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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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.
I'm sorry you've written so much here I want to underscore and shout to the heavens, yet there is so much and I fear I won't do it justice. Fascism is on the rise, and young men-- just as last time--are carrying it forward. Misogyny has become an assumed character trait in huge swaths of men, to the point you see insane arguments online about how men 'have it harder' than the gender held in captivity less than a lifetime ago. It wasn't until the 1960's in Vancouver, BC that women could get a loan without a man co-signing (and it was a credit union, not even a large bank.) I grew up and lived as a male, white, for over 40 years, and right now is on par, if not worse in many cases, than it was in the 90's. Men now rail at the idea they can't always be 'the default.' That the reason for these pronoun-forward changes is because it's always been man-first, from not even bothering to test drugs on women to 'room temperature' being what a bunch of middle aged white men, such as myself, find comfortable. To men being the vast majority of main characters, to the goddamn Bechdel test being oh-so-relevant.
So I wanted to add a quote about just how long this has existed, and the sheer length of fight women have had just to exist unchained. I have not gone through the fight you have, yet I hope you'll allow me at your side.
"You see, when I was growing up at the time of the Wars of the Medes and Persians and when I went to college just after the Hundred Years War and when I was bringing up my children during the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam Wars, there were no women. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Brontë were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.
So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man." -Ursula K. Le Guin, 1992
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Apparently LoTR - which gets major bonus points for depicting its male protagonists as consistently not toxic - fails the Bechdel Test, HARD.
Enjoy this compilation of every scene from the trilogy that holds up to the test:
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Oh don't you hate that? Happens too often, especially typing on my phone and the cat or the spouse
needsis asking for something so I'm rushing to finish and BLARGH! It's ruined! -
Depends on show type you choose. If you watch a series like Deep Water or DeadLoch its all woman driven stories, and minor roles for men. If you pick a superhero genre that has been male dominated forever, it is going to be mostly men still.
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I think the issue is that the movies aren’t written well. Rey in the third trilogy never saw a challenge she couldn’t master on the first attempt. A story about a character born perfect and never faltering isn’t fun
John Wick gets a pass, though?
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As also a man, I don't know any person in real life that complain about women in movies.
I only see it online in spaces that I avoid because those places are generally speaking transphobic misogynistic echo chambers. I would argue those places are also misandristic, by creating a place were you have to follow the doctrine, but it is very different to the active hatred towards women.
So I think the answer is "insecure hateful men will hate on anything that they were told is their enemy."
I have explored misandristic spaces online as well. And unsurprisingly, you see the same general behavior. So I really think generally it is true that:
People like to have an enemy and they like to be told who is that enemy and then they mindlessly hate even to their disadvantage and beyond. Once the social cost has to be paid, they feel validated and jump deeper into the abyss.
And where is that hatred coming from? Gamer gate, which made feminist hating popular, which made hating "the left" popular, which made anything anti-"woke" popular. As the source is based in a profession focussed on maximizing engagement, the need to generate "new" "shocking" Events was big. Therefore any gay character was a scandal and obviously with the questionable attempt to seem humane of e.g. Disney, aka adding diversity, these "new" "shocking" events were any kind of diversity. (Sidenote: diversity yay!!! Corporate diversity program just tend to be rather questionable) As the degenerate hate mob had its target to mindlessly hate, they looked for any excuse to hate anything "woke"
and "strong female characters" have to had been a feminist propaganda Tool and not a normal character type in movies for at least a couple decades, so they mindlessly hate that now. I would love to say "as they do anything for a treat of their master" but there is no treat, there is just the self-induced pain of hatred.And why gamer gate? I guess right-wing Propaganda worked on a group of people who were still afraid/annoyed to be the ones to blame for e.g. violence. remember the whole "video games make you a school shooter" nonsense?
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Don't overthink it.
It's because they're pussies. -
Keeping with OP's theme of referring to people as if they were dogs, I see.
Which is not to say that I disagree with your opinion as such. This world does have an issue with fragile masculinity, and that may well be the answer to OP's question.
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You are projection a position I neither stated nor hold
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A while ago, I read a sociology or social psychology study about children and how they were given attention by their teacher at school. The sample was like a bunch of 9yo, 50% girls, 50% boys.
It showed that when the attention given was like 30% for girls, 70% for boys, boys would feel the girls were given unfairly high and constant attention.
The way they're educated by their parents and, more potently maybe, society as a whole.
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You can't really compare the two movies, John Wick takes the route of being so over the top to the point of becoming funny. I don't think they were aiming for that with the new SW trilogy.
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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)
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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.
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You can’t really compare the two movies,
I'm not exactly, I'm asking why:
A story about a character born perfect and never faltering isn’t fun
Can be true, but also John Wick can never falter and that be fine. Kinda seems like a double standard to me.
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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.
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It didn't even occur to me that Deadloch is mostly about women, even though that shouldn't be surprising, given who made it.
I had a similar revelation after I played through Forspoken. I assumed it would be a target for the anti-woke brigade since the protagonist is a black woman, but it was only after finishing it clicked that every character of consequence is a woman (with one exception I won't mention for spoiler reasons).
If the story keeps you invested, genders are pretty irrelevant. I think genre expectations can shift if we don't draw attention to them.
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It works in that genre. The main guy in Nobody also was pretty good from the start
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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.
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The bit I didn't say was I meant such a character in a hero's journey style story
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I'll preface with I'll agree that for the most part, it's men being whiny about "woke" and other nonsense. They're assholes. I really don't have anything to add to that front.
So I'll add a perspective of the small other crowd in situations friends of mine and I have found ourselves in, that having criticisms of women led stories gets us lumped in with the above group when the same criticism of a male led roles/stories are fine and dandy. And we're not exactly a group that hates women led stories despite our love of scifi action. Sarah Conner, Ripley, Jesse Faden if anyone has played the game Control.
Some of it I get as a female led cast movie/show will get hate before the first previews even launch so legitimate discussions can happen. However, I can go on absolute rants about how terrible movies can be: Tom Cruise remaking The Mummy was, attempting to do Hellboy without Ron Perlman and Guillermo Del Toro, whatever the Conan the Barbarian attempt Jason Mamoa had, and no one bats an eye. (Lets be honest, those were all terrible movies)
However I've been called a misogynist when I talk about in the list with those above ones how absolutely terrible the all women cast remake of Ghostbusters was. Again, I knew there was a lot of undue hate, but if I ever discuss it, I've had to outright asterisk it every time that none of my complaints were to the actresses themselves but the movie from worldbuilding to some of the concept of it being made itself (As in: It's Ghostbusters, an IP that's been around for decades, did we need to dedicate screentime to remaking it from scratch? A complaint I'll have at every reboot of a popular IP.)And there's legitimacy to the why. As you point out, there's very few women led movies/stories which (I assume) means that with some representation there's the want to nicer to it, especially as there are people who are outright assholes about it. Vs Another White Guy Does Things is easy to deride a movie because... speaking as a white guy, I'm going to be there mocking that movie too. But that's why I put the "(I assume)" earlier, because it's not like I'm lacking in some form of representation, so it's easy to mock it.
I will wrap up this though with again, it's a small extra outside perspective for a different viewpoint. If people just complain "There are too many women in x", no, they've stopped having legitimate complaints and are just being jackasses.
