Bond Should Always Be a Man, but Not for the Reasons You Might Expect

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die. Photo by Nicola Dove.

Debates have been raging about who will play the next James Bond after Daniel Craig recently said goodbye to the role. No Time to Die, which has been subjected to a freight train of delays since the pandemic started, is Craig’s last hurrah after fifteen years as 007. And it seems just about every mainstream entertainment and lifestyle outlet in the universe is calling for the next James Bond to be played by a woman, because “Jane Bond” can play the character as well as a man.

But this surface-level appeal to a watered-down feminism doesn’t jive well with me. Our next 007 should remain a man because male characters who are written and designed as men do not stand in as some universal, androgynous standard of human experience. Women don’t need to inhabit male characters just to be powerful, and trying to stencil Bond’s masculine stance in the world onto a female figure actually covers up for the patriarchal culture in which his character was conceived over 65 years ago, and which still lives with us today.

James Bond was first written as a male character in novels and short stories in 1953. British author Ian Fleming penned twelve novels and two short-story collections all about the tuxedo-clad spy since that time. In those stories, the character of Bond was a stage upon which Fleming tried to conquer his personal challenges and fantasies, including alcoholism, womanizing, and a profound fear of aging. In 2021, patriarchal fantasies of manhood have not gone away, and we are still enamored with 007’s deft muscularity, steely cold killing instincts, and sexual prowess with women (who always end up dead after he seduces them, but we’ll get back to that in a minute...).

The agent’s wild cat-like energy, wrapped in sexy Tom Ford and Brioni suits, is essential to the brand of James Bond, and to our culture’s symbols of perfect manhood. Brands rely a lot on symbolism – in this case, black tuxedos, sleek pistols, and half-naked women – to the point where Pierce Brosnan was not allowed to wear black suits and tuxedos in The Thomas Crown Affair, or any other film or show, outside of the James Bond franchise. The tailored black suit and tie remains so iconic to the James Bond character that their appearance on the lead actor in any other context would shatter the exclusivity and allure of the film brand.

Many film and art historians, critics, and cultural commentators have identified symbolic patterns and their meanings when it comes to representations of women and femininity. And rightfully so, because finding out what’s behind decades of dead mothers, gratuitous cleavage, and femme fatales appearing on screen can tell us a lot about our society’s expectations of women and gender roles.

But that only gives us half the picture. Men are just as susceptible to gendered expectations, albeit empowering (and sometimes disempowering) them in a number of ways: being aggressive and competitive (“boys will be boys”); shutting out emotions other than anger (“boys don’t cry!”); and destroying whoever or whatever gets in the way of one’s professional and personal goals (“grab life by the balls!”). James Bond’s essential characteristics give us a vignette of hypermasculinity that we’ve left largely unquestioned since the 1950s. Sure, Producer Barbara Broccoli and Director Cary Joji Fukunagi (No Time to Die) probably didn’t have Bond rape a female villain in a barn to “cure” her of her criminality (as Sean Connery’s version of the role did to the character Pussy Galore in the 1964 film Goldfinger). But we still believe that a man’s sexuality is so potent as to render an unsuspecting woman “damaged goods.” Every woman the agent seduced over the past several films ends up violated, mangled, and strangled in a bedroom or beach hammock soon after their nightly tryst.

Is a character that discards sexual partners like used condoms, guns down dozens of people at a time in fits of rage, and feels almost no sense of remorse afterward a fantasy of manhood and power we want to keep pedaling to boys and young men, let alone women? In an era of #MeToo and supposed awareness around “toxic masculinity,” I really hope not.

007’s cardboard cut-out version of manhood does not always reflect how real men inhabit the world every day, but it does give as a vivid picture of what many men around the world idolize, and what society generally expects of them.* Calls to make the next James Bond a woman leave our rigid models of manhood unquestioned and intact, despite the good intention of promoting “strong female leads” in future stories from the Bond franchise. If we want to come to terms with what James Bond really means to us in the 21st century, we should take the character’s version of manhood seriously, rather than slap the same (destructive and stereotypical) characteristics onto a female body. Given time and space for reflection, who knows what kind of man we’ll dream up as the next top-secret agent?

*This is a comment on the way the character of James Bond was written over time, rather than Daniel Craig’s deft and compelling performance of the role.