An Animal Control officer once explained to me why I should not get a wolf-dog hybrid as a pet. Dogs are adolescent. Because they are dependents, they never fully mature. Wolves, being feral, and not domestic, become adults, and as such are unpredictable. A wolf-hybrid can be raised with a family its whole life, but cross in front of it at the wrong moment, it will decide to challenge for alpha, and it will not be playing.

I saw The Fifth Element the other night, the 1997 Bruce Willis – Milla Jovovich film. The writing, the performances, the settings, are all excellent, but the editing is extraordinary.

The woman character, played by Jovovich, is an incredibly powerful alien. She is written and portrayed, despite having the body of a fully mature woman, as an adolescent. It occurred to me that I almost never see adult women portrayed in film or television.

Since women’s primary identity — and her economic necessity — has been to please men, to be attractive to, and to be liked by men, she is not adult. She is adolescent all her life. This hurts my soul.

In 1987 we tried to cast an actress in a play that required the woman to make a threat gesture. Actresses in their late twenties at that time had undergone an unnatural selection for a decade, removing those with “unattractive” body types. And that would include women who look like they can handle themselves. And so we had an actress whom we had to teach how to make a threat gesture. And it looked fake.

These days, every now and then, there is a film where women are portrayed as adults. And this feeds my spirit like water after a lifetime’s drought. The sequences in Captain Marvel where she gets up off the ground. The Black Panther sequences with the awesome women fighters advancing together.

But look at Charlie’s Angel’s. They are all girls, not women. Or the woman character in Amazon’s Voyageur film, who dresses and acts like a circus performer, despite her supposed occupation as a balloon pilot. Then there was the hooting and derision that met the remake of Ghostbusters, with women — and they were actually almost all women! (Good script, too! That was a fun film.)

This is another instance where I understand I am living in the most amazing time in history (if the psychotic pirates who seized our country can just hold it together and not destroy the world while they steal everything on the planet). It’s not that women are not adults, it’s that it is becoming acceptable to see them as such. And for women to present themselves as wise, as powerful, as capable, without the obligatory head-duck to men, with the ubiquitous make-up, obligatory clumsiness, and the inevitable scanty clothing.

Apropos, I recently finished reading The Five, a work of comprehensive scholarship by Hallie Rubenhold, where she researches the background and lives of each of the victims of Jack the Ripper. In the process she not only restores their humanity, she also establishes that three of them were not and never were prostitutes. They were rough sleepers. Murdering supine rough sleepers is a completely different MO, and therefore a completely different profile, for the murderer. Killing homeless women sleeping in doorways sounds much more like a local crime, than some West End gent trolling for thrills. I understand from the reviews that her conclusions have caused a storm in the Ripper community, who don’t like that the women weren’t prostitutes. (She also raises the possibility that at least one, and perhaps two, might not have been killed by the same guy. It is, at least, the conclusion I came to, based on the evidence she presents. And that knocks down the Ripper story even more. See what you think.)

It is another example of people — okay, excuse me — men — being mad when women don’t behave the way they are supposed to. Or stay in the box that has been assigned for them. More on that soon.

In other news, three lambs were born today. It is always a joy.