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?
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?
You’re really narrowing down a much much bigger issue to try and make it digestible. But the patriarchy is systemic. Misogyny is systemic. Male privilege is systemic. Gamergate is a symptom, and honestly, a mild one at that.
I don’t disagree with anything you said.
I describe what I believe to be the reason why there is any attention on it. There are many many ways for hate mobs to express their hatred. So my focus was on why is there their attention.
I mean their hatred is expressed in many ways but e.g. they seem quite focused on e.g. POC in movies (especially Disney movies).
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.
I have seen this kind of behavior only on the internet. Maybe I just know people who aren’t stupid misogynist or then people are hiding their opinions in real life because they know that what they are thinking is wrong. There should absolutely be more females on major roles in movies, series and videogames.
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I agree with your reasoning but I think it highlights a major difference between genders in those stories. The hulk has decades of backstory that lets you just throw him into any plot as a badass. You don’t need to invent why he’s a badass because we all know it and the origin story is so played out that we all gloss over it. Now do that with a female character. Writing the equivalent to decades of lore in one origin story and then doing something with that origin in the same movie is way harder. Wonder Woman would be kinda similar but those origins are muddy with misogyny vibes. So now you have to use well established S tier characters to garner attention and bring in a fresh female face of similar calibar of power and act like they earned decades of respect in one movie. Either you’re Mary sue or treated like a child in those situations. The lore fights female empowerment because of baggage. I feel sorry for anyone trying to write for a character like she hulk with all of the obstacles that exist, but I get why the attempts weren’t successful.
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Now I know this isn’t a new observation or anything and I never watched episode 9, but in 7 and 8 Rey felt like just as much of a Mary Sue as Luke did in the ot. Now the well worn observation is that Luke Skywalker is like, the textbook Marty Stu.
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It is damn tin-eared to affix “she” to a female superhero’s name. Or “black” to a black superhero’s name.
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 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.
This is very interesting! Thanks
Using males to mean men is as weird as men who says females when they mean women.
I’d argue the difference is that when people say “females”, it’s usually in a vague sexual context- and that term includes girls and teenage women
Why when a lot of those males aren’t men, they’re boys.
At that point, you could say “male characters.”
I was talking about the people complaining about female characters in media lol. Those people are usually males who are often not (chronologically) mature, making it strange to call them men. I guess some of the characters might not be men either. But yeah we could say male characters rather than e.g. “7 characters: 5 males, 2 females” etc. But it could get a little clunky. Also I’m just not sure what the problem with it is, since saying “males and females” has always been acceptable to me and a basic component of language until patterns of differential linguistic treatment were observed between genders: “men and females” etc, which I understand could be offensive on a gender basis and agree can promote sexist attitudes. I already thought it should either be “women and men” or “females and males”, using the equivalent terms in the same context consistently (though somewhat interchangeably), but for there to be an inherent issue with using “males” and “females” even when we apply them equally seems like a separate objection that was new and unexpected for me. I’m curious to find out why that is that some people don’t like those terms in general, and I think maybe we should question it, because I have a feeling it could be tied to feelings of human entitlement and the problematic (imo) belief that humans aren’t animals, as used to justify speciesism. But I could be wrong.
I guess my reply was coming from women typically find being called females odd, often by “incels,” so I thought males had the same tone. I didn’t mean weird in a rude way! You have a good point.
Yeah I’m aware of the problems with saying “men and females” but I thought the issue was more about a double standard of using different terms for different genders… If we say “males and females” and use the equivalent terms for both, is there a problem with this? Because it’s not treating them differently so I don’t really understand
Honestly, ask a few woman how they feel about the usage and go by what they say. A bunch of men/boys discussing this have no skin in that game.
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).
In your examples, I would definitely think we shouldn’t use differential/non-equivalent language between different groups of people/members of society, including races or genders. So that includes not saying “white man” and “man who’s a black” -> I would think this should probably be “white man” and “black man” or “man who’s white” and “man who’s black”. I think being consistent with our language used to refer to people is important to not promote or uphold discrimination. There could be other problems even if it’s consistent, I’m not denying that, but I think lack of consistency of treatment (linguistic or otherwise) is a key issue. I believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity to a degree, that language shapes/influences how we view the world & informs a lot of actions & behaviors in society. So linguistic discrimination is a real thing that can lead to or perpetuate more overt (physical/social) forms of discrimination. For the same reason, it should be consistent between genders (and as a side note, I don’t view male and female to be strictly biological terms to refer to biological sex, but rather that they can be used for gender identity too, as in MtF / FtM [male to female or female to male], which other sociology institutions seem to agree with as well, in case you thought I was being a “sex absolutist” or transphobic).
The case of using “male and female” for rats in an experiment is interesting because to me it represents a double standard where we are okay with using those more kind of basic fundamental terms for non-human animals, even if we’re not okay with using them for humans (and it’s not like we have terms like men and women for other animals, so it’s somewhat understandable in working within the language). But it also shows that if we only reserve those terms for other animals, it can uphold harmful differential treatment of them (such as conducting experiments/testing on them that they can’t consent to–and wouldn’t since they’re typically cruel in ways we would never do to humans–which could be seen as exploitation/taking advantage of sentient beings), as tied to a belief that humans are superior and are not animals, which is used to rationalize these actions & arguably discrimination (speciesism) of another kind. That’s partly why I question if it’s really valid for us to be opposed to using terms like male and female for humans, or if it reveals something deeper about how we think of ourselves in relation to other animals- as well as just curiosity about if there is really a problem there, and what/why that might be.
If I’ve read your comment correctly I think we actually agree on all points, but my hurriedly written comment didn’t communicate two of them as clearly as I would’ve liked.
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We concur that consistency of terms matters, words are the skeletons of thought-processes and therefore biases, etc.
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I realise my emphasising the phrase “biological descriptors” was a bit misleading and strictly speaking actually wrong, but in my partial defence I was trying to avoid more scientific words when not necessary (not wanting to drift into pretentiousness). In light of your observation about biology vs gender identity (which I agree with), probably my point would be more correct if I’d used a phrase like “reductionist differentiation descriptors”. Even if accurate that sounds a little pretentious so I’d love any domain-expert to chime in with a more accurate-yet-concise phrase.
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I used the rat example purely as an example of a research context divorced from social/political connotations, not as a human-animal vs non-human-animal differentiator (not implying any double-standard there), hence why I followed it with the example of how paramedics also use it. My point could equally have used a “10 humans…” example.
Also, pondering again your comment which spawned this slightly lengthy subthread, namely:
If we say “males and females” and use the equivalent terms for both, is there a problem with this? Because it’s not treating them differently so I don’t really understand
I am not a linguistics expert so I’m probably not using exactly the right terminology here, but I think the bit that matters is using:
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adjectives as reductionist/caricaturing pseudo-nouns
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when any such words are used merely as labels vs as signifiers for emphasis
Namely:
A. Calling someone a “human” or “person” is using a less common noun as ambiguous label
B. Calling someone a “woman” or “girl” or “man” or “boy” is using a common noun as general label
C. Calling someone a “female human” or “male human” or “female person” or “male person” is using an uncommon adjective-noun combination as explicit signifier
D. Calling someone a “female” or “male” is using a usually unwelcome adjective-as-pseudo-noun as reductionist signifier
In this context “reductionist signifier” means “reducing the value, worth, and significance of a person to only that defined by a single abused adjective”. So a line in a book which says “The bar full of people fell silent when a female entered the room” is implying that the “people” (probably primarily/entirely male, by inference) are “whole people” (with hopes, dreams, struggles, character arcs), while the “female” is as far as the writer cares merely a one-dimensional representation of a (different) gender, and not “a whole person, who happens to be female”. I remember reading long ago (but can’t remember attribution): “Never trust an author who shows you they don’t care about their characters”. I think the application of that can be extended from authors to people in general, based on how they speak.
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That’s still a bit different than saying “males” or “females.” Using those words as nouns makes it feel like a nature documentary narration.
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Well humans are animals, maybe we should question why it makes some of us feel uncomfortable to be referred to in the same way we would refer to other animals. It could be ingrained biases of human supremacy/anthropocentrism/speciesism that we use to justify differential treatment of nonhumans that we wouldn’t want done to ourselves 🤔 just a thought
I hear what you’re saying and I’m not saying you were wrong in your usage. The issue I think most women (including me) have is when men refer to us as “females” while not referring to themselves as “males” is that it makes us feel like they view us as not fully human, or like a lesser animal. Problematic people are often trying to feel superior to others, whether via race, class, religion, age, etc etc, and certainly speciesism (is that a word? Autocorrect thinks so) can play a role.
Yes, that’s what I meant. Thanks for explaining it better!
What’s an inclusive term for both men, teenagers, and boys?
Most of the males are matched with females (two were more solo). The poster was consistent.
I have no idea, but I think this video is on to something.
Please give at least some clue before I give Google more clicks.
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.
Thanks.
No problem
Please remove the
&pp=ygU...tracking parameter from your link.Ok
ty!
No problem, I’m just so doxed already that I kinda forget that the whole internet was made to spy on people.
Thank you for bringing this into my life.
No problem, it’s one of the best things I’ve seen on the internet in a while.
Because when the norm to these people is media that exclusively panders to them, even one single piece of media that doesn’t represent them is a zero-to-100 change. Going from even 0 to 1 piece of inclusive media is startling, new, and scary to them, because they’re simply not used to it.
It’s the root of the entire conservative mentality (which is why you’ll primarily see conservative men talking about this) since all conservatism is based in a desire for things to remain the same. Change is just scary to these people, no matter how benign the change may be.
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.
I actually have a person in my life complain about this shit with the last Bond movie (I havent watched it, i just heard complaining). Oh and Into the Spiderverse, he disliked spiderman being non-white - even though Peter Parker is in that fucking film. He also uses the phrase woke all the time.
I really don’t value his opinions on these sorts of issues and neither should anyone. He’s got so little in his life and these stories are a powerful escape from the shit he isn’t dealing with. I won’t go into it, not my circus etc.
Basically, he likes to imagine himself as Luke Skywalker and he can’t imagine himself as Rey so she’s woke and bad. It’s a boring way of consuming media and he’s an idiot. He says there’s an agenda but can self identify the agenda is maybe letting the women and coloured people be on screen sometimes. However, they do not look like him so they are bad and the agenda is bad.
They’re not worth listening to.
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.
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.
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
Just pure fragility. You’d think at least a film from a different perspective might be interesting, but no - can’t even deal.
Inherent sexism in society to control people into doing what the dominant majority of society wants (which got there by force and enslaving and manipulation of the “lesser” people)
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