Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The action girls are everywhere this summer, toting their guns and strutting their high-kickin’ stuff. The new ’’Charlie’s Angels,’’ ’’Lara Croft,’’ ’’Terminator’’ - OK, that one is technically a girl robot, but she’s still all girl. They’re all all girl. Even Demi Moore, making a comeback bid as an ’’old’’ Angel at the advanced age of 40, is mostly getting attention for her bikini-filling skills. Talk about girl power.

So are we feeling empowered yet?

Well, if we’re Cameron Diaz or Drew Barrymore, we sure are. Diaz is getting $20 million for riding a mechanical yak and pulling down her Underoos (among other things), and Barrymore is grabbing her share of Hollywood clout by producing the ’’Angels’’ blockbusters. (The sequel, ’’Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,’’ opened here Friday, and it’s safe to say it’s going to make plenty of money for everyone involved.)

But let’s not confuse their newfound power with any real power for the rest of us - and certainly not for the teenage girls who flock to watch Barrymore, Diaz, and Lucy Liu cavort and chop onscreen.

’’Are girls only empowered or powerful when they’re acting like men?’’ asks psychologist Ann Kearney-Cooke, who directs the Helping Girls Become Strong Women Project at Columbia University. ’’And then these women are in various levels of being undressed, with low-cut clothes, tight-fitting costumes - very sexualized. The most empowering thing about it might be that Barrymore is one of the producers.’’

Having a woman producer, in fact, is one of the few new twists in a story that’s older even than Demi Moore. You may be hearing that the first ’’Angels’’ movie ushered in an unprecedented era of hard-hitting female action heroes, but where does that leave Diana Rigg? And at least she got to keep her clothes on in the TV ’’Avengers,’’ even if they were mostly made of leather.

The tradition of the female action hero goes back further than we may realize, notes film historian Jeanine Basinger.

’’You had cowboy women, you had gangster women, you had things like `Gun Crazy,’ where the woman is a crack shot, you had `Johnny Guitar,’ where the final shootout is between two women,’’ says Basinger, who wrote the book ’’A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960.’’ Even the eponymous heroine of ’’The Perils of Pauline,’’ Basinger says, has been misremembered. ’’She’s not a damsel in distress always. She’s in distress, but then she copes.’’

More recently, we had Sigourney Weaver in the ’’Alien’’ movies. Her Ripley - famously written as a part for a man - was tough, brave, and strong. Sure, we saw her in her underwear, but it wasn’t the bordello gear that today’s action females get strapped into. And Ripley, like Linda Hamilton’s equally strong Sarah Connor in the first two ’’Terminator’’ installments, wasn’t using her muscles or her weapons to seduce anyone; she was using them to kill.

For Basinger, it’s the intent that matters. ’’It’s really kind of attitude,’’ she says. ’’It seems that no matter how many years go by or how much we think women have been liberated, we do go back to ogling them in skimpy outfits.’’

But it’s more complicated than that. ’’`Charlie’s Angels’ really tried to make it fun, make it tongue in cheek, make it equal,’’ Basinger says, referring to the series’s first film. ’’But it’s still the glamour, the pulchritude, the seeing Cameron Diaz dance around in her little undies. ... Films have always been ambivalent. The gangster film: 90 minutes of the glamour of crime, five minutes at the end of `crime doesn’t pay.’ They’ve always been able to have it both ways.’’

And it may be that the very power of the ’’Angels’’ stars makes us all the more uneasy with how they’ve chosen to use that power. Sure, they talk a good line, and they occasionally beat back some creep’s unwanted advances - but they also dress like strippers and, in one extended sequence in ’’Full Throttle,’’ even are strippers. You can’t eat your cheesecake and have it, too.

As Basinger notes, however, ’’Charlie’s Angels’’ is the wrong place to look for feminist messages. ’’You look to it for entertainment, and that’s it. And it is pretty entertaining.’’

It is. And it’s also a textbook instance of our ambivalence about women’s power. Because our society is uncomfortable with the idea that women can be aggressive, Kearney-Cooke argues, we fall back again and again on a few stereotypes: the woman who’s trying to act just like a man, or the woman whose only real weapon is her Barbie-like body. Giving Barbie a couple of GI Joe’s guns (or, thanks to Hong Kong, martial-arts moves) doesn’t transcend the stereotypes; it only compounds them.

The Angels do plenty of chopping and kicking. So does Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, and so does Carrie-Anne Moss in the ’’Matrix’’ franchise. Of course, all the boys are doing it, too, but somehow the shots of the kicking women always seem to focus more on the line of their legs than on the effect of their blows. It’s like watching the Rockettes on steroids.

’’Watching’’ is the operative word here. If these women are meant to inspire fantasy - and they are - it’s not the fantasy of being them, but of seeing them. Terms like ’’objectification’’ have been thrown around for so long that we almost forget what they actually mean, but these movies are here to remind us. The Angels are objects, not subjects - girls whose power lies in how they look to others, not women who derive strength from acting for themselves.

It’s a strange recipe for an action movie, when you think about it. And it’s true that the Angels do take action - they kick, they fight, they run. But are we supposed to admire their skill or just watch what jiggles when they jump?

Patti Miller says she’s seen the same strange mix of action and passivity in videogames that feature female characters. The director of the Children and the Media Program at Children Now, an advocacy group in Oakland, Calif., Miller notes that her group found in a study that male and female action figures, even in the same game, are portrayed in strikingly different ways.

’’The females may be as tough as the males, but they also have a challenge to look sexy while doing it,’’ Miller says. ’’Male soldiers head off to battle in full combat gear, women soldiers in midriff-revealing tank tops with cleavage.’’

Now, says Miller, the same rules apply at the movies, even those focusing on female characters. ’’The question becomes how they are being portrayed,’’ she says. ’’If we’re just glorifying and glamorizing violence in those roles and making them highly sexualized, I think it’s sending very mixed messages.’’

For the generation that’s growing up with the ’’Powerpuff Girls’’ cartoons, which combine extreme girliness with extreme aggression, those mixed messages may seem perfectly natural. Why wouldn’t the Powerpuffs grow up to be Lara Croft? The real question is: How could they not?

But the other question, and the one that seems harder to answer, is this: Why is the stripper-cop the action figure that the movies keep presenting to girls? Why can’t a female action hero be something more than Barbie with a gun? Why, in short, can’t she be Buffy?

Yes, ’’Buffy the Vampire Slayer’’ - and yes, the small-screen Buffy, whose longevity on television gave her a chance to develop nuances and complexities that the earlier movie about her could only hint at. Strong but complicated, frightened but assured, Buffy is well rounded in a way that the pneumatic cutouts on the big screen, flat characters in every way but the one that matters to teenage boys, can never hope to be. And her speech in the final episode, about what could happen if only girls everywhere became strong, belongs in the pantheon of great television moments.

She’s enough to give girls a good name.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.

Kiss kiss, bang bang

Strong women characters have had a long history in the movies, but only recently have they taken center stage. Some of the changes have been good, others not.

’’The Perils of Pauline’’ (silent-era serial, 1914): ’’She keeps getting in trouble,’’ concedes film historian Jeanine Basinger, ’’but she mostly gets herself out.’’

’’The Thin Man’’ (1934): If you’re Myrna Loy, the only weapon you need is a dry martini.

’’Johnny Guitar’’ (1954): Joan Crawford plays even tougher than usual - but so does Mercedes McCambridge.

’’Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’’ (1966): The quintessential babes-with-guns flick, low-rent division.

’’Barbarella’’ (1968): Ditto, but in outer space.

’’Alien’’ (1979): Sigourney Weaver rules the universe.

’’The Terminator’’ (1984): But Linda Hamilton ain’t bad, either.

’’La Femme Nikita’’ (1990): Criminal-turned-government assassin classic-turned-inferior Hollywood remake (’’Point of No Return,’’ 1993)-turned-watered-down TV series (1997-2001).

’’Thelma & Louise’’ (1991): You say it’s a feminist masterpiece? Then why are they dead?

’’Tomorrow Never Dies’’ (1997): Michelle Yeoh, billed as 007’s equal, succumbs to Bond-age in the end.

’’Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’’ (2000): Infinitely stronger role for Yeoh, not to mention the marvelous Pei-pei Cheng as supervillain Jade Fox.

’’X-Men’’ (2000): Storm, Rogue, Dr. Jean Grey, sure - but it’s still called ’’X-Men.’’

’’Charlie’s Angels’’ (2000): Took the camp quotient of the TV series (1976-1981) and added a heavy dose of fisticuffs and feminism lite.

’’Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’’ (2001): Surgically enhanced Angelina Jolie brings an electronic fantasy to life. But at least she has some of the autonomy - not to mention the gadgets - of a proper action hero.

’’Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines’’ (2003): The terminator is back, and this time he’s a she.

’’Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle’’ (2003): You already know it all.