[Guest] What Would Xena Do?

emember Xena? The badass warrior/princess/possible demigod from ancient Greece but also from twenty years ago?

“I love the smell of warrior sweat in the morning,” Xena says in one episode, smelling her own armpit. As one does.

We live in the time of #MeToo and Time’s Up, an era in which we are collectively throwing back the curtain on a spectrum of male behavior ranging from thoughtless, bad sex to outright assault that seems to have shocked men everywhere and women nowhere.

Like a lot of people, I’ve struggled with these stories. Not in terms of whether to believe them but under the weight of their sheer volume and with the thud of recognition in my gut that comes from hearting women talk about being afraid to speak up (for good reason), either in the moment or afterward. With the idea that I’m going to have to raise my kid to live in this world. How do we move on to…something else? To whatever comes next?

In One and Only, book 1 in my Bridesmaids Behaving Badly series, our heroine, Jane, is obsessed with Xena. Jane is a comics and sci-fi nerd, and she dresses as Xena when she attends conventions. Part of her journey is coming to understand that the buttoned-up life she’s living isn’t serving her: she needs to embrace her inner warrior.

“What Would Xena do?” she asks herself. WWXD?

It strikes me that it’s a question that could serve us well more broadly applied. What would Xena do in a #MeToo world? I was never a comprehensive watcher of Xena, but I did love to settle into late night reruns of the show when I was in college.

There’s an instance in the show when Xena is groped. (It’s maybe not literally her, because there are some mistaken identities in this episode, but Joxer, Xena and Gabrielle’s frequent companion and comic relief, grabs her ass.) What happens then? The music swells to Darth Vader Theme/Imperial March—there’s practically a siren going off—while she pauses in disbelief over what has just happened. Then she sneers, “Are you suicidal?” She doesn’t give him even a nanosecond to answer, though; he’s already sailing across the room.

Now, I’m not suggesting we can all respond to affronts this way, nor that we necessarily should. (Or that anyone who doesn’t isn’t being a “good” victim.) Merely that seeing, or imagining, this kind of dramatic response creates a kind of internal power and strength, like charging a battery.

And I note that even Xena sometimes tempers herself. One quote sticks in my mind. I can’t remember the context, but she said to some dude, “I’m not going to kill you. Not today.” Oh, that today qualifier! It leaves open the possibility that if she feels like it, she might kill you tomorrow. Again, Xena is aspirational. We can’t always go around threatening to kill people, even when they harm us. But the secret knowledge that we might just be biding our time: that’s a kind of power, too.

Xena has lots of amazing qualities. She’s loyal, dogged, and brave. But maybe the greatest thing about Xena is her self-awareness. That’s what differentiates her from Wonder Women and from… (Oh, wait, there aren’t really any other mainstream female superheroes, are there?) Xena is funny. She’s not short on self-confidence, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously, either. “I am a lunatic with lethal combat skills,” she declares.

In the end, what I’m suggesting is that although we maybe shouldn’t literally do what Xena would do, we can cultivate her as a mindset, as a totem of sorts. We can move toward more Xena-ness in our lives. What does that mean, exactly? Here’s my attempt to boil it down, and what I’ll leave you with.

Xena’s Rules for Living

1. Take no shit.
2. Okay, if you’re going to take shit, have some friends to talk about it with. (And of course, Gabrielle was way more than Xena’s friend, but that’s another essay!)
3. Protect those friends.
4. There’s always another day to get things right. (Reserve the right to commit murder another day.)
5. You can be deadly serious about some things, but it’s also okay to have fun.

But maybe don’t get too distracted by smelling your own armpits. 

Jenny Holiday is a USA Today bestselling author who started writing at age nine when her awesome fourth-grade teacher gave her a notebook and told her to start writing some stories. Her new series, Bridesmaids Behaving Badly, launched in February 2018 with One and Only. The second book in the series, It Takes Two, releases on June 26. She lives in London, Ontario, with her family.

You can find Jenny at JennyHoliday.com or follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

You can buy One and Only now at your preferred book retailer, including your local independent bookstore and Kobo. Curious about One and Only? Listen to a short excerpt from the audiobook edition below.

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