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[picture taken from Jezebel Article linked below]...   >>>

[picture taken from Jezebel Article linked below]



Treading into the murky, perfumed waters of the prepubescent girl is dangerous, you can run the gamut of Lolita or run right smack into a girl screaming for vampires who sparkle in the sun and the Jonas Brothers. But with the depiction of an 11-year old girl as an assassin (trained by her father) who likes the c-word and has no qualms with disembowelment—you realize that there's blood in the water and you're not really sure what to do with it.



The character, Hit Girl in Kick-Ass is typical in her genre, the girl for whom violence is second nature. Except that she is 11, and therefore not yet sexualized makes for an interesting character. The fairy tale Red Riding Hood capitalizes on the budding sexuality of Little Red Cap, but yes though Hit Girl would have killed the Wolf in a heartbeat, one would wonder if the Wolf would have even given her the second look. So it begs the question, does Hit Girl revolutionize our sense of strong female characters?



We've seen empowered women, but they still fall within the stereotype, they're still incredibly beautiful or extraordinarily ugly which is unquestionably a sexualized matter. Now taking that out of the equation makes the question even more interesting. It makes us wonder when and what exactly makes us identify characters as women, men, girl, boy.