You’ve probably seen the poster. A lithe young woman with a dour expression stretches out with panther-like poise, ready for a martial-arts attack. She has a large silver scimitar in her left hand and a dazzling futuristic tomahawk in her right. She wears knee-high black leather boots and a thin black mini-dress-cum-negligée that rides up over her toned, white, outstretched thighs.

The poster is for Joss Whedon’s sci-fi adventure Serenity, but with its leering depiction of a leather-clad fembot it could be advertising an entire genre of Hollywood movies that speak of post-feminist kick-ass action heroines while offering an overtly sexualised view of women that’s utterly rooted in the darkest chambers of male desire.

Where once the kick-ass heroine was a curiously compelling screen anomaly, offering the genuinely liberating spectacle of Sigourney Weaver’s Lieutenant Ripley nuking man-eating aliens, it has now become defined by a rigid formula. Repeatedly, in everything from Tomb Raider and Elektra to Catwoman and Underworld, and from characters such as Trinity in The Matrix, or Mystique in X-Men, or Kristianna Loken’s über-fembot in Terminator 3, or the Oscar winner Charlize Theron in the forthcoming feminist kick-about Aeon Flux, the depiction of the action woman is immersed in the stylistics of bondage and has the emotional texture of sado-masochism.

Here, the so-called heroine is sprayed into a form-fitting black leather or PVC outfit, complete with high boots and even higher heels. She is photographed by a camera that mostly swoops around her newly buffed buttocks and pneumatic breasts. Then, after taking a minor but not inconsequential beating, she gets to “kick ass”. But whose ass is getting kicked here?

The established Hollywood buzzword, from those with millions of dollars invested in the propagation of this formula, is that it’s all about “empowerment”. Halle Berry — like Theron an Academy Award winner for Best Actress — has consistently spoken about her semi-naked bondage-clad turn as Catwoman being an empowering role: “It taught me that we can use our sexuality in ways to service our higher good.” Similarly, Angelina Jolie found that the character of Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft was “completely free, sensual and primitive. She’s an empowered woman, and I love everything she stands for.” And Whedon, the director of Serenity and the man responsible for both the small screen ghoul-kicking phenomenon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and an imminent big screen update of Wonder Woman, agrees that it’s all about “strong women”. Even supposedly objective cultural commentators seem beguiled by the glamour of the new back-flipping avatars, the novelist Amanda Craig describing them as “more in tune with the new feminism which has no problem with lipstick and spandex being a part of female empowerment, as long as we, like Catwoman, accept who we are and lose our fear of playing outside the rules of what is and isn’t proper for a woman to do”.

But this noble talk of strong women, empowerment and feminism is ultimately a lot of smoke and mirrors attempting to obscure the mechanics of what’s actually happening.

For a start, there’s the revealing, fetishised, form-fitting costume, says E. Ann Kaplan, the author of the book Feminism and Film. “Why do they have to show supposedly powerful women in these heavily sexualised contexts? These films are mixing sexuality and power. It’s a double standard in terms of gender.”

In other words, although these allegedly strong chicks, according to Whedon, may look “attractive” and “cool”, when is the last time that Vin Diesel had to wear a pair of mercilessly photographed and cruelly revealing tight black PVC Speedos before he could snap the neck of an enemy agent? Ditto for The Rock and Jet Li? And why can’t the action heroine kick ass in a baggy jumper or pair of dungarees?

But the costume’s just the beginning, says Kaplan. Bearing in mind that these films are made mostly by males and aimed mostly at repeat-viewing teenage males, what are the pleasures on offer? “Young males feel threatened by the powerful girls and women around them,” Kaplan says. “These films fulfil some sort of satisfaction, in that they can get off on these women rather than feel threatened by them.”

Even the fact that these heroines are kicking ass in the first place, which is the cornerstone of any pop-feminist defence of their status, is merely part of the illusion of power. Here, casually tapping a dark well of Freudian desires, the movies allow the male viewer to enjoy a host of masochistic fantasies that alternate between the powerlessness of the heroine’s victim (pinned to the ground by Catwoman? Yes please!) and the powerful position of the viewer (enjoying the spectacle of Catwoman in action? You betcha!).

These fantasies, according to Freud’s 1919 paper on masochism and oedipal desire, A Child is Being Beaten, have roots in the subconscious mind and the childhood years of family romance. It’s hardly surprising then that Whedon announces (in a Freudian slip?) that kick-ass heroines remind him of his mother.

Kaplan adds despondently that it’ll take a lot more analysis and education to change this ingrained habit of Western thought. In the meantime, wait for the December arrival of Charlize Theron as Aeon Flux, and for repeated gushing eulogies about the nature of empowering ass-kickers.

Geriatrix: the pre-history of the kick-ass heroine

Pussy Galore
(Goldfinger, 1964)
AKA: Honor Blackman
MO: Wears bust-hugging gold waistcoat

Barbarella
(Barbarella, 1968)
AKA: Jane Fonda
MO: Wears thigh boots and metal corsets. Destroys the orgasmatron

Emma Peel
(The Avengers, 1965-67)
AKA: Diana Rigg
MO: Wears costumes with bits missing. Gets tied up a lot

Wonder Woman
(1976–79)
AKA: Lynda Carter
MO: Wears golden bra and deeply unflattering blue granny pants

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