One Woman in the Justice League
Just one woman, maybe two, in a team or group of men.
Also watch Jimmy Kimmel’s "Muscle Man’ superhero skit - “I’m the girly one”
The Avengers:
In Marvel Comics:
“Labeled “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” the original Avengers consisted of Iron Man, Ant-Man, Hulk, Thor and the Wasp. Captain America was discovered trapped in ice in The Avengers issue #4, and joined the group after they revived him.”
5 / 6 original members are male. Only one is female.
Modern films (MCU):
The original 6 Avengers were Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, and Black Widow.
Again, 5 / 6 original members are male. Only one is female.
Justice League
In DC comics:
“The Justice League originally consisted of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, and Aquaman”
6 / 7 original members are male. Only one is female.
In modern films (DCEU):
The members were/are Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Cyborg. (+ introducing Martian Manhunter (in Zack Snyder’s Justice League director’s cut))
5 / 6 main members in both versions of the Justice League film are male, with appearances by a 7th member in the director’s cut who is also male. Only one member is female.
The Umbrella Academy (comics and show)
7 members:
- Luther (Number One / Spaceboy)
- Diego (Number Two / The Kraken)
- Allison (Number Three / The Rumor)
- Klaus (Number Four / The Séance)
- Five (Number Five / The Boy)
- Ben (Number Six / The Horror)
- Vanya (Number Seven / The White Violin) Later becomes known as Viktor and nonbinary in the television adaptation after Elliot Page’s transition but that’s not really relevant to this.
Here, 5 / 7 original members are male. Only two are female. Only slightly better than the other more famous superhero teams, and they had to add another member (compared to Avengers’ 6 members) to improve the ratio (maybe executives still demanded to have 5 males).
Now let’s look at some sitcoms and other stories.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
4 males, and 1 female slightly less prominent character who is abused constantly. The show claims to be politically aware and satirical but gets away with a lot of misogynistic comedy, tbh, that I’m willing to bet a lot of people are finding funny for the wrong reasons.
Community:
Jeff, Britta, Abed, Troy, Annie, Pierce, Shirley. This one is a little better, 3/7 are female. Notice it’s always more males though, they never let it become more than 50% female, or else then it’s a “chick flick” or a “female team up” or “gender flipped” story. And of course the main character, and the leading few characters, are almost always male or mostly male.
Stranger Things:
Main original group of kids consisted of: Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, and El (Eleven). 1 original female member, who is comparable to an alien and even plays the role of E.T. in direct homage. When they added Max, I saw people complaining that although they liked her, there should be only one female member. 🤦
Why is it ‘iconic’ to have only one female in a group of males? Does that just mean it’s the tradition, the way it’s always been? Can’t we change that? Is it so that all the men can have a chance with the one girl, or so the males can always dominate the discussion with their use of force and manliness? Or so that whenever the team saves the day, it’s mostly a bunch of men doing it, but with ‘a little help’ from a female/a few females (at most), too!
It’s so fucked up and disgusting to me I’ve realised. And men don’t seem to care. I’m a male and this is really disturbing to me now that I’ve woken up to it. How do women feel about this? Am I overreacting?
I’m a woman. Yeah it’s bothered me my whole life. I used to be really angry about it. Now I just accept it as the status quo. In the last few paragraphs of your post you are basically describing the Smurfette Principle, Two Girls to a Team,and other tropes. Also the Bechdel test.
I heartily recommend Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 1 is rough, but it’s got good gender equality.
Nowadays though, you get a lot more racial diversity on western TV than you used to. I think that’s something which has improved quite a lot.
Sometimes I do get what they mean though when there are women or other minorities when coupled with bad writing. I can kind of understand why people complain about “woke” media when I see shows like Supergirl or Star Wars: The Adept. Meanwhile, - Andor, Rogue One, Alien are great and have diversity, and people don’t complain about these being “woke” so much. So, I guess, shitty writing can score an own-goal.
Welcome to feminist media analysis. It’s an existing academic field and you can find books and YouTube videos on it (and it can go pretty deep into related topics).
One of my favorite examples was when the creators of Avatar the Last Airbender were deciding to create their sequel about the next avatar they decided to make their protagonist a woman and executives at nickelodeon complained that boys wouldn’t be able to relate to a female protagonist.
The explanation I’ve largely heard that makes sense to me is that women are taught women are generally expected to learn to empathathize with male protagonists whereas the inverse is much more optional. You have plenty of men who do get into wonder woman and she ra and korra, my childhood best friends are among them, but you also get a lot of men who don’t in a way where I can’t think of an inverse that I’ve seen
The avatar bit is kinda funny because, if anything, between Ang and Korra, I (male) find Korra more relatable. Their ages had a bigger impact on that than their genders.
I believe the answer can be broken into three parts:
-
valid criticism, when a movie is genuinely bad and has a female lead, the valid criticisms of the film are overdhadowed by slop online articles criticizing fans for not supporting women and hating a female lead. Captain Marvel is a good example of this. The movie has genuine issues, and is not considered a good Marvel movie, but the overall online discussion focused around Marvel fans not supporting a female lead superhero movie, when Wonder Woman found success and Captain America: The Winter Soldier is arguably colead by Scarlett Johanson.
-
Pre box office reactions. Any movie which can be summed up as “X but with women” lands here. Same with any movie which intentionally admonishes the male audience and advertises itself as for women and only, then get mad men didn’t see the movie. Charlie’s Angels, Ghostbusters, and Captain Marvel fall into this category.
-
Genuine oddities and sexism. I believe this applies to the gaming industry more than the film indistry, but it can blead over. I believe the initial outrage over _The Marvels _ was this, but the movie ended up having major issues and went to category 1.
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Why do males complain about female-led stories
They don’t? Or are you taking 4chan and Twitter as representative of the whole videogame audience?
Do you mean Twitch and YouTube? The biggest gaming content platforms where the largest accounts do complain about women being in movies/games quite a lot?
A couple of month ago I was volunteering in my youth centre. We always have the radio on. On air was an interview of a female author writing about a woman and her struggles as a mom and wife, falling for another man. The male interviewer had the audacity to ask if there are any themes in the book which could interest him as a male reader (imagine a very condescending tone).
Reducing “female” themes to lesser themes is so annoying, hurtful and stupid.
I’m not sure the interpretation has to be that “female themes” are “lesser”. People will generally and naturally relate more to themes that strongly correlate with personal, lived experience. It is not strange that a man would relate less to motherhood as a theme. Similarly, a woman might naturally relate less to fiction on father-son relationships. A city dweller might relate less to stories about life in the countryside. And so on. It is useful and instructive to get out of one’s own skin and mind now and then. It helps build empathy and works of fiction can be very helpful in that regard. But that does not change the fact that themes hit much harder when you can relate from personal experience.
As a man, strongly female themes and lead female characters are a-ok and can be touching even, but some male themes hit me much harder because I know what that feels like in my own skin so to say.
I get you and sure some themes hit harder than others. I myself no kids etc thought pet sematary was an ok book and I have read many comments saying it hits harder being a parent/father.
But there is a difference between: will we get the male perspective and I am not interested in the plot of a female one. Therefore devaluing it.
In a radio show introducing an entertainment to your audience, giving a platform to an author and then being dismissive feels so stupid.
I am especially enjoyed since it was on air in the youth centre. Boys and man constantly use girl and woman and anything related to it as insult. (And obviously gay, which is my personal journey to remind everyone that it is not an insult.) Just selecting a female team in FIFA was nearly too much to ask.
Yeah well I wasn’t there, so just going by your post and pitched in to say that it’s a valid question in general: how is this book relevant for me? If asked in good faith, the author I suppose can see it as an opportunity to explain for example why that woman’s story can be interesting to a male audience. Maybe even school the interviewer if so inclined.
I just feel like we should sometimes check our feminist impulses and recognize that some questions are valid, even when we may suspect that they come from a bad place.
The imbalance in numbers isn’t just in movies. Think about the judiciary, legislators, business leaders… It’s everywhere. In my own career I was the first woman to hold a senior position with one of my employers. Crazy. Achieving even what we have has been uphill all the way. I’m glad you’ve woken up to this - maybe you can keep spreading the word!
How do I feel about it? Really fucking exhausted. It’s not just the movies, it’s my everyday life. Being patronised, talked over, ignored, belittled… Ugh. A lot of men seem to outright despise women. On the bright side, most of this behaviour comes from men of my own generation (I’m old). Young men in general seem much less arrogant, more respectful of women. My sister suggested this is because we remind them of their grannies, lol, but they speak well about women their own age too, and regard them as equals. (Apart from this one young bloke who talked about “women and other minorities”, sigh.)
Plus, every time you bring it up (such as this thread) a large number of the responses are of the “not all men” sort. And yes, not all, but more than enough, and those comments are the opposite of helpful
Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.
Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that’s just about people living live in an imaginary situation, so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren’t white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males ones, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.
(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)
This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of “suspension of disbelief” going on.
If you want a neutral metaphor, it’s like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that’s there just feels natural.
You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.
Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had university students read the scripts (with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers’ names, gendered pronouns swapped for neutral pronouns, etc) and try to intuit the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the roles in the script. So if one role was filling a more traditionally feminine or masculine role, had more fem/masc speech patterns, etc, this part of the study was designed to check for that.
Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long they believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.
Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking 25-30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the script (literally) and had the actors play the opposite roles. So the female actor was now playing the “male” (determined by the earlier script reads) part of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination… But it’s not the entire reason.
It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.
This is very interesting! Thanks
This isn’t an excuse for the difference, but I wonder how exposure bias played into their perception. If a person was more accustomed to men in a specific situation and a woman “surprised them” by being involved, it could lead to time passing being perceived as longer. It would be similar to how any new experience is often perceived as taking longer than a familiar one in the same time period. Underrepresentation of women in that scenario would support it.
I’m man and one of my favorite type of stories are historical stories with women who defy the gender roles of their time. Also in general historical stories from perspective of someone else than white guys. I find them empowering even though they are not about my empowerment. Also I just find the stories more interesting than watching just another historical war movie with almost all men except main characters wife at home or smth.
Although there is this “girlboss” archetype I see in movies I really hate. Kind of one that feels like a committee wrote feminist character because it sells. Well we are likely to see less of those with all the anti DEI stuff, so I guess monkey paw wish came true.
Because the majority of dudes complaining are incel man babies who need to feel like they are the focus of society. If its not exactly how they like it its not right. Its time we start shouting down on them loudly.
And if you dare question their masculinity by suggesting a woman might be able to do something other than be eye candy then they’ll… well I don’t know what they’ll do. Probably just complain about it on social media.
They become president and burn the country down
I found they usually huff until nearly shitting themselves before schoffing once more.
Sometimes, they’ll start a podcast or a YouTube channel. Those ones are the worst.
I don’t accept the premise of the question. People don’t complain about female led movies, as long as those movies are well written. What people complain about (and this should include people looking for increased female representation) is projects that prioritise having female leads over having good writing.
Take the trend of gender swapped existing male characters into female ones. If, as a writer, you’re prepared to follow through on that concept and explore how it changes the story, then it can be interesting. A chance to experiment with the differences in motivation between genders and how obstacles can be navigated in different ways.
If you’re just going to swap “he” for “she” in the script and call it a day… Well that’s boring and doesn’t deserve anyone’s time. It’s not interesting or clever. In fact it’s often bad take. You can end up with a woman on screen showing that to be a hero they have to display hyper-masculine traits. How is that a good female role model?
I mean, there is definitely a crowd that don’t like women as lead characters. While not directly related to movies, just see how a bit of peach fuzz on Aloy upset people when they showed off the new Horizon game. And that’s not a poorly written game or character.
Something like Captain Marvel does suit your argument; a poorly written character and movie, so people who criticise it get lumped in with the “women are bad” crowd. But there definitely are people who just hate things that put women in the spotlight.
Edit: fix shockingly poor grammar and spelling.
I mean, there is definitely a crowd that don’t like women as lead characters…
There are always crazies, but I don’t think that’s a large number of voices. I seriously think that most people just want well written characters that are true to themselves and the situation and don’t give a shit if its a man / a woman / black person / white person / pig or sentient blob of jelly.
To prove this point, The Marvels was received better than Captain Marvel, and it had 3x as many women in leading roles
I personally think Ms Marvel is the best disney+ marvel show and I’m a white guy.
It was good, had a vibe that very few other shows did.
I prefer it when the gender doesn’t matter, and that the hero doesn’t need to prove anything to the audience. They’re just well-written and we’re invested in their motivations and the wider story around them.
A good example of this is the excellent She-Ra cartoon. I can’t think of many good examples beyond that sadly…
Ellen Ripley’s gender doesn’t matter until Resurrection, which isn’t the highlight of the movie.
A lot of media have strong female characters but their gender or sex does matter for the story so can’t easily be replaced
Susan in the book Soul Music (plus some others) as well as the Witches, Tiffany Achings and more from Pratchett
Death from Sandman (even though the author is very controversial, but you could check the books out from sources that doesn’t give him a kick back)
Was a long time since I read them but the Polgara books feature a strong female protagonist
We got classic youth/kids media that shows strong female characters even if some stuff are coloured by weird takes (Such as Xander Harris): Xena, Buffy and Pippi Longstockings
Ripley being a woman didn’t matter much in the first film. It’s crucial to her character in the second. It’s her maternal instincts that drive her protection of Newt and that drive her into direct conflict with the alien queen.
The final battle is two mothers fighting for their children.
I saw that as parental instinct since protection of young are not gender coded, but you can read it as maternal for sure as a mirror to the Queens hatred after the egg burning
It’s more explicit in the directors cut when you learn of her own daughter’s fate.
You can make an argument for it mattering in the first film as well, but that starts examining the film from a lense of Ash, Weyland Yutani, and the Xenomorph being metaphors for the patriarchy.
Eh, the character was written as “Ripley”, sex unspecified. IIRC none of the characters had their gender written into the screenplay and it was intentional.
Oh true – Alien did it pretty good
I do find cartoons the best examples here. Pippi Långstrump is an interesting choice since I think that’s aimed primarily at girls, but PepperAnn did it pretty well with an ambiguous audience. Daria (arguably, though she’s a bit of a toxic character). Kim Possible maybe? Again probably mostly aimed at valley girls, but the show was interesting enough that anyone could watch it.
Books wise, plenty of examples. Lyra, Matilda, Anne of Green Gables, etc.
I think issue is just hollywood. They pander to the lower common denominator which tends to be alpha males looking to justify their existence
At least when I grew up in the late 80s and 90s both boys and girls read the books and watched the movies with Pippi.
I agree that Hollywood is a blight on the cultural landscape, and you basically have to disregard their movies if you want to find something deeper than a puddle, with exceptions few and far between
An interesting counter point to this.
Kids movies, I’m a dad, I only have boys. Trying to find new movies that have good male parts is challenging. There are plenty of “girl empowerment” movies, but ones with good role models for boys are few and far between.
Everything is based around violence. Like really, is that all boys are good for?
…and not just movies. My partner and I steadfastly try to do all “interacting with kid’s school, extracurricular and social groups” stuff 50/50. We always strive to go to (and host) such important events together. We always indicate we should both be added to mailing lists, and give both our phone numbers as contacts, etc, etc. However, much (sometimes most) of the time people only ever call her about kids playdates, medical professionals default to discussing his issues with her exclusively even though I am sitting next to her and commenting too, when there is a parents’ chat/mail group for his classes or other activities usually she gets added and then has to help me muscle my way in to the group (and the groups are often all women). Once at a preschool party a parent saw me interact with my kid, came and asked me to point out his mother, then went to her to invite our kid to a birthday party. It’s never-ending for a father who strives to be a “caring father”, and not just an infantile “toxically masculine, one-dimensional, emotionally stunted cliché” in terms of “role model”. It is exhausting for both her and me, but is also extremely demoralising for me because trying to be what you believe to be the right kind of role-model is one of the most important yet virtually undocumented parts of parenting, and even more demoralising because it still happens even after I hugely reduced my external workload in order to be the primary “stay at home” parent. One small positive step is that the country we live in introduced “paternity leave at child-birth” legal requirements (much smaller than for maternity leave though, and only introduced after my kid was born [sigh]). In popular culture it has become a trope that women suffer endlessly trying to play the role of both parents to compensate for idiotic (or selfish prick) fathers, but it glosses over the fact that a man who actively tries to “be the change” (and any woman who tries to facilitate that change in solidarity) are so often tripped up at every step by this pervasive (and often subconscious) intellectual and emotional inflexibility. One other small positive is that I occasionally find another father who feels the same way (and who is often just as frustrated and burned out by the state of things) …sometimes - just one or two. Having previously lived in many countries/continents I also know that the country I live in is far from the worst offender for this, which makes it even more pathetic globally.
Everything is based around violence. Like really, is that all boys are good for?
Oh yeah, you are so right. It feels at times like - when I’m not teaching him to play football (violently), and not egging him on to emulate (violent) action figures, and not buying him fake guns to play with (violently), and not telling him to “man up” instead of taking time to understand his feelings, etc - there seems to be a degree of subliminal judgmentalism directed at me for not “sticking to the job description”. It seems many people will prefer to see the world burn in preference to accepting someone disregarding parts of the “normality” rulebook based on rational introspection, including those who would never admit it out loud, and even some who haven’t yet consciously realised they are standing on that side of history - perhaps because it holds up a mirror to them not doing so (out of fear?, laziness?, bitterness-fueled pulling-up the ladder?).
Just for a specific example. Bluey vs Paw Patrol. Both HUGE kids shows, about dog-based characters.
In Bluey all of the important characters except Bandit are female. The stories are awesome, they revolve around family, caring and over coming challenges. They are almost never violent, the stories are rich and interesting and somewhat entertaining even for an adult watching for the infinity+1th time.
In Paw Patrol; all the important characters are male except Mayor Goodway and Skye. The stories are repetitive and boring, they revolve around working together, being heroic and solving problems. They are regularly violent, and as the show has progressed it has gotten stupid with massive power creep and a group of antagonists. Paw Patrol just kinda sucks.
In Bluey often Bandit is used for comic relief; none of the female characters are. In Paw Patrol, the comic relief is handled by Mayor Humdinger who is often the antagonist, Mayor Goodway is often scatterbrained but rarely is the comic punching bag.
This is valid but I want to non-judgmentally laugh at the concept of power creep in Paw Patrol
Same for kids books. It’s great for my daughter, but it’s hard to find good movies and books for her younger brother.
First, I’m confused as to why you’d need to segregate books and film by gender, these all have either a male or non-gendered lead: Captain Underpants, Nate the Great, Hal The 3rd Class Hero, The Hobbit, The Lord of The Rings, Treasure Island, Danny the Champion of the World, The Outsiders, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Percy Jackson (all 40 billion of the series), The Giving Tree, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Bridge to Terabithia, James and the Giant Peach, Holes (series), Where The Wild Things Are, The Heroes of Olympus (more Percy Jackson I think), Ender’s Game, Winnie The Pooh, Narnia (series), The Wind In The Willows, The Indian in the Cupboard, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Neverending Story, I Am Every Good Thing, Don’t Hug Doug (He Doesn’t Like it), King Arthur’s Very Great Grandson, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Wild Robot (series), Stuart Little, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, George’s Marvellous Medicine, Lord of The Flies, Calvin and Hobbes (series), The Dangerous Book for Boys, The American Boys Handy Book.
(You didn’t specify age, so I tried to add our family suggestions for about 4-12. Once he’s older, depending on your thoughts on the language, we also have a lot of suggestions for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn)
We don’t need to, but I noticed at one point that he’s mostly seeing female leads. We read a bunch of the books in your list, many others we avoided because they’re no longer in line with current times (and they’re not old enough to understand the historical context), and a bunch of them are not for their age yet.
I appreciate what you’re saying, however:
Women are, regardless of any other stat, still under-represented. 2000-2009 is depressing.
Yes, it’s not a counter point but rather an also important parallel discussion. We need to have higher standards for male role models, or we will continue to have incels fill the space.
I suppose the counter point is actually.
Why are there so many female leads in kid focused movies and so few female leads in adult focused movies.
What changes? Why do we lose out on these stories?
That does not seem to be what research shows, but rather your personal experience:
For animated children movies, I found that 80 % male leads are reported for 1990-2020. Source
Couldn’t find data for children movies in general.
And I found for children books that there is still a slight male overrepresentation on average but in general it being around 50 %for the last few years. Source, search for “Fig. 2”
Yes. It is my experience.
I am looking at the last 9 years (my oldest is 9); I agree, when I was a kid in the 80’s, most movies were male focused.
If we restrict the dataset to big popular kids movies in the last decade; it is either a female empowerment movie or a movie based around violence.
As for kids books, in Harry Potter (my oldest boys favorite books) his favorite character is Hermione. Because she is brave, smart and gets shit done; Harry is brave and good at sports…
Even when the stories are male focused, the characters are still two dimensional.
Yes, it’s not a counter point but rather an also important parallel discussion. We need to have higher standards for male role models, or we will continue to have incels fill the space.
I feel like it’s awfully interesting though that we have ‘parallel discussions’ whenever someone says “hey this specific thing sucks for women.” The original question posited here was:
Why do males complain about female-led stories or too many female characters when the majority are still dominated by males?
The question is why do men complain about female leads, which they do, when the majority of leads are still male, which they are. The answer to that isn’t “we need better male role models in movies” (though it would obviously help as well) as it’s dodging the original question.
I understand your point and to avoid two apparently valid points talking past each other I suggest these both look like cases of suffering under the general “stay in your lane” mentality. In that context the “counterpoint” you are replying to seems to support the initial point rather than conflict with it. To clarify, that context is the very outdated mentality of “Women ‘should’ raise the kids and keep the family healthy, while men ‘should’ go out and do society-stuff. Girls ‘should be’ raised to handle interpersonal challenges and ignore other stuff, while boys ‘should be’ raised to ignore interpersonal challenges and handle other stuff”.
I feel like it’s awfully interesting though that we have ‘parallel discussions’ whenever someone says “hey this specific thing sucks for women.” […] The answer to that isn’t “we need better male role models in movies” (though it would obviously help as well) as it’s dodging the original question.
Yes, perfectly agree with you! I think both are important points and needed to tackle the issue of patriarchy, because if we don’t teach boys to be better, they never will be and grow up to ask “but what about me?” when they read about feministic topics.
And I fully agree, the way the op posted it with “counter point” already send the discussion in the wrong way.
And I fully agree, the way the op posted it with “counter point” already send the discussion in the wrong way.
I think the ‘discussion’ failed the moment someone said “how come men are angry at women doing ‘x’” and the entire fucking thread is full of men talking about men.
Like I’m not surprised, I’m just mildly amused I’m yet again changing accounts for awhile while my inbox fills with angry men shouting messages at me I never read. Every. Single. Time. A thread about an experience a woman has with men being shit in it is always filled with comments from men “nuh uh, whatabout…!” in response.
Every. Time. It’s so fucking embarrassing I wish I could literally just not be my gender for awhile. We’ve been in power for almost the entirety of humanity but oh my God a woman made a comment about how shitty men are to them, so let’s constantly make absolute ironic assholes of ourselves.
Peace out, men, you continue the trend of making us all look like whiny babies who can’t handle not being talked about, and not being The Normal.
See it more positive, don’t look at the amount of comments, but rather at the votes:
the 2 highest main comments and most of the high voted main comments are agreeing with the main gist of the post. That there are then people discussing that is a different thing, but a majority of the people watching this post agree that there is a problem and recognize it.
People who feel attacked by it are naturally more interested in answering and sending their own viewpoint out into the ether. But most votes are not agreeing with them. So majority of those here in this post are on the right trajectory, but of course still have to do the walking towards that direction.
It’s so fucking embarrassing I wish I could literally just not be my gender for awhile.
You should probably delve that particular line of thought more deeply, tbh.
You should probably delve that particular line of thought more deeply, tbh.
I know you meant this flippantly but I came out as nonbinary last year; having (especially white) men act like entitled toddlers online was a helpful push into embracing more femininity.
No problem with the stats.
But I’m really interested in movies aimed at the under 10yo segment
Branch out of American media; European and Asian media have much less tolerance for on-screen hardcore violence. American media freaks out over a nipple in children’s media, but war and graphic fighting are A-OK!
Totally.
I love Shaun the Sheep.
Must not be an anime fan.
Anime is great if you want you kids to think they are supposed to surrounded by a harem of women so possessive of their crush that they can’t function for themselves without that crush their site reason for existing, more often than not
Why can’t a girl be a good role model for a boy?
(I’m not completely disagreeing with you btw - if all the boy leads are “stereotypical boy” then it’s just perpetrating the problem)
For the same reason we want diverse casts in media.
Kids learn by putting themselves into the story. I don’t want to see only girls kicking arse and boys being relegated into two dimensional villains or stupid sidekicks.
I recommend Onward, especially if they’re a little older enough to really resonate with the ending
Sexism
A simple answer for a very long post.
Probably. As others have said here no one seems bothered by female leads in good stories - but the focus on gender when it’s a bad story is probably sexist.
I’m likely guilty of this myself, grumbling about “woke nonsense” and blaming the ideological messaging for the bad writing rather than just the bad writers.
It’s not all doom and gloom though - check out this list of books. Lots of highly rated entries there with female protagonists - many of which are targeted at a broad audience, not just women.
I do not have a problem with a female lead in a show. One thing that may be overlooked her is when they make a movie with a female lead and make a bad movie.
My wife watches a lot of spy, military action type movies. A lot of the time, the stories are poorly written and cheesy when they put a female lead in the show.
One example of this was a movie where the girls dad who died was CIA. His daughter somehow ends up involved in some CIA thing and is able to survive the whole thing even though she has no formal training. So, while this issue occurs with male leads, there are fewer movies like this with female leads so it may look like there is a higher percentage of movies with female leads that people do not like.
Look at the movies with female leads that are great, (Almost anything with Michelle Yeoh), Star Trek Discovery, Star Trek Lower Decks, hidden figures, Alien, Zero Dark Thirty. I am sure there are more that I can’t think of.
I think that the female lead may get blamed for a bad movie, or people just don’t like bad movies and it is assumed it is because it is a female lead.
I’m a woman, and what bothers me is when the woman is not believable in that role. Men are generally stronger than women – that’s just a fact. But some women are exceptionally strong and trained in combat. If you’re going to cast someone in a role that’s supposed to show us a strong woman, then for fuck’s sake, she’d better be a strong woman, not a gorgeous woman who just looks great in a tank top and a sheen of sweat. It’s obvious she would be easily overpowered by any of her male opponents, but we’re supposed to believe that she’s kicking all their asses.
Someone else suggested Alien would be accused of wokeness had it been released today. I don’t think so. Ripley was just a regular, somewhat fit woman, and the things she did were believable for someone with her physique and level of training. That’s why that movie works.
I agree with you, I think that issue can be handled if they make her a great martial arts fighter.
But she can’t just magically know it, there has to be a reason why she knows how to fight, but that applies to men too.
Man Lower Decks was fucking awsome. Loved it!
If alien came out nowadays, people would complain it was woke.
My favourite kind of movie is when they take a classic movie and recycle it by making a much worse version of it, but with female characters.
