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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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.
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I appreciate what you're saying, however:
Women are, regardless of any other stat, still under-represented. 2000-2009 is depressing.
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I’ve begun to prefer scifi written by women, because then at least I know its not going to be completely cringe.
If you haven't, check out Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. Absolutely fantastic novel.
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.
Asimov is so, so difficult to read through now that I'm older, as the female characters are just... ouch. The ideas are there, but good gods I wish he'd just avoid writing out conversations at all.
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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!
