Tsunade is a powerful woman. Everything about her screams intensity and exuberance, from her blonde hair, to her sharp eyes and glorious bosom. Even with certain insecurities and misguided hobbies, she has a certain ability to keep herself standing tall and proud at all times.
When she enters the room, filled with the other kages and respective bodyguards, she cringes a little. Everyone is looking at her; it will take a few seconds before their attention passes from her body to herself. Tsunade holds her breath during these seconds. It feels like she's hated them forever.
Tsunade is a fighter, in more aspects than one. She's not a kunoichi, she's a sannin. She's not a woman, she's a warrior. She carved herself out of the body of an attractive girl – the sort of girl men would love to look at, without paying really much attention. She turned her physical advantages around and put her good features to use as weapons.
One of the reasons Tsunade rejected Jiraiya was his inability to see beyond Tsunade, the woman, or Tsunade, the almost-girlfriend. The only time he looked at her as an equal, as a companion, with a mixture of love and trust, was in the battlefield – there, their relationship was truly one of reciprocity and intensity. However, the minute Jiraiya stopped thinking as a ninja, he was just a pervert, and Tsunade couldn't stand that. It wasn't the perversity per se, but the way he would reduce her to almost nothing and then call it "love".
Jiraiya, Tsunade was convinced, didn't knew much about "love". When they were both older and were reunited as she became hokage, she began to change her mind and appreciate some maturity in Jiraiya. But then he died – and, anyway, by then, Tsunade was already suffering the lost of too many well-loved people in her life.
What attracted Tsunade to Dan was the way he saw her. Basically, Dan saw Tsunade as she chose to be seen – whatever that may be. When she wanted to be sexy and promiscuous, Dan didn't insist on an idealized virginal image; when she wanted to be serious and professional, Dan acted as if the sex was irrelevant; when she wanted to be fragile, he didn't accused her of not holding up her strength. Dan, above all other people, appreciated Tsunade's true power.
And that power was all about choice. Tsunade Hime, rich, beautiful, strong and talented – all doors open. The myriad of people she could have been; the ways in which she could have used or fallen victim of the feminine mystique she's so accused of transpiring.
And yet, what did she chose?
Fight as a beast, cure as an angel. Drink as a prostitute, gamble like a fool. Somewhere between divine and overly human, Tsunade places her choice.
Men always need to make excuses for Tsunade, excuses that eliminate her choices altogether. They're always looking for a way to justify why such a woman managed to be such a kunoichi; wasn't that the man's job, to be supreme and absolute?
When men seek power, Tsunade muses, they can never handle it. Men cut all their connections to the real world, attempt to evade the body, ignore desires of the flesh. Men, in order to be powerful, have to stop being human. Tsunade thinks of Orochimaru, Pein and Madara and snickers – what a pair of amateurs. They fool themselves, thinking they're making a real choice, when actually they're just ripping themselves apart piece by piece, by fear of what they might do with the freedom power brings when balanced with real emotions. God forbid, they might actually arrive to the conclusion that they must be good – what sort of villains would they be then?
Women are different, or at least, that's what men say. Maybe that's why they've always been dragged to the shadows, forever coming second. They've been so concerned on how to be a REAL woman, they never realized that being a woman is just like being human – it all depends on choice.
Well, not anymore.
Tsunade looks around. There's the Mizukage, Temari, Kurotsuchi – a new generation. Do the men in their lives still look at them simply as women, or have they learned that comes in second place? That being a woman isn't something to be proud of or admired, but simply something to be chosen and perfected? God knows she's still trying to teach that to Sakura and Ino (Tenten got the message soon enough and Hinata has first to learn how to be, period)
Tsunade is powerful because Tsunade is conscious of her choices. Tsunade is everything she wishes to be and more. Tsunade isn't a pretty reflection. And, most of all, Tsunade isn't perfect and is fine with that – It's her choice to be that way, after all.
A little bit of existential feminism for you, mainly based on Simone de Beauvoir – the second sex. I've always loved Tsunade's character (and Jiraiya's too), so I thought I could link her with one of the most aggressive female philosophers.
" Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy.(…) The Second Sex, published in French, sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. (…)Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the immanence to which they were previously resigned and reaching transcendence, a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom." (Wikipedia)