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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Why is it gender stuff when it's women but not men? Men and their gender is apart of their movies too, you just may not see it, like how a fish doesn't see water. Take how a film is shot, how women and men are framed. You may not notice the camera assuming a het-male's perspective by "eyeing" women a certain way because "that's just house films are shot." You may not go into a horror movie with the silent prayer that the male lead doesn't get raped because that can just be thrown in there. You may not notice if every woman looks a certain way, and how no matter how old the actor gets, the female lead is still 25. Even in movies where it doesn't even matter. You make not notice when a woman only gets to speak to and about men. You may not notice that one woman is usually tossed in to represent the entire female demographic because "they're not the focus."
But all those little details add up. Women have had men's gender and their ideas and values soak into almost every part of society, even to how they value themselves. Men are not the default, and that means that they will have to go into some media knowing that they are not the main target and be okay with that.
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Funny thing with books is you can tell whether the intended audience is men or women by the cover art, but the art is (perhaps was) all aimed at women because they don't find a significant number of men buying books, the man's wife or mother buys them for them
So books aimed at men have cover art aimed at attracting women buying for a man.
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Gamers complain about cancel culture, but they're the first to demand changes and threaten to boycott a game for daring to include any "woke" (diverse character) content.
It's absurdly ironic and hypocritical.
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Sometimes, they'll start a podcast or a YouTube channel. Those ones are the worst.
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At that point, you could say “male characters.”
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You’ve just shifted the goal posts here.
First, you said it’s stealing richness from a story if you add more women to make up for the lack of representation in the original source material.
And when challenged on that, you’re now saying it wasn’t rich to begin with, and the story itself is broken if women are underrepresented.
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“Men who feel inferior to other men are always anxious to establish their superiority over women.”
Makes me think of this quote from Mary Wollstonecraft
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Because when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
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Your comic book examples with one woman on a team of mostly men are probably due to the audience for conic books having been almost exclusively boys. I suspect the one woman was indicative of the market share going to girls
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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?
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I've always thought it was absolutely insane that the kids show paw patrol has 6 dogs with just ONE girl dog, along with the human lead being a boy.
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I think this guy says it well.
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I think that's it. I was taught how to project my voice, how to use an authoritative tone and it has helped me get leadership roles. It's a skill, and it's a skill that any leader ought to have, in a film, at least.
Both men and women can do it, but you need to learn and I haven't seen nearly as many girls trying to learn it as boys
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I got back into scifi books recently as an adult and was disgusted to find that virtually all of the "great" scifi authors are menwritingwomen trope goldmines.
When there are female main characters that aren't just the authors fetishs, they're typically subjected to violence, with rape used so frequently as female "character development" that it would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
I've begun to prefer scifi written by women, because then at least I know its not going to be completely cringe.
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Because some boys are little bitches.
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Hell, even I Robot, a movie that should have had a female lead, turned Calvin in to a supporting role to put a man in the lead.
That's exactly the point, arbitrarily changing the characters is unsatisfying. I, Robot should have been about Calvin.
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I don't think many have any problems with female leads/main characters in games/movies/etc. I think many would perfectly tolerate a natural diversity.
I think many take issue with the fact that essentially media is dying, not because of female/etc. leads replacing male leads, but because of the profit-seeking behavior shining above all else, first and foremost. Consequently, these roles are generally not impactful and well-received because the writing and supporting factors are terrible, cheap, and watered-down - despite massive advances in a number of areas and powerful performances. Most companies cash on nostalgia-baiting and remakes and they have lost their creativity and passion.
There seems to be an incessant trend to constantly diversify well-known franchises, instead of creating new franchises or opportunities for non-dominated (diversified) franchises. If female-dominated franchises were made to appeal to all audiences, that could certainly spark their overall popularity as well.
I'm sure if we had many decades of female-dominated media like we have had with male-dominated media, people would likely be upset when female leads would be replaced by males when the wheel turns. Let's just drop the rope and stop the gender wars. Everybody can be present in media, and also be just as strong as anybody else and choose to be however they wish - that's the true spirit of acting and the freedom we could enjoy as a society.
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It's because they're used to male perspective being the default focal lense for all media they consume. Male gaze is more about perspective than it is about aesthetics, something that has seemingly failed to translate into current online discourse.
In essence, all media in a genre they deem belongs to them must see them as their primary audience and must reinforce the perspective they feel is theirs. It's a kind of patriarchal social egocentrism. Women can exist in those pieces of media, but they have to be defined in relation to a male perspective. This can be a male character within the same work, or it can even be the audience itself by presuming the audience is male.
It's been so pervasive throughout media throughout the years that they think of this as being "just how media is". When media deviates in really any way that media becomes the aberration of the norm. It can be as simple as one of the female characters having a side plot about her that doesn't involve any of the men, or a female character who isn't sexually appealing to what the current male psyche desires. The media in question becomes inherently an act of political activism. A transgression.
It's notable that media from genres deemed not "belonging to the male perspective" is not judged the same way. Men do not become outraged at chick flicks or romcoms or romance novels. They don't become outraged by romantic drama TV shows made for women about women. Because those things are socially permitted to exist outside of men's perspectives. It's notable when a man enjoys media that has a female perspective. It's assumed that he won't. This essentially means that female perspectives in genres they do see as belonging to them comes across as an explicit attack on them. They avoid the female perspective as much as possible, they denigrate it and demean/belittle it constantly. They do not want to be forced to see the female perspective and will actively resist it.
There's lots of examples that go beyond this. Lots of media over the past hundred years has broken the rules and been lauded instead of denigrated. But we live in a time where an organized effort exists specifically to promote patriarchal thinking among men and those efforts mean that more scrutiny is being applied to this than ever before. There are entire content engines driving constantly to produce as much patriarchal outrage content as possible, all the time. And it works. These problems existed long, long before the modern far right movement started. It's partly why it works so well. This male egotism in media existed before, and less resistance to it also used to exist. That change in social atmosphere means that men can be manipulated into further and further misogynistic beliefs. All it takes is dogwhistles and a loud angry entitled male gamer and you can radicalize thousands of people into misogyny. And they will repeat that cycle with more or less any boy or man they know.
To make a long story short, anxiety about their perspective not being the default in their favorite genres of media presents a great opportunity to turn young men into fascists. The far right has capitalized on this, and that's why you see so much outrage about it online. It's also likely that algorithms have picked up on you being male, and will probably show you more of this exact type of outrage content.
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Same for kids books. It's great for my daughter, but it's hard to find good movies and books for her younger brother.
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My favorite example of this is when Scrubs added Dr. Grace Miller, she was literally written to be Dr. Cox, if he was a woman.
And people despised her.
