Violent Femmes.

• Author: MENCIMER, STEPHANIE
• Position: Cinema

On the big screen today, action babes are on top. Here's why men love it.

THIS SPRING, WHILE Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was breaking box-office records and feminists were arguing over the merits of the female action hero, no one noticed the dogs playing in theaters elsewhere. Exit Wounds, the latest Steven Seagal flick, opened with a paltry $19 million--his best in years, but a poor showing for an action film. While he's mercifully cut off the ponytail, Seagal is showing all of his 50 years, wearing a pastiche of orange pancake makeup and sporting heft not attributable to muscle mass.

In Exit Wounds, the martial-arts afficionado and star of macho classics Hard to Kill and Out for Justice employed Hong Kong kung-fu-movie wire tricks made famous in The Matrix and now standard fare in action-chick flicks. But where the wires only added to the grace and agility of lithesome Zhang Zi Yi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, they seemed to strain just to get Seagal off the ground.

Meanwhile, Driven, the latest by Sylvester Stallone, the quintessential beefcake action hero, was dying from neglect. The car-racing movie went almost straight to video, and so far has grossed only $32 million, a far cry from the $47 million Tomb Raider made in its very first weekend. Driven's returns were actually an improvement over Stallone's last disaster, Get Carter, which in 2000 earned all of $15 million, barely what his 1981 classic, Nighthawks, grossed back when ticket-prices were a lot cheaper.

And then there's poor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Last fall, his cloning film, The Sixth Day, disappeared with similar returns--this from a guy behind one of the all-time box-office blowouts, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Schwarzenegger had better luck last year playing the voice of a bug in the animated film, Antz, which pulled in $90 million.

This year, the muscle-bound stars of action-film blockbusters of the '80s and '90s have found themselves ungraciously drop-kicked out of the genre by, of all things, a bunch of girls. Girl-power flicks like Charlie's Angels, Crouching Tiger, and Tomb Raider are topping the $100 million mark once dominated by men like Schwarzenegger. Charlie's Angels has brought in $125 million; Crouching Tiger is up to $179 million; and Tomb Raider, only open since mid-June, stands at $126 million. Even last year's cheerleading movie, Bring It On, trumped the traditional male stars, grossing $68 million.

Action chicks are taking over prime time television as well. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and La Femme Nikita--all WB or UPN fodder--are about to be joined on a major network by Alias, a show about Sydney Bristow, a kung-fu-chopping female agent for a top-secret division of the CIA.

The enormous popularity of women as film enforcers has stirred much debate over what these films say about women, feminism, Hollywood, and violence, and whether it's progress or exploitation. But no one has answered a more interesting question: What does this say about men? After all, none of the big female hits. could have achieved its staggering popularity without nabbing a significant...