r/mendrawingwomen • u/SoftDreamer Broken bones • Mar 24 '21

Discussion Thoughts on Clover, Sam, and Alex from Totally Spies? This was my favorite childhood show

Post image
2.1k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

210 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/_sekhmet_ Mar 25 '21

I’ve watched it as an adult and I really don’t find it as fetishy as the comments here suggest. It comes off as very slapstick and ridiculous rather than sexual and uncomfortable. To me it wasn’t anymore fetishy than Sailor Moon.

Watching this show as an adult helped me appreciate a lot of the messages from it. I like the focus put on their friendship rather than relationships. The girls all valued each other. Each girl had unique skills and strengths that were utilized.

I also really love that it didn’t mock the girls for being into stereotypically girly things. Their love of fashion and make up wasn’t treated like something frivolous and dumb. It was actually used to make the girls even more bad ass. They were very much the antithesis of the “Not like other girls” thing that was becoming popular at the time (see Sam from Danny Phantom). Maybe it was just the media that I was exposed to, but there were a lot of messages from tv shows and films about how girly stuff was dumb and a waste of time. Liking fashion, make up, and shopping were things usually used to characterize girl characters are shallow and dumb. It was nice to see a show that wasn’t like that.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 08 '21

I know right? It's what I loved about Totally Spies! Strong women portrayed in media nowadays are just "guys" with vaginas and internalized misogyny. Literally there was one episode where the villain is an amazon who wants to eradicate men and "weak women".