Recently, William Gibson, an author whom I admire, retweeted something about Lisbeth Salander (of the eponymous Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series) kicking the asses of those responsible for the H&M fashion line inspired by her. I was tempted to reply, “Of course she would. A man made her up.”

Men love to make up women like Lisbeth: young, tough, vulnerable, and not into anything tainted with the word “feminine.” I’ve been musing about this phenomena, but Sarah Blackwood at The Hairpin up and wrote about it in a post titled “Our Bella, Ourselves“:

This is an uncomfortable place for feminists, because this heroine is not particularly good at actualizing herself. Bella waits, she wallows, she thinks, and feels, and worries, and wonders. She does not actualize in the sense we have come to expect from our heroines, an expectation that, I might point out, is quite often based on a masculinist understanding of what being effective in the world looks like. Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of the popular The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series, is emotionally stunted but, damn it, she actualizes herself! She punishes the people who hurt her, she sleeps with whomever she wishes, she zips around on a motorcycle, and she’s a master computer hacker. In other words, our actualized female heroine might as well be a tiny man.

Girls and women have become invested in this concept of “empowerment.” The word has come to mean not much more than “doing what I want, kicking ass and taking names.” It’s an incredibly thin notion of power — one based so much on the emulation of what our male-oriented society has decided is powerful.

I watched a Charlie Rose episode recently which was made up of clips of interviews with Shakespeare scholars and specialists. While discussing Shakespeare’s treatment of power in his plays, one guest asked Rose, “What do you think power is?” Rose answered that it was the ability to exert your will in the world.

I think that’s a great answer, but it got me thinking about power that doesn’t look like power. Not in the Taoist sense (which Lao Tze calls “the feminine” and extols as the strongest force in the universe), but in the sense of privilege. Privilege is not having to exert your will to have it fulfilled. Privilege seems passive to those who have it because they don’t have to do anything to exercise it.

So the privilege of the “empowerment” narrative is such that men get to write about women who act in a way that has been extolled as powerful in a masculine-oriented society and get lauded for it. They get to write about women this way and have women adore them for it.

And in this framework, a woman writes about a teenage girl who acts like a teenage girl — “clumsy, obtuse, and aggravating in her helplessness” in Blackwood’s words — and she gets pilloried by women who are on their empowered pedestals. Now, perhaps Stephenie Meyer didn’t handle some very real aspects of being a teenage girl in the way we would like — the creepy, stalky boyfriend is the hero, the girl never quite grows beyond the adolescent who wants to be saved — but it is true that the characteristics so many hate about Bella are real aspects of many teenage girls’ still-forming selves.

This is why I had such a visceral reaction to the anti-Twilight sentiment running through Comic-Con a few years ago. It’s misogyny, and, what’s more, it’s misogyny that women who call themselves feminists indulge in. In so many ways, empowerment in the culture I’m part of is still being what men want you to be. And if they don’t want you to be gushy, emotional, and enthusiastic about something they don’t like, well, dammit, you’re not going to be, and what’s more, you’re going to make fun of the women who are, all under the banner of supporting “empowerment.”

I’ll be thinking about that as I try to get into H&M when its doors open on December 14 — the day the Lisbeth Salander collection goes on sale.