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17 july 2000

i've been thinking about superheroes lately

I've been thinking a lot about superheroes lately. A couple of weeks ago, I became part of a neato online people collection, thanks to my friend Jason (who gathered us together), and Blogger. Blogger is an Internet-based FTP site that allows people to update any page in real-time, and is especially appealing to folks who keep online journals. Essentially, there are about twenty of us keeping this Blogger-powered interactive diary. Twenty conscious, literary, thoughtful people. It's been interesting so far, and very thought-provoking for me.

So about a week ago, we started talking about heroes, specifically Helen Keller. Someone mentioned her off-hand, and it began a discussion about her and other heroes that we held as adolescents. When I was in the fifth grade, Helen Keller was a big deal to me. First and foremost, she was the only woman who received any serious time and study during our history lessons. Even twenty years ago, female heroes were hard to come by, even real-live historical figures. She was certainly the only chick represented in my sorry little history book. Looking back on it, I was ripped off.

Even at the age of ten, this didn't sit well with me. I loved the short-lived tv show Wonder Woman, but she was disappointing to me in some ways. Her super-powers weren't inherently kick-ass like Spiderman's, the Hulk's or Superman's. She flew around in an invisible jet and had a magic lasso. Big deal. "I'm gonna get you with my big bad rope, Mr. Evil Guy!" It was kinda lame. Compared to Wonder Woman, Jeannie (of I Dream of Jeannie) and Samantha (of Bewitched) had way cooler powers, but they either weren't allowed to use them at will, or only used them to serve their "master" or husband. In another decade, they would have (and should have) been the girl super heroes.

I won't even go on about my disappointment about Underoos. Boys got to run around in cool Superman, Batman and Hulk Underoos. Girls got Wonder Woman and (horrors) Barbie. Not exactly the stuff of world domination.

So we idolized Helen Keller. We played blind, deaf and mute with our friends, and confounded our parents by pretending to be deaf and blind. The ASL (American Sign Language) library books were either always checked out, or in disastrous condition when we did finally get a hold of them. In pretending to be her, we imitated someone amazing. Someone who did what no one expected. Someone who could leap life in a single bound, speak through the silence, and make the world take notice.

As I grew older, I became a biography junkie. In doing so, I picked up the heroine that I would idolize to this day --- Babe Didrickson Zaharias. I don't even think that my parents know this, but she's why I decided to run track in the sixth grade, and continued running throughout high school. Babe played basketball, ran track, did the high jump, and then later became a professional golfer. She was tough in ways that girls weren't often shown how to be tough. She was "unattractively" competitive. She was fast. She threw hard. She won. I wanted to be like that, and held her in an esteem that would rival any boy's fascination with Michael Jordan or Shaq.

I wanted to be an action figure.

Even now, I wish better superheroes for little girls. We're getting there, slowly. I have to admit that I'm a big fan of the Powerpuff girls, whose creator called them the Whoop-Ass Girls before the Cartoon Network picked them up for broadcast. As annoying as I found the Spice Girls, I gave them a lot of credit for making "girl power" a cool catchphrase. And now with the Williams sisters dominating women's tennis, I am hopeful that young girls are getting a wider variety of role models.

I just hope that if I have daughters, they don't mistake a Barbie doll for a superhero action figure. It makes me wish that those Powerpuff girls would come alive when the toy store closes, beat the Barbies senseless, and neatly dispose of their carcasses. We need more room for cooler Underoos.