It’s a good question…does the female assassin trope need explanation anymore or do we just accept it? The “reasoning” has been part of the zeitgeist for decades–seduction, less conspicuous, etc.
I thought they really undercut Black Widow with the pheromones–we didn’t need the scene of Weisz character warning her ahead of time…Just have Widow realize the solution on her own. I also thought they were going to do something with the call back of (paraphrasing) “pain you makes you stronger.” She lets Draykov kick the shit out of her because the pain would let her break the conditioning. Breaking her nose I thought was much more clever.
Right… but that reasoning does not lead you to “it’s better for your assassins/spies/super-agents to be female”, it leads you to “it’s better for SOME of your assassins/spies/super-agents to be female”. It’s trivial to come up with missions where a man would be a more effective assassin/spy/agent, either because it requires more strength than subterfuge, or because it requires infiltrating a male-only organization, posing as a man, etc.
“soldiers/killers are nearly all men” has been (for better or worse) an assumption baked into our culture for ages. “It’s also useful to have trained female killers, as there are some missions where they would be better suited than men” is a more recently discussed addendum, at least in pop culture. But it would be silly to go from there to “assassins/infiltrators/covert people/spies are NEARLY ALWAYS women”.
In-universe, I feel like they certainly came very close to “badguy only recruits girls because he gets off on controlling them”, without actually saying so out loud. Which kind of leaves the message as “well, obviously this unethical secret organization that kidnaps children and mind controls them and uses them for evil missions all over the globe only kidnaps girls. Because that’s a thing that only girls do! I mean, don’t you know the girl roles and the boy roles?”, which is some kind of weird through-the-looking-glass gender stereotype reveresal.
I haven’t actually seen the movie. Do they explicitly say that there’s no other Russian super assassin programs besides the Red Room? I assumed that the Red Room produced a specific kind of assassin (sexy femme fatale) and there were other programs for other sort of assassins.
That’s exactly what I was going to bring up.
We KNOW there are male agents and soldiers–even under Draykov’s control in the movie…The assumption can be the Red Room program is specifically for female assets–which are prized for their uniqueness.
We don’t really get any notes about how effective the Widows are to support the massive funding and system of the Red Room. Are they all as good as Natasha? They never felt like a threat IMHO the way the Winter Soldiers were painted to be thanks to Bucky.
Yeah, but there’s alot of 'em.
You can send as many as you’ll need to get the job done and not rely on one person. Plus, if a couple get sacrificed along the way, there’s replacements.