Top 10 Female Role Models That Won't Make You Roll Your Eyes

Posted at 5:00 AM Dec 11, 2008

By Andrea Grimes

I found myself harboring a bizarre, residual interest in the Britney Spears documentary that aired during every free moment MTV had last week. I'd just finished my first semester of graduate school and was enjoying a weekend without the usual 500 pages of academic reading. Between the Sci-Fi channel and "Music" Television, I let my beautiful, newly crafted brain go to mush.

The end of this semester also coincides with the first time in my life that I've been comfortable calling myself a real down-with-the-patriarchy, can-the-Subaltern-speak-for-herself, capital "F" Feminist, thanks to Heartless Doll and the wonderful girls who educated me during my first-ever gender studies course. Considering, one might imagine that the combination of cable television, Judith Butler and Britney Spears was a rather difficult one for this Doll's mushy, mushy brain. How to move feminism forward? Who is feminism for? What is feminism, and what is Britney's excuse for having the world's worst hair extensions? Is there no one with the answers, no one we can look up to? I tried to come up with a list of fictional and non-fictional female and, sometimes, feminist role models who make me happy. I hope they make you happy, too.

She's a banana-yellow cartoon with spikes for hair, and she's still one of the most real, compassionate characters on television today or, probably, ever. Lisa's a Buddhist, a goody-two-shoes, a vegetarian, a liberal, a smart-aleck and an environmentalist. I think she reminds a lot of girls of the youthful idealism they harbored before MTV and sex and Cosmo started fighting for their attention. What would Lisa do? The right thing.

9. Romy and Michele

Lest anyone accuse me of only picking out traditionally intelligent women for this list--what with the patriarchy being in charge of our educational system and values and all--I'm happy to nominate fashion-conscious, business-minded Romy and Michele as role models. They're (perhaps overly) confident, shamelessly silly and thoroughly dedicated to each other. Would that everyone could have girlfriends like these two.

"And after you've had kids and you've been in that delivery ward, frankly, goodbye vanity, goodbye self-consciousness!"

Praise be!

7. Susan Sontag

Nucking futs? Maybe. But Susan Sontag's status as a controversial feminist figure, writer, photographer, activist and academic (among a slew of other -ists and -ers we could give her) make her impossible to pigeonhole. She was the kind of person who was the best kind of enigmatic sum of her own parts. Get a copy of her On Photography essay collection and see how it strikes you.

The cable news landscape was way, way overdue in finding this funny, snarky feminist to stand out among the blowhards. Not only does Maddow have one of the best heads of hair on television, she's refreshingly smart and incisive for someone talking above a news ticker and for anyone in general. Should I mention she's also gay? That's right, straight folks--it's not just Ellen any more. Now we can all name two lesbian TV stars. O, progress!