Lhbizness wrote:It's meant to be a joke, but to me it comes off as objectifying. It's a joke on the woman, not on the men for behaving stupidly. I'll again point to the way the scene is photographed, dividing Olga's legs from her body. If Gambit is in on the joke (and I'm not convinced there is one), he still persists in addressing Steed rather than Olga, and even after being introduced to her, he bends down and continues to stare at her legs like that's all there is to her. It is a joke, but it's a tasteless and semi-offensive one. It's the way a teenage boy looks at girls. The fact that it's a woman who gets one line in the entire episode makes it worse than, say, giving us a shot of Tara's or Purdey's legs. Olga is entirely there for the men to stare at and make jokes about without her participation or consent.
It's the fact that the series dwells on the active creepiness of Cromwell and Purdey's flirtation with him, not whether or not it condones it. That sort of behavior from male characters comes back again and again - it's an example of defining sexual aggressiveness or even violence as something that's standard, even if it is ultimately unacceptable. Cromwell's crime in this is being the white rat, not how aggressively flirtatious he is.
I don't recall Gambit ever actually having girlfriends that we're introduced to, other than the women he sometimes flirts with, and Purdey, of course. He probably does appreciate clever women, especially if he appreciates Purdey, but I don't find that he ever espouses to be even as forward thinking a character in terms of women as Steed was in the original series. In fact, he regularly philosophizes about his conquests and the fickleness of women.
Well, he doesn't actually have much of a chance to talk to Olga after he's been introduced to her--she ducks back down to go back to grooming the horse right after she's acknowledged him, and he has about one line of dialogue after that before it switches to the findings of the assignment, which he has no reason to talk to Olga about. And I'm not convinced that Olga is completely oblivious and has no idea what's being said about her, or takes issue with it. The fact that Gambit's there, and she knows he can see her, doesn't seem to bother her much one way or another.
The way it's filmed is another issue entirely, and has nothing to do with the characters themselves, although it is partly done that way for the surprise factor--we're expecting to see Steed, so when we're confronted with a pair of legs that definitely aren't Steed's it's a "what?" moment.
Cromwell's crime is generally being a nasty individual, and all those characteristics add up to that. It's dwelled on partly for plot purposes--to give us a sense that Cromwell isn't a nice character, to give Purdey a chance to see his scar and unravel the mystery, and also just to give Purdey a chance to hold her own. She knows she can nip it in the bud whenever she wants.
Gambit does have girlfriends in the course of the series, and the ones we see him meet and flirt with he either makes dates with, or we see them pop up for the dates later on. He actually doesn't talk about his conquests very much, and when he does it's because Purdey's brought it up and starts asking him about them. I also don't recall him saying anything about women being fickle. You might be thinking of one of Purdey's lines, where she rehashes an old argument they had about the fickleness of
men's minds. Purdey's argument was that men are fickle when it comes to women, whereas Gambit's argument was that men stick with women they really care about.
