Thoughts and feelings towards “Femme Fatales”?

What can I say, other than I simply cannot disagree with any of this.

As I suggested previously (but not to you), the problem is not femme fatale in-and-of-itself. Rather, I think the issue is with how it's handled by the author; seemingly a common theme in writing.

I might use words other than "offensive" (boring, uninspired, inaccurate, or indeed terrible...), as offense can only ever be taken, and I have better things to do than be or act offended on behalf of other people who didn't elect me— but our fundamental points about discrepancy in quality being tied to authorial execution is practically the same.

I think there's some discrepancy to be found in reader interpretation of a work as well, which was more the focus of my conversation with DK. We very readily leave behind any semblance of objective criteria to measure these things by, and quickly find ourselves ultimately in the realm of subjectivity.

So my position isn't a complete defense of the femme fatale archetype, but rather one that tries to acknowledge its real-or-imagined shortcomings (some of which, like "harm", remain exactly as unsubstantiated in this thread as the "societal harms" of dumb-dads in sitcoms), while supporting its utility, and simultaneously emphasizing the great diversity of experiences and interpretations that fiction brings in general.

 

The kind of depictions we see with femme fatales does cause real harm to people. It's not hard to find people who will tell you about staying in the closet about being gay, bi or trans because they felt ostracised and they will tell you that problematic media depictions do contribute to that.
Women who grew seeing misogynistic depictions of femme fatales are going to be influenced by that. They are going to get used to seeing women the way these media depict them. And that's because not only are they going to get such ideas from fiction, but elsewhere. Fiction is rarely going to be a very decisive factor in anyone becoming bigoted when they weren't already, but fiction doesn't need to because people are already bigoted, fiction is bigoted because bigotry exists in society. What bigotry in fiction does is help to perpetuate that bigotry in society and every consequence of that upon society can be linked to some extent to such media.
And you can dispute to what extent bigotry exists in society, but it undeniably exists in some significant amount. It's not consequence-free, at least. And that's all we need to be concerned about as far as this discussion about writing is concerned.

Whether or not it stands out to you is not that important. What's important is what we take away from it. Does the depictions of femme fatale in classic media help to create or reinforce an impression about the role of women in society that is harmful? How consciously strong such takeaways is not the same as how impactful they are. What goes without much thought can be very important for affecting our worldview and behaviour.

Not the point

Any character of sufficient prominence in the story should be accompanied with a certain amount of agency to match. What exactly that means can vary from character to character. But if certain characters are conspicuously lacking in agency, and particularly, conspicuously lacking in a multitude of popular works, that does leave an impression. Because agency is pretty important to people and pretty important to how stories are told.

There's a huge difference between acknowledging on some level that it is bad for people who are victims to not resist being victimised, and writing stories about how the dumb victims wouldn't stop letting it happen. You wouldn't make a film where the villains are random citizens who aren't particularly concerned about air raids, if you were concerned about people being killed in air raids you would make the military powers the villains because they are the ones dropping the bombs. The problem you can run into is when you make victims out to not really be victims at all, and that's certainly the case with many femme fatale characters and misogyny.

See above.

You did say that "the dumb-male trope....must be as big of an issue as femme fatales".
And I don't even think they are close. If "the dumb-male trope" is an issue at all.

From my initial response to this thread my argument has clearly not been that the femme fatale archetype is in any sense untouchable, but to talk about the ways in which this archetype has a problematic history and is inherently susceptible to becoming problematic, and how we might avoid those problems in writing such a character.