They're your responsibility now

I've mentioned this before ... but, how I have always hated this:

Watching The Towering Inferno. Paul Newman has brought a woman and two kids (not his or hers) up to the 135th floor and found the door locked. He decides to crawl through a duct and turns to the other three. "You take care of these ladies now," he says to the boy. "They're your responsibility now."

The boy is maybe 12. The woman is in her forties.

There are so many things wrong with that mindset I can't tell where to start. It's the belief that women are somehow lesser than children - if those children are male. It's the equation of a forty-something woman to a six-year-old girl. It's the infantilizing of women, which results in their being unable to take responsibility for themselves. It's the attitude satirized in Shrek the Third, when Fiona tells the princesses they need to get themselves out of captivity and they "assume the position" to wait for the princes to show up.

It's also a dreadful thing to do to a child. Children shouldn't be made to feel that the lives of others depend on them. This boy should be able to rely on the adult with him. What a dreadful, dreadful burden to put on him. As I said back in 2006.

I remember a moment in Shake Hands With The Devil, where General Roméo Dallaire was talking about how, when he'd left for Rwanda, he'd tossed that at his son, telling the fourteen-year- old boy that he'd have to be the "man of the family" if anything happened to him ... and how terribly that weighed on the boy when it became clear from the newscasts that Dallaire was in palpable, deadly danger. He wished he'd never laid that burden on a boy.

It's a cliché, of course, and I'll bet most people who say it or see it in movies don't take it seriously. It's all about bucking up the boy, and no one ever thinks about the damage to him - or to the women who are being treated as no-account.

And sure, The Towering Inferno was made back in 1974. But people are still saying that to boys, to make them feel "like men". The thing is - boys aren't men, and it's not good for boys or women to pretend that they are.