Poll: Female role models

[Professor James]

I was preparing for college applications and one of the questions and one of the questions were who were your role models. I filled them out and realized they were all men. I shouldn't be too surprised since I am a man, but when I thought about it, I couldn't think of any women, real or fictional, dead or alive, I looked up to. The closest person I guess would be mom due to her ability to adapt too life's struggles, but even that was mainly an afterthought. Does any escapees have any female role models? I prefer it if it wasn't a family member, but I won't reject those answers.

 

[Frankster]

It's corny but I do have a female role model: my grand mother, RIP.


Otherwise I've always liked Joan of Arc due to being part french (so isn't for the "girl power" aspect but more cos she rallied an entire country from the brink of defeat).

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Mara Jade and Jaina Solo, both from Star Wars.

Delenn from Babylon 5.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I've never given much thought to role models to be honest, male or female.

 

[Barbas]

Cleopatra - what a fiery temper, but by heaven, what a nose!

 

[Lufia Erim]

I don't believe in role models. No one deserves that kind of pressure. If its for an application of some sort do what everyone else does. LIE.

 

[Saetha]

Female, and no role models period. Never seen the point, which is why I always roll my eyes at every "Who's YOUR role model?" or "Kids need a good role model to look up to!" It seems so mindless. Screw patterning yourself after others! Be your own damn person!

 

[Godhead]

I'm my own role model, I'm a terrible influence though.

 

[FPLOON]

Does my mother, my grandmother, and/or my great grandmother count? If not, then my first female role model was Mihoshi Kuramitsu from the original Tenchi Muyo OVA...

Other than that, I only had one other role model, but they don't do the things I looked up to anymore, so there's that...

 

[HardkorSB]

I used to be really into martial arts and my absolute favorite martial artist (and one of the main reasons why I got into martial arts) was Cynthia Rothrock:


Hot, badass and not a bad actress either.
Too bad she never got really popular, I really wanted to see her in some big budget stuff.

The thing that pissed me off was the fact that the character of Sonya Blade was based on her, yet they didn't cast her as Sonya Blade in the MK movie and instead went with someone who couldn't portray a convincing fighter to save her life (forgot her name and I don't care enough to look it up).

Over the years however, I became a cynical bastard and I don't have any role models anymore.
I do look at certain people as points of reference for where I am in life vs where I want to be but that's about it.

 

[Timeless Lavender]

I never cared about role models in general. Even as a young child, I never wanted one or cared about having one.

 

[Christian Neihart]

My mom, for starters, and then there's Marie Curie and the female astronauts and engineers at NASA.

 

[Just Ebola]

Female, and no role models period. Never seen the point, which is why I always roll my eyes at every "Who's YOUR role model?" or "Kids need a good role model to look up to!" It seems so mindless. Screw patterning yourself after others! Be your own damn person!

There's nothing wrong with admiring someone for having good qualities. I don't get why so many people equate 'looking up to someone' to 'stomping out one's identity to better resemble said person'. Though I guess the word model is a bit misleading. But the reality is you can appreciate and even imitate somebody without leaving your personality on the cutting room floor.

And if I had assign a "point" to it, I'd say it's to combine the better qualities from multiple people in order to better oneself.

I don't believe in role models. No one deserves that kind of pressure. If its for an application of some sort do what everyone else does. LIE.

There's pressure connected to having the unbridled approval of lots of people? I've never been looked up to, so I guess I wouldn't know, but that seems like a really slanted take on the whole role model thing. Any reasonable person understands that even the best people are critically flawed in some ways. I'm sure some people do expect perfection, but just because there are a few misguided people it's automatically a bad practice?

There's a reason they're call role models and not 'Paragons of Humanity'.

 

[Lufia Erim]

Female, and no role models period. Never seen the point, which is why I always roll my eyes at every "Who's YOUR role model?" or "Kids need a good role model to look up to!" It seems so mindless. Screw patterning yourself after others! Be your own damn person!

There's nothing wrong with admiring someone for having good qualities. I don't get why so many people equate 'looking up to someone' to 'stomping out one's identity to better resemble said person'. Though I guess the word model is a bit misleading. But the reality is you can appreciate and even imitate somebody without leaving your personality on the cutting room floor.

And if I had assign a "point" to it, I'd say it's to combine the better qualities from multiple people in order to better oneself.

I don't believe in role models. No one deserves that kind of pressure. If its for an application of some sort do what everyone else does. LIE.

There's pressure connected to having the unbridled approval of lots of people? I've never been looked up to, so I guess I wouldn't know, but that seems like a really slanted take on the whole role model thing. Any reasonable person understands that even the best people are critically flawed in some ways. I'm sure some people do expect perfection, but just because there are a few misguided people it's automatically a bad practice?

There's a reason they're call role models and not 'Paragons of Humanity'.

Except any role model that fell of the wagon gets figuratively thrown under a bus. Exple take hanna Montana aka miley cyrus. She used to be this good quirky girl little girls looked up to because of the show and suddenly when she started expressing herself people were all like Whoa what happened to the nice little girl we used to know? Logically yes you are right, realistically, things don't go like that.

 

[Just Ebola]

Except any role model that fell of the wagon gets figuratively thrown under a bus. Exple take hanna Montana aka miley cyrus. She used to be this good quirky girl little girls looked up to because of the show and suddenly when she started expressing herself people were all like Whoa what happened to the nice little girl we used to know? Logically yes you are right, realistically, things don't go like that.

Realistically, things go like that all the time, actually. People (especially young children) benefit from having positive role models all the time. Which is why "Who's your role model?" is a question you encounter so often. Seriously, the idea that a practice must be entirely bad just because there are a few unreasonable outliers can be applied to just about anything. It's like saying if a band puts out a bad song, the entire album is shit.

And I'm all about expressing oneself, but there's a difference between falling off the wagon, and spending years intentionally subverting everything people used to think about you. That kinda downward spiral doesn't happen by accident. Besides, Miley Cyrus seems to be doing pretty well for someone who lives under a metaphorical bus.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/10/15/1413378770179_Image_galleryImage_Miley_Cyrus_took_to_the_s.JPG

 

[Smooth Operator]

People as role models never made sense, because people are messy and for everything put on display as good there are always 5 dead bodies in the closet you don't know about.
Admire peoples work if you will, and admire it separate from people so it's not some emotional cluster fuck when someone "turns out bad" when you only just found out they are plain normal people with heaps of issues.

 

[LetalisK]

Dude here. Perhaps not role models, but the closest would probably be Ronda Rousey and Katie Ledecky.

 

[Illesdan]

God, I've always hated this question with a passion.

I don't believe in 'role models'. Once you start putting an individual or group of people on a pedestal, the sooner their true colors come out. Lets look at the former 'Subway' spokesman just for an example of a road to hell paved with good intentions.

Instead, I choose to see what's a respectable/admirable trait in the people I see. For example, my grandmother. I respected how there was never such a thing as 'you're too young to know that/ask about that'.

On the flip side of that coin, there are people that serve as poster children of what NOT to do with your life. In this case, I'll point to my (now deceased) uncle. A raging alcoholic who refused to take responsibility for anything he did in his life. It was a life lived with so little consequence or impact that it might as well have never existed.