{"id":65638,"date":"2015-01-06T09:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T14:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=65638"},"modified":"2015-03-16T16:08:27","modified_gmt":"2015-03-16T21:08:27","slug":"herculean-dimorphism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/01\/06\/herculean-dimorphism\/","title":{"rendered":"Herculean Dimorphism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know, I know, Hercules is a demi-god. But he\u2019s also all man. In\u00a0Disney\u2019s (1997) version<\/a>,\u00a0Hades says<\/a>\u00a0to Megara, \u201cI need someone who can \u2014 handle him as a man.\u201d And handle him she does:<\/p>\n

\"herculesmegkiss\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And since they involve him in such matters of the human flesh (and heart), that means their measurements are fair game for the Disney dimorphism series<\/a>. If Disney is going to eroticize the relationship\u00a0and sell\u00a0it to innocent children, then we should ask what they\u2019re selling.<\/p>\n

As usual, they\u2019re selling extreme sex dimorphism. I did some simple measurements from one pretty straight shot in the movie, and compared it to\u00a0this awesome set of measurements<\/a>\u00a0taken of about 4,000 U.S. Army men and women in the late 1980s. Since Hercules is obviously\u00a0extremely strong and this woman seems to be on the petite\u00a0side, I compared their measurements to those of the biggest man versus the smallest woman on each dimension in the entire Army sample. The numbers shown are the man\/woman ratios: Hercules\/Meg versus the Army maximum\/minimum.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As you can see, this cartoon Hercules is more extremely big compared to his cartoon love interest than even the widest man-woman comparison you can find in the Army sample, by a lot. (Notice his relaxed hands \u2013 he\u2019s not flexing that bicep.)<\/p>\n

To show how unrealistic this is, we can compare it to images of the actual Hercules. Here\u2019s one from about 1620 (\u201cHercules slaying the Children of Megara,\u201d by Allessandro Turchi):<\/p>\n

\"hercules-turchi\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That Hercules is appallingly scrawny compared with Disney\u2019s. Here\u2019s another weakling version, from the\u00a03rd or 4th century<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"hercmegaramosaic\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now here is one from\u00a0the\u00a02014 Paramount movie<\/a>, in which he is conveniently paired with the human female, Ergenia:<\/p>\n

\"?????\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That bicep ratio is only 1.5-to-1. And that\u2019s not normal.<\/p>\n

Seriously, though, isn\u2019t it interesting\u00a0that both the Disney and the Paramount versions show more extreme dimorphism than the ancient representations?\u00a0Go ahead, tell me he\u2019s a demigod, that it\u2019s a cartoon, that it\u2019s not supposed to be realistic. I have heard all that before, and\u00a0responded with counterexamples<\/a>. But that doesn\u2019t explain why the modern versions of this myth should show more sex dimorphism than the old-school ones.\u00a0That\u2019s progress of a certain kind.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written so far about\u00a0Frozen and Brave<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Tangled<\/a><\/em>, and\u00a0Gnomeo and Juliet<\/a><\/em>, and\u00a0How to Train Your Dragon 2<\/em><\/a>. It all goes back to the critique, which I first\u00a0discussed here<\/a>\u00a0and Lisa Wade\u00a0described here<\/a>, of the idea that male and female humans aren\u2019t just different, they\u2019re opposites. This contributes to the idea that\u00a0Mark Regnerus defends<\/a>\u00a0as the \u201cvision of complementarity\u201d \u2014 the insistence that children need a male and female parent \u2014\u00a0which drives opposition to same-sex marriage. If men and women are too similar, then we wouldn\u2019t\u00a0need them to be paired up in order to have complete families or sexual relationships.<\/p>\n

In the more mundane aspects of relationships \u2014 attraction and mate selection \u2014\u00a0this thinking helps set\u00a0up the\u00a0ideal in which women\u00a0should<\/em>\u00a0be smaller than men, the result of which is pairing couples by man-taller-woman-shorter much more than would occur by chance (I\u00a0reported on this here<\/a>, but you also could have read about it from\u00a0538\u2019s Mona Chalabi<\/a>\u00a019 months later). The prevalence of such pairs increases the odds that any given couple we (or our children) observe or interact with will include a man who is taller and stronger than his partner. This is also\u00a0behind some notions\u00a0that men and women should work in\u00a0different \u2014\u00a0<\/span>and unequal<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 occupations. And so on.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I\u2019m not letting this go.<\/p>\n

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of\u00a0<\/span>The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and writes the blog\u00a0<\/span>Family Inequality<\/a>, where this post originally appeared<\/a><\/em>. You can follow him on\u00a0<\/span>Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0<\/span>Facebook<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know, I know, Hercules is a demi-god. But he\u2019s also all man. In\u00a0Disney\u2019s (1997) version,\u00a0Hades says\u00a0to Megara, \u201cI need someone who can \u2014 handle him as a man.\u201d And handle him she does: And since they involve him in such matters of the human flesh (and heart), that means their measurements are fair game […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,55,2103,2096,2087,343,868,293],"class_list":["post-65638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-gender","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-femininity","tag-gender-masculinity","tag-tvmovies","tag-power","tag-social-construction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/01\/1a.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65638"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65642,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65638\/revisions\/65642"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}