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Popular Culture Review
Coin’s anonymity from CIA operatives opposed to the Key/Coin system. One
agent states that field reports have claimed that Coin is a woman. His deputy
director retorts, ‘“We know better now’” (Death 70). By virtue of the socially
recognized belief of female weakness. Penny is able to get her man both in the
bedroom and in battle while sustaining her anonymity as an agent.
Despite her obvious ability to overcome and overpower all of her
opponents, the texts still betray a sexist need to explain her physical prowess,
assumedly because Penny is a woman. Sometimes this is done by explaining her
adversary’s weakness: “But she was stronger than he was. Tall as he was, he
was a sedentary type” (Ecstasy 206). On occasion, her emotions make up for her
womanhood: “She lifted the impaled man high into the air, her ftiry giving her
strength” (Hard-core 201). However, she is strong. “The cable-hard muscles of
her forearms” are mentioned several times (Hard-core 167). Readers see her
“strong elegant thumbs... that ... could crack walnuts... now [crack] a human
larynx” (Operation 56). Her toughness is also demonstrated when she kills a
snake and eats “the flesh raw” (Hard-core 163). At times her physicality even
borders on the ridiculous. When jumping over a fence, she notes that it was “a
good fifteen inches below the women’s Olympic record. It would have been
easy if she hadn’t been so dehydrated” (Hard-core 163). She is not only strong;
she is fast: “She was the fastest runner” (Death 121). Skytop, an expert in
unarmed combat, believes that “she moved faster than anybody he’d ever seen”
(Hard-core 8). Even her “superbly keen” (Sonic 39) ears and “superbly sensitive
skin” (Sonic 89) are more highly tuned than most people’s. In training:
They taught her to pick locks, kill a man with a hairpin or a
rolled-up newspaper, use explosives. They taught her how to
resist interrogation, pass out under torture, kill herself with
both hands tied. (Diamonds 46)
Even though her tough and able bodily abilities are requirements for her
line of work, the narrator still needs to fit in these minor explanations of her
feats of strength because she is a woman.
While readers may or may not accept her strength, it is entertaining to note
the equipment a woman is given on spy duty. The Mont Blanc pens of James
Bond are clearly male territory. Instead the Baroness is given a band-aid, a bra,
shoes, lipstick, fake hair, a ring, pantyhose, hairspray, a watch, a cigarette lighter
that shoots black widow venom, and - best of all - fake nipples. These items all
turn into weapons or communications technologies, but their covers are highly
representative of what 1970s society thought a rich woman naturally owned. But
readers wonder if the Baroness even needs the weapons. She would appear to do
well with the items they pretend to be:
They were perfectly ordinary things, the things you’d expect
to find in the luggage of a rich, beautiful woman. Lingerie, for
instance. But you could garrote a man with a lace bra, cosh
him with a weighted stocking, break his neck with a pair of