptance of them affects the real life badass women all around us. The king can change his mind anytime he likes, remember. He’s still in control, and must be obeyed. Or must he? Maybe it’s time to stick him in his chair, carry him home, and show him where we come from.

If you think part of that introductory story and essay sounded familiar to you, you’re right. It’s one draft of an introduction to the Problematic Badass Female Tropes series I whipped up just before I began my memoir and right when I’d decided it’d be cool to make both Problematic Tropes series into a book. Since my reshare of all 14 essays plus their introductions are up and live and polished in T is for Thursday Tropes, I’m going to continue the series with a collection of some less refined pieces. I’ll be concocting a sort of kaleidoscope of the snippets of stories and subtropes that didn’t make it into the published series as it is now. The above is one of these. What do you thnk?
Here’s the basic plan for the ongoing Problematic Tropes ‘mess’ays going forward::
Problematic Badass Female Tropes: 3 sub/tropes that didn’t get written
Problematic Toxic Masculinity Tropes: 3 sub/tropes that didn’t get written
Problematic Story Plot Tropes: a series of 7 that I never started
*
(Should I GLOSS the existing essays too? Let me know if that’d be interesting for you.)
That’s the idea! I reserve the right to adapt, eradicate, or otherwise change any of this I see fit, for my workload and sanity’s sake, but for now that’s the plan. Comment below and let me know what you’d like to see.
NOTE: ‘Catherine, Sly Country Lass’ is an old European folktale that I have retold in my own words. I did not quote, but did reference, Jane Yolen’s Favorite Folktales From Around the World for her version though, to make sure I didn’t forget any plot points.
Man, I really do like to quote this, don’t I?
Fun fact #1: a female ninja is called a kunoichi. I have heard a few translations of what the word really means, but the most interesting one IMO is the “nine holes plus one” translation. Think about it. I’ll wait…
That was a rough time, not gonna lie. I’m happy to report that this was somewhere around 8 years ago, and that my life is exponentially better right now.
ESPECIALLY today. Like today, in the USA, with a mad king on the nonexistent throne.