Now and Then – Bitch Flicks

Female Friendship: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Female Friendship Theme Week here.

Pretty Little Friendships by Victor Kirksey-Brown

I don’t know if the writers portray this type of friendship and steer away from many of the harmful female friend tropes on purpose, or if it’s just because there’s no way to fit them in with all the other crazy shit that’s going on, but the strong and positive friendship these girls share is one of the reasons I enjoy Pretty Little Liars.

“I’m a Veronica”: Power and Transformation Through Female Friendships in Heathers by Alize Emme

A snappy dark comedy set in a high school bubble, Heathers touches on difficult subjects including murder and suicide, and nonchalantly addresses major social issues like female friendship and power. The friendships we are introduced to steer every aspect of the story as it progresses and bring us into a world where female characters aren’t just cardboard cutouts but multidimensional, seriously flawed, and sinfully interesting young women.

It Takes Two for Friendship by Laura Money

To me, this movie is all about a deep female friendship. Yes, it is a bit narcissistic on the surface – instantly falling in love with someone who looks just like you – but it really captures the essence of friendship, connection, and trust. Alyssa and Amanda realise that they look alike on their first meeting but soon understand that they are also both deeply unsatisfied with particular elements in their lives.

“She’s My Best Friend”: Friendship and the Girls of Teen Wolf by Andrea Taylor

The girls of Beacon Hills, especially Allison and Lydia, are loyal, dedicated friends. They help each other out and they encourage each other. They stand up for each other. They’re best friends with all the complexities that relationship implies. There are better, or at least more consistent, examples in media to turn to, but the perfect moments of female friendship in Teen Wolf mean a lot to me.

You’ll Never Walk Alone: Heavenly Creatures and the Power of Teenage Friendship by Caroline Madden

Peter Jackson shows the girls interacting and playing in these worlds. “The Fourth World” is a beautiful garden. Borvonia is a dark and delightfully wicked world of castle intrigue and courtly love. Seeing the girls in the worlds they’ve created demonstrates the extent of the fantasies and the pleasures their imaginative and playful friendship brings. Pauline and Juliet have an intense friendship; they don’t want anyone to stand in their way of spending time together or stop the joy that it brings for them.

Why This Bitch Loves the B— by Mychael Blinde

I avoided Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23 for quite a while; at a cursory Netflix glance it looked like anti-feminist tripe featuring catty women pitted against each other in a false dichotomy of “nice” and “bitch.” Then I watched it.

I could not have been more wrong.

The Queer Female Friendship of Frances Ha by Sarah Smyth

For Frances Ha is not a film where “boy-meets-girl,” and there is definitely no diamond ring. The love story of Frances Ha is between the titular character, Frances (Greta Gerwig) and her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), and it is precisely this friendship between two women which questions, resists, and challenges the definition of love posed by the (primarily) heterosexual and (almost always) heteronormative romcom genre.

I Married a Monster: Female Friendship in The Other Woman by Chantell Monique

Instead of hating and seeing each other as competition, the women form a bond, increasing their woman-power. Kate decides that she wants to make Mark pay for his unfaithfulness saying, “I want him to have to start over,” but she’s afraid she doesn’t have the killer instincts to do it. Her new friends step in, telling her that she does and that if they work together, they can get their revenge.

In Spite of Mean Girls: The Radical Vision of Pretty Little Liars by Jessica Freeman-Slade

In her bestselling collection ‘Bad Feminist,’ Roxane Gay starts the listicle entitled “How to Be Friends with Another Woman” with this as the very first item: “Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses—pretty but designed to SLOW women down.”

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion: Bosom Buddies Against The World by Emma Kat Richardson

While there’s quite a bit that’s frivolous about Romy and Michele – the film’s tagline is “The Blonde Leading the Blonde” – there is also, much more importantly, the heartwarming love story at the film’s creamy center. But this love has nothing to do with the complications and disappointments that romantic relationships can bring; rather, it’s what the Greeks called agape, or a deeply spiritual, passionate love between intimate friends.

We’re All for One, We’re One for All in A League of Their Own by Rhianna Shaheen

At the end, many of the league’s players reunite to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Old friendships rekindle and emotions soar. After following these women through what must have been the best time they ever had in their youth it is refreshing to see authentic portrayals of them as older women. It feels like their lives are unfolding before my eyes.

Walking and Talking With Non-Toxic Women Friends by Ren Jender

A short clip at the beginning of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s first film, 1996’s Walking and Talking, lets us know that Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche) have been friends since adolescence. Both are in their 30s and living in New York City–Laura with her boyfriend Frank, and Amelia alone in the sort of sunlit airy apartment someone with her job, even in a pre-gentrified New York (which, like many films from then and now is also mysteriously bereft of people of color), would never be able to afford.

Practical Magic: Sisters as Friends, Mirrors by Olivia London-Webb

This is why I love this movie. I have two real sisters in my life. One born and one chosen. I have strong powerful women everywhere I look–my friends, my mother, my sister-in-law, and my mother-in-law. I would go through hell for them. They would go through hell for me. What we are more than anything else are each other’s mirrors.

Martyrs: Female Friendships Can Be Bloody Complex by Dierdre Crimmins

Often in feminist criticism female friendships are discussed as a great barometer for the authenticity of the female characters. Strong bonds and healthy interactions serve the dual purpose of highlighting positive female roles and for showing the many dimensions of women as whole persons. I propose that in order to continue the push to show women as well-developed characters we also need representations of flawed female friendships.

St. Trinian’s: Girlish Wiles and Cunning Friendships by Bethany Ainsworth-Cole

Now whilst this seems like an odd collection of friendships, it is an important selection of lessons. It fosters the idea that girls working together will always be better than scheming men, and will always sort things out even if they do need help. Girls are fearless: willing to steal, blow up iron bars, fight back against creeps, and speak out. And most importantly, it’s OK to make mistakes. The girls also enjoy themselves doing it.

Best Frenemies Forever by Emanuela Betti

Can women be friends? Or, most importantly, can two women who share the same man be friends? The depiction of genuinely loving and caring female friends has found its way onto many movies and TV shows, but when it comes to the idea of a more complex situation—the “frenemies”—it’s harder to find characters that do it justice. There is a shallow notion that when two women want the same man, they turn into hair-pulling, catfighting brats.

The First Wives Club and First World “Feminism” by Amanda Lyons

But the focus on “getting everything” was a little hard to stomach from women living in huge condos in the heart of New York with an interior designer on their payroll. Somehow it felt like the message was getting a little lost in the middle of all the high-society hob-nobbing – there was nothing particularly universal about it, and any feminism that was being communicated was certainly of a rarefied kind that most of us wouldn’t be able to access.

Scarlett and Melanie: The Ultimate BFFs by Jennifer Hollie Bowles

Regardless of how psychological or interpretive you want to get with Scarlett and Melanie’s friendship, it serves as an invaluable example for how women can accept, value, and interact with one another.

Seed & Spark: Female Friendship On Screen–Art Imitating Life by Liz Cardenas Franke

But what if I spent my time, instead, helping another female filmmaker make her movie involving female friendship? Wouldn’t that be just as meaningful? And could it perhaps be making an even bigger statement—promoting the “cause,” so to speak?

Homegirls Make Some Noise: Antônia and the Magic of Black Female Friendships by Lisa Bolekaja

Classism, racism, sexism, and colorism are very real in the world of Antônia. But the film shows us a fresh narrative of Black women succeeding despite living in a slum, despite poverty, despite violence and all the ills that pervade real life. For just a moment, I’m able to watch Black women who are free to be themselves. They don’t have to unpack external baggage based on a checklist of intersections involving their skin color, social status, or gender. That is a rare treat. It’s their tight friendship that sustains them. Music is friendship, and friendship is music.

Kamikaze Girls: When a Lolita Meets a Yanki by Jasmine Sanchez

While their connection doesn’t form immediately, especially in Momoko’s case, the two eventually are able to form a close bond. When they first meet they are both taken aback by one another’s exterior–Momoko is horrified to be dealing with a yanki and Ichiko thinks that Momoko is a little girl. Once she finds out they are the same age Ichiko admits to her folly, “I shouldn’t judge by appearances,” which Momoko counters with, “But appearances says everything.” This sets up their dynamic for the rest of the film as Ichiko is willing to look beyond, while Momoko prefers the superficial.

Julia: A Portrait of Heroic Friendship in an Age of Darkness by Rachael Johnson

Although peppered with flashbacks to the women’s childhood and youth, Julia is set during their formative academic and professional years. The film chronicles the women’s personal and political lives in the decade that saw the rise of Fascism. We witness how the fight against those dark forces transforms both friends.

9 to 5: The Necessity of Female Friendships at Work by Deb Rox

Like the three fates, the friends conjure a life-altering force by listening to each other, by laughing, by being friends. The scenes where they envisioned the demise of their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” of a boss start to play out for real in madcap, accidental, and intentional ways. As the fabric unrolls, each woman experiences being supported by the other two and feels compelled to help her friends. In their confusions, cover-ups, and retribution schemes, Violet, Doralee, and Judy knit together a solid friendship where each character finds strength and support. And manage to avoid getting caught. It’s the little things.

“I Love You More Than My Luggage”: Female Friendships and Fertility by Joanne Bardsley

The implication of the relative richness of the representations of female friendships at either end of the fertile period is that at these times the female is free to explore relationships which are not sexual but during the fertile period the female’s most important relationships are sexual. This is damaging and dangerous as it is a structural reinforcement of the objectification of women. We only see our friendships represented on screen when we are no longer of use to the patriarchy, when we have either yet to serve our function or have already performed our reproductive duties. It is only in the margins that we are free to pursue our own interests.

Making Sure Female Friendship Films Aren’t Forgotten: Take Care of My Cat by Adam Hartzell

The film is about the evolving friendships of five young South Korean women as they step away from their technical high school into a less certain world. Their degrees of closeness shift as they consider their futures in the face of particular restrictions in work and life opportunities due to gender and class discrimination.

Frances Ha: Chasing Sophie by Rachel Wortherly

In my experience, people who have seen this film often mistake Sophie’s actions as abandoning Frances for her boyfriend, Patch. The fact that it happens differently is a breath of fresh air. Rather, it represents an early point in which audiences experience the divide between Frances and Sophie in physical and emotional aspects. Sophie sees the opportunity to move on and fulfill her dreams, while Frances’ dream is fractured. The story of “us” that precedes this action becomes their separate, respective stories: “the story of Frances” and “the story of Sophie.”

Fearless Friendship! Usagi and Rei by Kathryn Diaz

Growing up isn’t cute. At six or 16 or anywhere in between, figuring out who you are and what your place in the world is isn’t sparkly fun-times. The best you can hope for is to have a real friend to muddle through the worst of it with you, someone who is having just as much of a crazy time as you are, who will run to your defense, give you pep talks when you’re about to face the Dark Kingdom, and shamelessly make fun of you for being such a crybaby after you call her a meanie.

What Now and Then Taught Me About Friendship by Kim Hoffman

Summer has always been a magical time where childhood lingers, and every time I get on a swingset again, or have a hankering for a push pop, or throw on my Now and Then soundtrack, I think of my childhood and feel invigorated with that rush of youth. I think of Taylor and Sara, and a time when we were so eager to make our own adventures. I also think of those four girls from the Gaslight Addition; somehow they affected my life by making me appreciate what it means to be and have a true friend in this wild world.

Reality Bites: A Tale of Two Ladies by Beatrix Coles

While a fun exercise, it’s really just as counter-productive to reduce these two women to their Reality Bites character archetypes as it is pointless. But yet, there is something familiar and soothing in these roles. We want the pretty girl who falls from grace punished, just as we want the girl wearing glasses to have a political point of view and to not be too concerned about whether she has a boyfriend.

Feisty and Heisty: Female Friendship in The First Wives Club by Artemis Linhart

The main characters’ friendship goes way back: a flashback shows the group in college, together with their valedictorian and close friend Cynthia. The four of them vow to be friends forever. This, however, turns out to be easier said than done. After graduation, the four of them lose touch and are only reunited years later, with the occasion being Cynthia’s funeral. After her husband took financial advantage of her and then left her for a younger woman, she commits suicide. At a post-funeral get-together, the three women bond over their own failed marriages and spite for their ex-husbands. Their friendship is rekindled as they decide to settle the score with their exploitative exes.

When Friendships Fray: Me Without You, Not Waving But Drowning, and Brokedown Palace by Elizabeth Kiy

Not all friendships are built to last. Teenage friendships are little romances between two people, tiny beautiful, impossibly fragile things that break apart upon touch or close examination. Just as a true romantic relationship between two unformed people rarely lasts, so often we grow out of our early friendships. Because so much of growing up means developing into a person who can live in the world, films about the ends of friendships can be just as satisfying coming of age stories as the typical narratives of beginnings. Each ending after all, is the beginning of something else.

“We Stick Together”: Rebellion, Solidarity, and Girl Crushes in Foxfire by Jenny Lapekas

In the spirit of Boys on the Side, along with a dose of teen angst, Foxfire is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, ‘Foxfire’ is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see Bride Wars and Just Go with It). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see Bridesmaids and The Other Woman). When I first saw Foxfire around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

What ‘Now and Then’ Taught Me About Friendship

Summer has always been a magical time where childhood lingers, and every time I get on a swingset again, or have a hankering for a push pop, or throw on my ‘Now and Then’ soundtrack, I think of my childhood and feel invigorated with that rush of youth. I think of Taylor and Sara, and a time when we were so eager to make our own adventures. I also think of those four girls from the Gaslight Addition; somehow they affected my life by making me appreciate what it means to be and have a true friend in this wild world.

This guest post by Kim Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

I was pretty excited about Sara’s 11^thbirthday party. Her mom owned a print shop and I was told we’d be having cake and playing games there; I enjoy the smell of paper so it didn’t seem like an odd place to have a party. After Sara opened presents we were outside at a picnic table lit by a floodlight from the print shop, glittering and bedazzling hats and T-shirts.

Sara’s birthday was in March, and just a few months before, a group of us went to the movies to see a new film called Now and Then. Since then, it was all any of us could talk about. We’d gone back to see it countless times, and one of those times, we were the only ones in the whole theater, a group of four or five of us girls, running around, doing cartwheels and singing and dancing. (I’d be remiss not to mention that I actually still have the original soundtrack, and it’s in my car as we speak.)

What Sara hadn’t told us was that her mom’s print shop was located right next door to a crematorium. It was a small grey building with a giant stone yard, filled with coffins of all sizes. I saw that my finished hat masterpiece was drying next to one that said the same thing as mine, “Teeny,” speckled with orange and yellow flower power decor. A blonde girl walked over with an impressed-looking grin on her face. “Wow, you actually look like Thora Birch,” she said to me. A few other girls formed around us and we all began to gush over our favorite movie of the year. A fancy car drove by at that very moment and we all squealed, pumping each other with a sugar high as if one of the actors from the movie was in our neighborhood, you know—cruising by the print shop and the crematorium on a dark Saturday night.

Now and Then wasn’t just a coming-of-age ‘90s girl movie. It was intersecting itself into my life as an 11-year-old fifth grader; I was same age as the characters in the film. And I felt we were all doing this “growing up” thing together. I cut out any clippings from magazines I could find on the movie, though it wasn’t hard because Devon Sawa, who played wormy Scott Wormer, was a common household name among girls my age. He was a teen heartthrob all over the pages of Tiger Beat and Bop and I instantly obtained both the movie soundtrack and the film score (and amassed a huge pile of pinup photos of Sawa). In 1995, there was a resurgence of the trippy hippie ‘60s style and I was obsessed with rock ‘n roll for the first time. The only thing my bedroom was missing was a lava lamp. You could say I didn’t care all that much about the boys in my class, just what my friends and I would do over the weekend at our upcoming sleepover. I savored this new art of forming real bonds with girlfriends.

Now and Then is a film about four friends: Samantha, Teeny, Roberta, and Chrissy, who are growing up in the Midwest in the ‘70s (though much of the film was shot in Savannah, Georgia). A couple of decades have passed and Chrissy (played by Rita Wilson) is pregnant, living in her parents’ old home, and married to a guy she once thought was a mega dork. Teeny (Melanie Griffith) is a blossoming actress in Hollywood, with, as Roberta puts it, “Long legs, a tiny waist, and large, perky breasts.”

“Roberta you know how I feel about swearing,” Chrissy says back.

“Chrissy, breast is not a dirty word,” Roberta insists.

Which leads me to Roberta (Rosie O’Donnell), who has become a doctor and according to Chrissy, “Lives in sin with her boyfriend.” But more on that in a moment. Last but never least is Samantha (Demi Moore), a writer, and the narrator of this film; she is sarcastic, jaded, and arguably depressed. She explains that she hasn’t been to the Gaslight Addition in years (the neighborhood where all the girls grew up, which looks like any other midcentury American neighborhood). Now the girls reunite at their familiar stomping grounds for the arrival of Chrissy’s baby—and boy is she ready to pop. Waddling around in the house in a bow-tied muumuu dress, Chrissy opens up her home to her old friends, who awkwardly situate on the plastic-covered couch as if nothing’s changed in 25 years. Roberta is helping Chrissy around the house and offers the girls a beer, Samantha slinks into the backyard in all-black threads perfect for a moody writer, and Teeny inches through the yard in her heels, wearing a pearly white skin-tight skirt and matching jacket. As they play catch-up, they stare up at the treehouse they spent so much of their time as kids saving up money for, and slowly that eternal summer of their youth begins to skim back to the surface…

In our own little ways, my friends and I were making our own pacts for the first time—Sara, me, and our friend Taylor, plus the new girls we’d just met at Sara’s birthday. We would ride our bicycles from Taylor’s to Sara’s house, singing and laughing, stopping downtown at an old diner in the hopes we might see Janeane Garofalo in character as Wiladene, diner waitress by day, clairvoyant mystic by night. You could say I was enamored by this new, untapped part of me that the film was bringing out. I had a mix of confidence and fear—to explore, not just on our bicycles, but also in our minds—through séances and tarot cards, music and making up stories. (We commenced our friendship that night at Sara’s birthday party when we snuck over to that crematorium and had our first-ever séance.) We were in search of Dear Johnny in our own ways. But as our knees bobbed against one another’s and we formed a circle that night, I simply felt that brief but blissful form of excitement you feel when you’re a kid.

Now, the line about Roberta and her boyfriend “living in sin” is somewhat of a discussion among fans of the film, because word has it that from the beginning, Roberta’s character was written to be gay. I. Marlene King, writer, producer and director of Pretty Little Liars, was the writer on Now and Then. In earlier versions of the script, Chrissy says, “Roberta, for example, has chosen to be alternative, but she is still normal. She hasn’t been married four times or gone through a series of monogamous relationships…or wear all black. She’s happy. Aren’t you Roberta?” When the girls flash back to that summer when they were kids, we meet young Roberta (played by Christina Ricci), binding her chest and stumbling over her macho brothers wrestling in the hallway. Her mom died when she was four, and she is deeply bothered by it, refusing to succumb to any bullshit standards set aside for girls and the ways girls are supposed to dress or act.

Instead, Roberta is the girl at the softball game who’s throwing punches at boys or pranking her friends in a not-so-funny incident where she fakes drowning. She’s constantly testing her limits and the trust she so craves with the people in her life. But what she doesn’t yet understanding is that she needs to give others a chance to get through to her, too. Samantha (played by Gaby Hoffmann) is next to kin when it comes to tough-girl stuff because she’s in the midst of her parents’ divorce, and she’s completely in favor of rebelling against her clueless mother—which also means punching out a boy at a softball field if the moment calls for it, especially if she’s standing up for a friend. (I bet Sam is a Libra.) I used to wonder if there wasn’t more to Roberta and Sam’s relationship, especially because I could totally see Rosie O’Donnell and Demi Moore’s grown-up versions getting together and living “alternatively” as Chrissy puts it. Whatever happened in post-production to cause anyone to add in that line about Roberta’s boyfriend is a terrible shame.

Young Teeny (played by Thora Birch) is the girl who sits on her roof and memorizes lines from old movies playing on the big drive-in screen. Her parents are always hosting lavish parties while she floats about in her room upstairs, obsessing over actresses from the Golden Hollywood heyday. Teeny is down for everything and anything, but we quickly get the sense that it’s all smoke and mirrors and in truth, she’s the least experienced, at least for right now. She stuffs her bra with vanilla pudding-filled balloons to bide her time before she reaches adolescence. (She got the idea from the Wormer boys after they surprise-attack the girls with water balloons.) Sex, dating, and romance—it’s all mysterious and lusty to her and she is rushing to grow up. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Teeny is making all the girls take a quiz and she discovers she’s a sexual magnet, “attracting men from all four corners of the world.” The look on her face as she reads her results say it all–she’s googly-eyed over all this possibility.

Sam is nothing like Teeny, but she doesn’t try to act prudish, she just prefers to focus on other things, like books, magic, science, and what really happened to Dear Johnny. She’s the one with the bag of candles and cards who’s happy to tote her wares to the cemetery. Sam has to look out for her little sister, but she also has to contend with her mom’s new dating life. Here, she’s expected to act mature and mind her manners, while she sees her mom dressing differently and gushing over a man who isn’t her father. Her only way to cope is to escape, and her friends support that; in their not-as-R-rated way, they’re basically saying, “Fuck that. We’re your family.” Sam and Teeny make great friends because they’re so out of each other’s way and they so easily understand this place their at in their lives—with Sam’s parents’ divorce and Teeny’s parents being nearly as absent under the same roof.

Roberta and Chrissy have a special bond that’s set to the side too, because they’re so opposite yet they balance each other’s personalities to a tee. Chrissy (played by Ashleigh Aston Moore) feels Roberta is her best friend. I can’t imagine what Chrissy’s mom must think of that—what if Roberta were to track mud into her pristine home? Chrissy’s bedroom is perfectly tidy and manicured pink. She is completely sheltered by her mother’s discussions about sex—and probably still believes a garden hose and a watering can are involved. She’s the last in line when the girls hit the road on their bicycles, and she’s the first one to say, “I’m not doing that,” when she feels uncomfortable or nervous. But a little mild giggling and convincing and the girls have Chrissy believing in herself and feeling connected to them in no time. Despite her doubts that she isn’t as pretty or skinny as the other girls, Chrissy manages to find her place in the group by just being Chrissy. That’s why Roberta makes such a great best friend. For her, friendship and acceptance isn’t about appearances. Chrissy has a heart of gold. A promise is a promise with her.

There is purpose to these friendships in Now and Then like there is purpose to Chrissy’s naivety about sex, Samantha’s imaginative curiosities, Teeny’s desires for passion in romance and career, and Roberta’s capacity for strength and weakness in equal measure. See, it was easy for all of us little girls who loved the film to attach ourselves to a character we related to or liked a lot because we too were on the verge of something—and being on the verge of anything is a beautiful and surreal feeling. When you’re 11, or 12, or 13, you are a part of this magical in-between moment that connects childhood with adolescence, and the friends you have during those few years may be some of the most important friends you will ever have—not because of how long they’ll be in your life, but because they’ll be the first people on board in your life journey who are up for the same adventures you are, and they’ll challenge you somehow—maybe to get in touch with your emotions when you’re embarrassed you cried in front of them, maybe to remind you that you’re all in this together. It’s the age where you’re searching for something, anything, and you’re old enough to find those things with your friends.

It wasn’t that long after Now and Then that I became the class scapegoat—they had decided I was weird. Instead of leaving it at that, they just had to hammer away at my self-esteem for good measure. What happened to riding our bikes, playing in our backyards, jumping into swimming pools and playing slumber party games? Now, friendship was considered by how much you impressed some queen bee, how far you’d go to stake your coolness. An eighth grade girl named Tara once saved me from a bathroom incident where a girl I once thought was my friend was mocking and making fun of me. I thought, “Here’s a true Roberta.”

I treasure the time around 1995 with an appreciation that goes soul deep. Those friends opened my eyes to the kinds of friends I would look for later on in my life, hoping to attract by weeding out the fair-weathered friendships, hardened, jealous-types, and egocentric bullies. Forget the thrill of being popular, well-liked, admired and noticed—those accolades are blips on the maps of our lives. Instead, relish in your weirdness, the glue that makes you who you are, and remember that embracing something weird is not a bad thing, it’s actually a wonderful thing; that’s the lesson I learned as a kid, when we snuck in to see Now and Then for the umpteenth time. Summer has always been a magical time where childhood lingers, and every time I get on a swingset again, or have a hankering for a push pop, or throw on my Now and Then soundtrack, I think of my childhood and feel invigorated with that rush of youth. I think of Taylor and Sara, and a time when we were so eager to make our own adventures. I also think of those four girls from the Gaslight Addition; somehow they affected my life by making me appreciate what it means to be and have a true friend in this wild world.

All for one and one for all.

Kim Hoffman is a writer for AfterEllen.com and Curve Magazine. She currently keeps things weird in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter: @the_hoff

Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists Theme Week here.

Powerful Realism and Nostalgia in My So-Called Life by Leigh Kolb

Almost 20 years later, we need more of what My So-Called Life gave us a taste of. We need teenage girl protagonists to be sexual, not sexy. We need honest portrayals of what it is to be a teenager–not only for teenagers who need to see themselves in faithful mirrors, but also for adults who are still trying to figure themselves out.

Are You There, Hollywood? It’s Me, the Average Girl by Carrie Gambino

The expectations for girls in film and television are incredibly mixed. It is naïve to say that girls nowadays are just expected to be a sexy sidekick or afterthought. With more strong female roles popping up in bigger budget films such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, there is the expectation that girls should also be intelligent and incredibly clever (while also being visually pleasing)… There isn’t really a place for the all-around average girl. The first two examples of strong female protagonists that I could think of are in fantasy franchises. Are real female characters really that difficult to come up with? Real female characters are often created with good intentions but tend not to work on a larger scale.

Six Lessons Lisa Simpson Taught Me by Lady T

…Lisa takes a stand against the sexism spouting from the mouth of the new talking Malibu Stacy doll. Frustrated with the doll’s collection of sexist catchphrases that include “Let’s bake some cookies for the boys,” “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles,” and “My name’s Stacy, but you can call me *wolf whistle*,” Lisa collaborates with the creator of Malibu Stacy to create their own talking doll, Lisa Lionheart. When Malibu Stacy outsells Lisa Lionheart, our creator feels temporarily dejected, until she hears her own voice speaking behind her: “Trust in yourself and you can achieve anything.” She turns to see a girl her age hold a Lisa Lionheart doll in her hand and smile.

Bob’s Burgers: The Uniquely Lovable Tina Belcher by Max Thornton

Delightful Tina. Shy, painfully weird, butt-obsessed, quietly dorky, intensely daydreamy Tina. Tina is a little bit like all of us (and–cough–a lot like some of us) at that most graceless, transitional, intrinsically unhappy stage of life that is early adolescence. She is also a wonderfully rich and well-developed character, both in her interactions with her family and in her own right, and she’s arguably the emotional core of the whole show.

The Relationships of Veronica Mars by Sarah Stringer

It’s common wisdom that maintaining relationships requires constant work, but there’s often an assumption (in TV, movies, and real life) that this only applies to romantic relationships. Platonic relationships are rarely the focus of a story, and when a storyline deals with issues in these relationships, they’re often easily dealt with, and the friendship goes back to being simple. Exceptions to this are problems that are caused by romantic relationships. Veronica Mars is an exception to this; for its first two seasons, it depicts many platonic relationships, and explores the many issues involved in navigating them (some of these problems are related to romance, but many are not, showing platonic relationships have their own complexities, separate from romance).

My Sister’s Keeper: Anna and Kate Growing Up On Screen and On the Page by Dina Martin

My Sister’s Keeper is a story about growing up, identify, family, death, and life (how can we truly tell any story about life when death isn’t the costar?), but its uniqueness is that it is told primarily through two young girls.

Sixteen Candles, Rape Culture, and the Anti-Woman Politics of 2013 by Stephanie Rogers

So, these are the important things in Sixteen Candles: Samantha’s family forgets her birthday; she’s in love with a hot senior who’s dating Caroline (the most popular girl in school); and there’s a big ol’ geek (Farmer Ted) from Sam’s daily bus rides who won’t stop stalking her. Oh, and Long Duk Dong exists [insert racist gong sound here]. Seriously, every time Long Duk Dong appears on screen, a fucking GONG GOES OFF on the soundtrack. I suppose that lines up quite nicely with the scene where he falls out of a tree yelling, “BONSAI.”

Since the entire movie is like a machine gun firing of RACIST HOMOPHOBIC SEXIST ABLEIST RAPEY parts, the only way I know how to effectively talk about it is to look at the very problematic screenplay. So, fasten your seatbelts and heed your trigger warnings.

The 80s were quite possibly a nightmare.

Sucker Punch Might Leave You Wishing for a Lobotomy by Angelina Rodriguez

My main issue with the film is that it is speckled with meaningless platitudes and clichés about girl empowerment when the film simply isn’t empowering. The women in the film are portrayed as oversexualized, helpless, damaged goods. Though there are metaphors at work that symbolize abuse or objectification of women, nowhere does the film stress an injustice or seek to dismantle its source. It is just like any other formulaic action movie complete with boobs, guns, and explosions, but it has a shiny, artificial veneer of girl empowerment. The false veneer is the aspect of the film that truly infuriates me, along with the side of artsy pretentious bullshit.

On Milk-Bones, Toothed Vaginas, and Adolescence: Teeth As Cautionary Tale by Colleen Clemens

Early in the film, Dawn is a nymph-like virgin committed to “saving herself” until marriage. She is the poster child for the “good” girl: a loving daughter who obeys the doctrines of the church and spends her time spreading the gospel of virginity. Everything Dawn knows about the world and herself changes when her falsely pious boyfriend Tobey takes her to a far off swimming hole and tries to rape her. A confused and terrified Dawn reacts by screaming and then—much to everyone’s surprise—cutting off his penis to interrupt the rape. Little does Dawn know that her lessons about Darwin in her biology classes are taking hold in her own body.

The Horror of Female Sexual Awakening: Black Swan by Rebecca Willoughby

What disappointed me most, I think, was that Black Swan could easily have been a progressive film with a positive, young woman-centered journey out of repression at its center. It could have recouped that gender-centric childhood ballerina dream of so many little girls into a message about determination, hard work, personal strength, and emotional growth. Instead, Darren Aronofsy has produced an Oscar-winning horror film. That’s right: I said HORROR. While that might seem like a stretch, it seems clear to me that the horror I refer to is the possibility of changing an age-old story. The horror of Black Swan is the absolutely terrifying idea that a young woman might make it through the difficult process of maturation, develop a healthy, multi-faceted sexuality, and be successful at her chosen career at the same time.

Girl Gangs Are Mean: Teenage Girl Gang Movies Through the Years by Emanuela Betti

While most teen movies revolve around coming-of-age stories, gang movies reveal the extreme side to adolescence—the misfit, criminal, and violent side. Gang movies are rather simple, either focusing on episodes of gang debauchery, or revolving around rivalry and jealousy. Usually the viewpoint is that of the ring leader, or the “new girl,” who is initiated into the gang but is still an outsider. Yet, among the plethora of girl gang movies, every decade has produced stories involving specific issues and specific types of teenage girls.

What a Witch: Girlhood, Agency, and Community in Kiki’s Delivery Service and The Little Mermaid by Megan Ryland

Kiki’s Delivery Service carefully constructs a world where a girl’s agency is expected, accepted and supported, while Disney movies typically present a girl’s agency as unusual, forbidden, and denied. The difference between these two messages is that Kiki’s world anticipates and encourages her independence, while the women of Disney are typically punished for this.

For example, in The Little Mermaid Ariel wants to “live out of these waters,” but her father forbids her exploration of the human world and punishes this dream. Sea witch Ursula exploits Ariel’s desire to discover another world beyond her own as well. This is hardly an isolated incident.

The Book Thief: Stealing Hearts and Minds by Natalie Wilson

Liesel, unlike so many young heroines, resists romance—from her friend Rudy’s early problematic insistence and then throughout the remainder of the movie. Instead of being positioned in relationship to romantic partners, she has three male best friends—Rudy, Max and Hans (Papa)—as well as two females of great importance to her life, Rosa (Mama) and Ilsa Hermann (the mayor’s wife who, transgressively, supplyies Liesel with books). As for Liesel, like her futuristic counterpart, Katniss Everdeen, she is a life-saving heroine and inspirational rebel.

Just One of the Guys: Sexism, Gender Stereotypes, and the Rise of the Female Teenage Protagonist by Shay Revolver

Terri sets out to explore the luxury of male privilege disguised as a young man. Just One of the Guys smacked us straight in the face with the unspoken universal knowledge that sexism was real, it existed and the film gave us tangible proof. Terri decides to use her parents’ trip out of town to switch things around for herself by getting another shot at the newspaper internship with another article, an expose of sorts. She switches high schools and uses her brain, and as much as she can, is herself.

Troop Beverly Hills: What A Thrill by Phaydra Babinchock

Initially the girls of Troop Beverly Hills are portrayed as clueless and privileged, but they are allowed to grow and transform themselves over the course of the movie. The film writers don’t do it unrealistically by turning them into tomboys overnight or at all. The girls retain their femininity, which they are made fun of for by the Red Feathers, throughout the film.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Declaration Feminism by Matthew Abely

Immortality is not what makes a world better. Hope, friendship, and love do, and love is not limited by sex, gender, ethnicity, or race. Women like Homura and Kyoko can fall in love with other women like Madoka and Sayaka respectively. We have the responsibility to stand up with people like them. This series is part of the reason I try to do that and more. I hope that many others to do the same.

Young Women and Heroism in The Host by Sade Nickels

Is Wanda a girl/teenage female protagonist? Technically she is not “young” as she is 1,000 years old and seemingly immortal, but she is new to Earth so that makes her young in some sense. Also, why would the Souls even have genders that mirror that of humans or have genders at all? The Souls look like beams of light and they probably aren’t even a carbon based species and yet somehow Wanda is a female? So. Frustrating. Nonetheless she is controlling a person’s body who identifies as a teenage girl and is thus somewhat restricted to her occupied body’s feelings, emotions, and categorizations.

Q&A: Girlhood Behind and In Front of the Camera

Ten questions between filmmaker Morgan Faust and 13-year-old actress Rachel Resheff.

Morgan: The truth is when I was growing up in the 1980s, the child actresses were often given pretty syrupy roles (with the exception of Journey of Natty Gann and Labyrinth). It was the boys who got to have the cool movies–Goonies, Stand by Me, even The NeverEnding Story and E.T., which did have girls, but the boys were the heroes. That is why I write the movies I do–adventures films for girls–because that’s what I wanted to do when I was a kid, go on adventures, be the hero. I still do want that. I mean, who doesn’t?

Catching Fire: Positive Fuel for the Feminist Flame by Natalie Wilson

The Hunger Games, saturated as it is with political meaning (the author admits her inspiration for the trilogy came from flipping channels between reality TV and war footage), is a welcome change from another recent popular YA series, Twilight. As a further bonus, it has disproven the claim that series with female protagonists can’t have massive cross-gender appeal. With the unstoppable Katniss Everdeen at the helm (played in the films by the jaw-droppingly talented Jennifer Lawrence), perhaps the series will be the start of a new trend: politically themed narratives with rebellious female protagonists who have their sights set on revolution more than love, on cultural change more than the latest sparkling hottie.

The CW: Expectations vs. Reality by Nicole Elwell

The CW is a rarity among the many networks of cable television. Its target demographic is women aged 18-34, and as a result has a majority of its original programming centered on the lives of young women. On paper, this sounds like a noteworthy achievement to be celebrated. However, the CW produces content devoid of any sense of the reality of its young audience, and as a result actually harms its most devoted viewers. The CW creates an unattainable archetype for what a teenager should look like and fails to maturely handle issues of murder and rape.

Defending Dawn Summers: From One Kid Sister to Another by Robin Hitchcock

OK, sure, my big sister didn’t have superpowers, and as far as I know she did not save the world even one time, much less “a lot.” But from my perspective as her bratty little sister, I felt like I could never escape her long and intimidating shadow. I could never be as smart as her, as special as her; I couldn’t hope to collect even a fraction the awards and accolades she racked up through high school. And she didn’t even properly counteract her super smarts with social awkwardness: she always had a tight group of friends and the romantic affections of cute boys. She was the pride and joy of my family, and I always felt like an also-ran. Trust me: this makes it very hard to not be at least a little bratty and whiny.

Why Alex Russo Is My Favorite Fictional Female Wizard by Katherine Filaseta

The protagonist of Wizards is a girl who acts like girls really act: she has boyfriends and broken hearts, but isn’t overly boy-crazy or dependent on them; she’s curious and smart enough to ask questions when other people are telling her not to; and throughout the series she faces a lot of the struggles women really do face throughout their lives.

Ja’mie: Mean-Spirited Impression of a Private School Girl by Katherine Murray

Power dynamics mean something in comedy. Making fun of someone less powerful than you is sort of like beating up someone who’s small, or taking advantage of someone naive. It’s not very sporting, and it makes you look mean. The problem is that the same person can be powerful in some contexts and not in others. A rich, white 17-year-old girl, for example, might be very powerful in contexts where she’s bullying her classmates at school, but less powerful in contexts where she’s trying to meet the demands of a sexist culture. If you’re an adult man nearing 40, it’s hard to make fun of the way a teenage girl dresses, flirts, and moons over boys without starting to look kind of petty.

True Grit: Ambiguous Feminism by Andé Morgan

Mattie wears dark, loose, practical clothing. She climbs trees and carries weapons. She shows utter disdain for male privilege or La Boeuf’s pervy allusions to sexual contact. She has no interest in the older men for romance or protection. She is only concerned with their usefulness to her task, and she uses her will and her reasoning rather than seduction to convince them. Steinfeld’s Mattie emanates competence and confidence.

True Grit: The Formidable Fortitude of Tweens by Vicky Moufawad-Paul

Not since Megan Follows played Anne of Green Gables in the 1985 adaptation of the novel with the same title have girls had a young protagonist on screen who fights against social conventions that are designed to limit her because of her age and gender. Mattie’s similarity to Anne doesn’t end at their indignation and fearlessness, they both also share a love of long braids, both can be found wearing ill-fitting clothes, both of their stories are set in a similar time period, and finally, both girls are orphans.

Princess Mononoke Has No Desire to Marry a Prince by Jen Thorpe

Granted, Ashitaka (voiced by Billy Crudup) is an important character. Even so, it is a bit disconcerting when the IMDb blurb about this movie only mentions him, and almost none of the female characters who are equally, if not more, important to the story. Princess Mononoke (voiced by Claire Danes) is the title character, but is only mentioned toward the end of the blurb. This movie is so much more than yet another “save the princess” quest!

Pretty in Pink: Side Effects from the Prom by Kim Hoffman

In Pretty In Pink, Andi is a self-sufficient, seemingly self-aware teenage girl who lives in a little cottage with her single father. Andi isn’t the type of girl who goes gaga for cocky, linen suit-wearing Steff (James Spader). She’s too busy at home sewing and stitching together her latest wardrobe creations. To her fellow girl students, she’s just a classless, lanky redhead who shouldn’t dare be caught dead at a “richie” party. So, she spends her time at TRAX, a record shop she works at, and a nightclub that showcases hip new wave bands like Ringwald’s real-life fave, The Rave-Ups. Her best friends Duckie (Jon Cryer) and Iona (Annie Potts) admire and envy Andi.

Portrait of a Girl: Reflections on the Role of Flora in Jane Campion’s The Piano by Rachael Johnson

What is clear is that Campion is interested in the strategies women use to survive in patriarchy. But she is not only interested in the fate of women. She is also interested in how girl-children negotiate their way in a male-dominated world. It is through Ada’s daughter as well as Ada herself that Campion explores the feminine condition in the 19th century. Her rich, multi-layered characterization of Flora is, in fact, one of the most remarkable features of The Piano. She is as interesting and compelling as the adult characters and, arguably, the most convincing. The little girl also has huge symbolic and dramatic importance. This is, of course, unusual in cinema. There are relatively few films where a girl plays such a significant, pivotal role.

Temporary Tomboys: Coming of Age in My Girl and Now and Then by Elizabeth Kiy

However, the tomboy was a prominent figure in two well-loved films of the period aimed at young girls, though both presented her as a transitional stage in development. My Girl (1991), is the story of precocious 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) who grew up in a funeral parlor and is obsessed with death, while in Now and Then (1995) four childhood friends reunite as adults and remember (in flashbacks) the summer they were 12.

Brave and the Legacy of Female Prepubescent Power Fantasies by Amanda Rodriguez

Basically, Brave isn’t really that brave of a film. It’s traipsing through a well-established trope that, though positive, is stagnant. Don’t get me wrong; I love all the prepubescent female power fantasy tales I’ve listed, and I’m grateful that they exist and that I could grow up with many of them. However, we can’t pretend that Brave is pushing any boundaries. It sends the message that little girls can be powerful as long as they remain little girls. The dearth of representations of postpubescent heroines who are not objectified, whose sexuality does not rule their interactions, and who are the heroes of their own stories is appalling.

Temporary Tomboys: Coming of Age in ‘My Girl’ and ‘Now and Then’

However, the tomboy was a prominent figure in two well-loved films of the period aimed at young girls, though both presented her as a transitional stage in development. My Girl (1991), is the story of precocious 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) who grew up in a funeral parlor and is obsessed with death, while in Now and Then (1995) four childhood friends reunite as adults and remember (in flashbacks) the summer they were 12.

This guest post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

Young girls have little power.

Controlled by their parents and teachers as well as financial and societal restrictions, often their only agency is the refusal to obey and to fit into standard gender roles. In early adolescence, they mature physically and socially but have yet to assume real adult responsibility.

A clear example of the the transitory nature of this period is the frequent presence of the tomboy character in coming-of-age films.

Though in real life many girls maintain masculine identities into adulthood, in these films as in much of society, the tomboy is a temporal figure tied to early adolescence that girls are expected to grow out of it order to be a healthy, happy (and inevitably heterosexual) adult. And in coming-of-age films, a genre where characters go through moral tests and life-changing tragedies and emerge stronger and wiser, the proof of her growth is her adoption of a female identity.

Because of female liberation movements in the 1970s, media scholars tend to see the decade as the heyday of the tomboy character in popular culture, with stars such as Jodie Foster, Christy McNichols, and Tatum O’Neal. Female-focused narratives gradually tapered off at the end of the decade, with a rise in powerful male protagonists, effects-driven blockbusters and action heroes in the 80s. In the 90s, “Girl Power” movements brought about an increase in female-directed media, but with a different framing. Gay and lesbian films encouraged positive portrayal of masculine women, but were directed exclusively to adults and others in the community.

Tomboy Roberta in her element, the lone girl who can challenge the boys

As adolescents, both characters are depicted as going through the early stages of puberty, where their female body and nascent sexuality are becoming impossible to ignore and they must come to terms with their gender identities.

Their tomboyism is only a cause for fear or treatment, when the girl appears to have extreme male identification or her tomboyism threatens to extend into adulthood. In this vein, it is acceptable for Roberta and Vada to climb trees, play sports and dress like the boys, but fear of puberty is a step too far.

Roberta pushes the limits of acceptable tomboyishness by binding her breasts

Roberta is panicked about the growth of her breasts and regularly measures them and binds them. Although it is not explained exactly why she is sensitive about them, the film portrays her anxiety as irregular. The other girls, all more acceptably feminine, tease her about their size and tell her she is lucky because men will like them. In this discussion, Roberta is clearly uneasy and disgusted by the idea.

Similarly, Vada is horrified when she learns about her period rather then feeling pride at becoming a woman as girls often do in coming-of-age narratives. She tells her father’s girlfriend Shelly (Jamie Lee Curtis) that it isn’t fair because nothing happens to boys and kicks her friend Thomas J (Macaulay Culkin) out of the house until it is over. As with Vada, a girl’s crisis of gender is because of her difficulty reconciling her view of herself with that of her new sexualized body and differences from male playmates. In both cases however, unease with the tomboy’s female body is portrayed as transitory or naiveté, rather than indication of transsexuality, while her lack of interest in boys is because of her youth, not lesbianism.

Both girls are also established as outsiders who are different from their peers and attempt to be independent from them. Roberta is the only one of her friends who is not feminine and who isn’t interested in romance. Likewise, Vada is neurotic and is a hypochondriac who always feels she is sick. In both cases, they have lost a parent, which leaves a gulf between them and their friends that they cannot possibly understand. As such, the masculine girl often functions as a lone outsider rather than as part of an elaborate subcultural group.

Hotheaded Roberta leads the group to fight the local boys

In both films, the tomboy takes on a leadership role within their group as well. Roberta constantly places herself in the front and distributes things to the other girls; she is also the first to act and suggest new ideas. In this fashion, My Girl begins with Vada selling tickets to a tour of the funeral home, attempting both to scare the boys and make money off them. Vada goes a step further, not only being the protector in her group but the protector of a more feminine boy. Tomboy characters are often paired with effeminate male characters, as it reinforces the binary of masculinity and femininity, suggesting there is no grey area between them.

Vada’s tomboyishness is balanced by effeminate Thomas J

Roberta also transgresses into what is consider boy’s territory by placing herself in direct conflict with the boys, most notably after they steal the boys’ clothes. Later at the baseball game, she gets in a physical fight after one of the boys tells her she needs to remember to act like a girl and says she needs a mother to teach her how to be one. She tries to defend her right to be present in the masculine space, but her friends restrain her, supposedly to keep her dignity.

Moreover, both girls grew up without mothers or a feminine influence on their lives. Instead, each has a father who encourages her tomboyishness rather than attempting to suppress it. Vada’s father (Dan Aykroyd) is portrayed as well meaning but incapable of raising her properly alone. The film suggests he has done a fine job to this point, but he does not know what to say about as she is going through puberty. Likewise, Roberta grew up with a father and three older brothers.

This familial structure suggests their tomboyism is acceptable because they have no female role models. It is suggested, at least in Vada’s case, that her tomboyism is because she doesn’t know how be a woman, rather than a conscious decision.

Shelly acts as Vada’s mother, comforting her and teaching her a beauty routine.

That the film begins with the introduction of an older woman to become Vada’s female role model/motherly influence suggests she couldn’t go on living this way without it.

Shelly is the epitome of femininity–she is a makeup artist, well-versed in fashion and romance. Vada sees Shelly as fascinating and exotic and allows her to take on a motherly role, showing her how to put it on lipstick and reassuring her boys will think she is pretty. In the next scene Vada, wearing full makeup, is trying to walk in an exaggerated impersonation of a movie star’s walk and posing for Thomas J. His next line, asking where her bike is, subtly suggests she will begin to abandon her tomboy qualities as she discovers femininity.

The transformed Vada in a party dress and pretty hair

Both Thomas’s death and Shelly’s influence bring her to a point where, by the end of the film she has nearly abandoned her tomboyishness. At the film’s end, she shows up at her last writing class with her hair out its ponytail, having abandoned her t-shirt and jeans for a frilly dress. Yet she retains some of her old self, still riding bikes, even in her dress.

In contrast, Roberta receives no new mother figure or female role model and could be viewed as what Vada might have become with Shelly. The adult Roberta, though straight, is portrayed as a stereotypical lesbian, a doctor who wears masculine clothes, drinks beer, and plays softball.

Adult Roberta continues to dress in a masculine style, while Chrissy is overtly feminine

Despite this, in the scene where Roberta finds the newspaper with her mother’s death notice in it, she remarks at how beautiful she was. Though she is usually portrayed as strong, this makes her cry and because she keeps repeating the comment, it seems as if she is yearning to be like her mother, but she does not know how to get there without her.

The film uses Chrissy (Ashleigh Aston Moore), Roberta’s childhood friend, as her “mother figure.” Chrissy is naïve and sheltered, to the point where most of what she says is clearly something parroted from her mother. She reminds Roberta to “be a lady” rather than fight and reminds her to “act like a girl” when she is splashing in the mud. In a sense, Chrissy’s mother, though not present in these scenes, is sort of a mother figure to Roberta.

Though best friends, Chrissy and Roberta seem to be opposites. While Roberta is a tomboy, Chrissy is the most stereotypically feminine in the group, easily scared and weak. In the future scenes, where Chrissy is having her baby, they are coupled, with Roberta taking on the husband role. While Chrissy’s actual husband only arrives to hold the baby after its born, Roberta drives her to the hospital and delivers the baby. After it is born, rather than sharing a look with her husband, Chrissy and Roberta are shown looking at each other mouthing “I love you.”

Furthermore, in both films, their first hint of romance is used to suggest a softening of their personalities and movement into a feminine disposition. Early on, Roberta is disgusted by the love quiz her friends are completing.

Her kiss with Scott Wormer plays on her need to question masculinity as he tells her she is good at basketball, not just for a girl but for a guy. Though she threatens to beat him up after if he tells anyone about their kiss, it is revealed later that she has stopped taping her breasts as a result.

Likewise, Vada has a crush on her teacher, an impossible object with no real hope of a future. At the same time, she is disgusted by Shelly’s romance novels and doesn’t understand why people have sex and get married.

When she kisses Thomas J, it is approached as an experiment to see what it is like. Magical sounding music plays as they kiss, as if this kiss will result in a big moment where a spell is broken. Though nothing happens immediately afterward, the kiss marks a change as she is now able take him, someone her age, as a realistic love object.

Vada and Thomas J’s kiss and her first step into a feminine adulthood

His death soon after suggests that his function was merely to pull her out of her tomboyishness and introduce her to heterosexual romance. Indeed, only after Thomas J’s death is she able to make her first female friend. In this sense, the kiss could be seen as breaking a spell.

Though these films make no mention of links between tomboyism and lesbianism, as tomboy characters are given romantic subplots in films where more feminine characters are not; it is suggested that these romances are included as proof they are heterosexual.

Though Now and Then shows the adult Roberta as a fairly masculine woman, it reinforces her heterosexuality as she is referred to as “living in sin with her boyfriend.” Interestingly, this character was based on a real person who did grow up to be a lesbian, but all references to this were edited out at the last momen t. This inadvertently serves to tell viewers that even the most masculine girl can grow up heterosexual.

As such, these tomboy characters emerge at the end of their respective films with more submissive feminine gender identities, the experience of their first love, and close female friends or role models. Due to this, the young girl viewer is meant to assume they fit comfortably into society and are no longer outsiders or ostracized. As such, she is give the message that she too, can only grow up straight and feminine.

Hopefully she realizes it is in her power to question it.

Elizabeth Kiy has a degree in journalism with a minor in film from Carleton University. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is currently working on a novel.