Why do males complain about female-led stories or too many female characters when the majority are still dominated by males?
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and in Bluey almost all characters are girls.
Also in paw patrol, the good mayor is a black woman and the bumbling villain is a white man....
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The core complaint is for femwashed stories, where the male lead has been replaced by a woman.
It's very similar to Hollywood movies taking movies from Japan or China and then turning the Asian lead to a Euro-American.
The level of hatred for this type of content is very strong as it feels like a farce or fraudelent, like someone is trying to sell you a fake designer brand item.
Everything that made the item great is absent in the fake one.On top of that, there's a clear fascist takeover in the US from the rainbow liberal, evangelical and social capitalists. Fascists have weird superiority and inferiority complexes including towards women.
But don't worry, Chinese movies will become popular soon, so both sides of the US political aisle will have to adjust. -
There is also the fact that John gets punched in the face, kicked and beaten....and then gets back up to wipe the floor with the enemy.
Showing female characters getting their arses handed to them is not as commercially popular.
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I don't know what a Mary Sue is. Can you explain?
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Please give at least some clue before I give Google more clicks.
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It’s a humorous poem done with beat poetry (I think I don’t know much about poetry)using African instruments discussing gender identity and sexuality. It’s worth the click and doesn’t take long.
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I'd say the latest star wars movies were shit. It had nothing to do with Rey being a woman or even naturally gifted. Finn, Grumpy Luke, Swolo Ren (other poorly written characters), the writing team and the plot points (a spacecraft the size of a city needs to refuel but a lightsaber that can cut through anything has an infinite energy source) the writing team chose, should all share the blame. If your criticism is levelled at Rey alone, your argument isn't worth hearing.
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I don't have a problem with the character, just the way she was written especially in the second film, I didn't watch the third. And that film was terrible. The plot was bad, all the characters were bad, their adherence to star wars space stuff was bad
I don't know if the writers were bad at their job or whether they were required to change it
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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...
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Bad writing is to blame for most of the criticism I think. They are just point scoring if they push a female lead because it’s a female lead. Shitty male leads are pushed constantly but the criticism of them is often ignored because the pedestal is often lower. I couldn’t give a fuck about anything Kevin hart or Dwayne Johnson is in for instance, same with plenty of other badly written male characters. Well written characters do more for films/tv than any shoehorning ever could.
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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"
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Bit like how when women reach a threshold of 30% 'airtime' the perception is that they're taking up over half of it.
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/adam-grant-communication-gender.html -
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 society is on the right trajectory, but of course still has to do the walking towards that direction.
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...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?).
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It’s sad that those people make discourse over actual criticism so hard.
Rey is a wonderful example here. Your acquaintance dislikes Rey because she’s a woman. I (and a bunch of other people) dislike Rey because she’s terribly written. If you exchanged her for a man he would still be terribly written. But of course, that legitimate criticism is often lumped in with people crying „woke“ at the sight of a female protagonist.
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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".
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A main character who can do no wrong. They're the best, prettiest, most important person. Rarely has flaws, or flaws thay are actually "cool." Like, the lead in many YA novels.
Or Batman, or Harry potter, or Tony Stark, or Kirito... There are so many! But those aren't a problem for some reason.
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I think, as with many things, it is about context. When doing a scientific reproductive study about "rats - 5 male, 5 female" it makes sense to use biological descriptors, and when paramedics do it in a biological emergency, etc. A good way to understand it is via other similar trajectories, like racism. Would you consider it reasonable to refer to a "white man" while referring to another "man who's a black"? For example only a few decades ago you might have heard a cop in the US (or South Africa, in Afrikaans) say e.g: "I saw 5 men leave, and 2 of them were blacks" vs what you would (hope to) hear now: "I saw 3 white men and 2 black men leave". Look at those 2 sentences substituting "white, black" -> "male, female" and "men" -> "people", and that should highlight the point (in a slightly grammatically clunky way though because I don't have time to come up with a more elegant example).
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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 -
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 bleeding the new Horizon game. And that's not 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" crowed. But there definitely are people who just hate things that put women in the spotlight.
