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Why Colleen Wing From Netflix's Iron Fist Is Every Feminist's Masturbatory Dream

It even got a superhero-cynic like me to watch it...

21 March, 2018
Why Colleen Wing From Netflix's Iron Fist Is Every Feminist's Masturbatory Dream

Disclaimer: Long-term fans of the Marvel franchise should refrain from judgment. This had been viewed—and reviewed—as a newb watching as an outsider to this universe.

So, okay, I'm not an all-out loather of the superhero genre. There is the exception of Nolan's Batman series, and the first of two Thor films.

But overall, being a much more devoted patron to douchey Nouvelle Vague films that noone likes and Hugh Grant-infested rom-coms that noone admits to liking, I'm not drawn to this genre of my own accord.

However, a particularly empty Saturday and some mild guilt-tripping from my boyfriend (who also indulges my tastes while I shun and pooh-pooh his, primarily because a lot of the things he likes involve explosions and robots and basically terrible) led to a begrudging Lemon-law prefaced viewing of Netflix's new comic conversion—Iron Fist.

It was involving, but typical—corporate landscape, troubled hero, larger than life forces turning the wheels—it was a song I'd heard some bars of before. But it quickly became clear that the USP of the show was the solid and driven Japanese martial artist Colleen Wing.

It's interesting—Iron Fist received the least amount of veneration a Netflix-Marvel collab has gotten—but it struck a chord for me simply because of this one character—and enough to see it's 13 episodes through to its un-orgasmic finish, mind you.

See, the thing about Colleen Wing is, she's so kick-ass, she's surreal. She isn't pseudo feminist, or part-feminist, she's a blazing, untempered feminist—the ideal every woman hopes to be, whether or not she has the physical and emotional strength to try to attain that level of kick-assery.

An instance, in particular, was when she walked into a cage (oh, um, spoiler alert, perhaps?) and beat two meaty muscleball men into quaking piles of mince. The feminist in me watched with the same drooling fervour that one might view a sped-up video that involves a bed of whipped cream being lathered onto a brick of Nutella.

I realised, in that moment, that I wasn't drawn to Colleen because she was attractive, or wildly fit, or incredibly skilled or morally principled.

I was drawn to her because she had incalculable power.

I envied her the ability to break someone's face in anger, to rip a man's arm out of his socket if he so much as tried to touch her inappropriately. As feminists, we're not supposed to talk about these desires. We're supposed to champion equality (which we do) and not zoom the lens in on hate.

But for the record, there is hate, and there is anger—and not for all men, but for the idea that certain men think that they can get away with anything. Don't misunderstand this—we don't all want to beat the living daylights out of men crossing the street. Not in the least.

What we want is the ability to turn any man who thinks he can—and often does—cross the line with us, into creamed corn. We want the expertise, strength and agility she has to be f*cking invincible. We want to be able to walk in looking we couldn't hurt a fly, and then burn some goddamn metal.

And while legs day at the gym makes my muscles hurt all the way into Saturday, a girl can dream—and Colleen is that dream.

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