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?
I’m a woman. Yeah it’s bothered me my whole life. I used to be really angry about it. Now I just accept it as the status quo. In the last few paragraphs of your post you are basically describing the Smurfette Principle, Two Girls to a Team,and other tropes. Also the Bechdel test.
I heartily recommend Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 1 is rough, but it’s got good gender equality.
Nowadays though, you get a lot more racial diversity on western TV than you used to. I think that’s something which has improved quite a lot.
Sometimes I do get what they mean though when there are women or other minorities when coupled with bad writing. I can kind of understand why people complain about “woke” media when I see shows like Supergirl or Star Wars: The Adept. Meanwhile, - Andor, Rogue One, Alien are great and have diversity, and people don’t complain about these being “woke” so much. So, I guess, shitty writing can score an own-goal.
Can’t help but feel like you’re mansplaining how women are underrepresented and that your favorite female led shows and movies should be more appreciated and men are cancers.
It really is very simple. Well written shows and movies do well. Good actors/actresses make a well written movie better. It doesn’t matter if it’s men and women. I’m no expert but the majority of female led movies are poorly written and the actresses act bad but that may be because of the writing. That also doesn’t mean there aren’t good female movies that do well.
Where much of this marketing goes wrong is the studios try to take something that’s male led and change it to be female led. That will obviously not go well for an audience that preferred the male led material.
Welcome to feminist media analysis. It’s an existing academic field and you can find books and YouTube videos on it (and it can go pretty deep into related topics).
One of my favorite examples was when the creators of Avatar the Last Airbender were deciding to create their sequel about the next avatar they decided to make their protagonist a woman and executives at nickelodeon complained that boys wouldn’t be able to relate to a female protagonist.
The explanation I’ve largely heard that makes sense to me is that women are taught women are generally expected to learn to empathathize with male protagonists whereas the inverse is much more optional. You have plenty of men who do get into wonder woman and she ra and korra, my childhood best friends are among them, but you also get a lot of men who don’t in a way where I can’t think of an inverse that I’ve seen
The avatar bit is kinda funny because, if anything, between Ang and Korra, I (male) find Korra more relatable. Their ages had a bigger impact on that than their genders.
I don’t know. I’m a guy and I really enjoy the horizon games including the dialogue and character development. I don’t think the interactions and dialogue would work if Aloy were a dude.
A couple of month ago I was volunteering in my youth centre. We always have the radio on. On air was an interview of a female author writing about a woman and her struggles as a mom and wife, falling for another man. The male interviewer had the audacity to ask if there are any themes in the book which could interest him as a male reader (imagine a very condescending tone).
Reducing “female” themes to lesser themes is so annoying, hurtful and stupid.
I’m not sure the interpretation has to be that “female themes” are “lesser”. People will generally and naturally relate more to themes that strongly correlate with personal, lived experience. It is not strange that a man would relate less to motherhood as a theme. Similarly, a woman might naturally relate less to fiction on father-son relationships. A city dweller might relate less to stories about life in the countryside. And so on. It is useful and instructive to get out of one’s own skin and mind now and then. It helps build empathy and works of fiction can be very helpful in that regard. But that does not change the fact that themes hit much harder when you can relate from personal experience.
As a man, strongly female themes and lead female characters are a-ok and can be touching even, but some male themes hit me much harder because I know what that feels like in my own skin so to say.
I get you and sure some themes hit harder than others. I myself no kids etc thought pet sematary was an ok book and I have read many comments saying it hits harder being a parent/father.
But there is a difference between: will we get the male perspective and I am not interested in the plot of a female one. Therefore devaluing it.
In a radio show introducing an entertainment to your audience, giving a platform to an author and then being dismissive feels so stupid.
I am especially enjoyed since it was on air in the youth centre. Boys and man constantly use girl and woman and anything related to it as insult. (And obviously gay, which is my personal journey to remind everyone that it is not an insult.) Just selecting a female team in FIFA was nearly too much to ask.
Yeah well I wasn’t there, so just going by your post and pitched in to say that it’s a valid question in general: how is this book relevant for me? If asked in good faith, the author I suppose can see it as an opportunity to explain for example why that woman’s story can be interesting to a male audience. Maybe even school the interviewer if so inclined.
I just feel like we should sometimes check our feminist impulses and recognize that some questions are valid, even when we may suspect that they come from a bad place.
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.
Sexism
A simple answer for a very long post.
Because the majority of dudes complaining are incel man babies who need to feel like they are the focus of society. If its not exactly how they like it its not right. Its time we start shouting down on them loudly.
A lot of it comes down to genre, target audience, and writer’s personal experience. Even MC and DC are characters written decades ago. Batman is basically from the 1930s/40s.
Compare that to last decade’s best selling YA novels. Hunger Games was constructed to be very balanced from the start including a female main lead, same for Percy Jackson.
My hot take is that most of these instances are actually fine as is because Hollywood in general sucks total ass at writing new characters into existing franchises, especially for the exact purpose of introducing diversity without any depth.
There’s literally a 3+ hour series on youtube of how bad the new star wars trilogy is, and a solid third of that rant is about how poorly written the female lead is.
The issue here is that having an equal or majority female (or any other metric) set of characters wouldn’t automatically make your story or writing better. You have to develop each character just like the rest, otherwise you end up with inserts that have no purpose other than to equal out a fraction.
Whether that is due to the writers being able to create male characters easier, or just a perceived audience target, you’d much rather have a well written character than a soulless one.
And that is likely not even correlated with male vs female writers. So much so that some critics even believe female writers are better at writing male characters than male writers, which is funny to think about. Ex: Harry Potter is still a 2:1 ratio.
Again though, there are plenty of good examples (mostly books) with very successful stories with equal or majority female characters.
If it makes you feel any better, this argument is old as hell lol. You can find ye olde forum posts discussing the exact same things mentioned in this entire thread from as far back as early 2000s, with plenty of in text examples from books and screenplay.
The general concencus though, is that if the characters are good, the plot is good, and the writing is good, no one really cares about the number because you’re absorbed into the story. Your attachment to the story is a direct reflection of your own personal identity. If you notice the lack of X whatever while reading/watching and it breaks your immersion, then it’s probably a viable critique of the writing. If it’s something you notice after outside the story, then it might not matter as much as you think.
This is really well written and I agree with a lot of your points…but when I read “as far back as the early 2000s” I felt about 100 years old.
Haha I meant for WWW forums.
Dunno how many people here remember BBS or having to look up stuff in the library.
That being said damn it’s been 25 years already :O
100% factually accurate and yet still devastating to hear.
25 years…I can almost hear the modem whining like it was yesterday.
“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
imo
Main Points
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most people (including most men) do not actually give a fuck.
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a tiny insignificant group mumbling in a dark corner probably do care, but noone should give a shit or listen to them.
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instead their voice is amplified in social/legacy media as a typical divide and conquer tactic (men vs women is ‘powerful’ as its half the planet vs the other half).
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unoriginal drones parrot those amplifications because they’ll get angry about whatever their screens tell them to this week.
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society has leaned male-dominant for too long, so genuine efforts to be fair are perceived by some idiots (see #2,#4) as “unfair”.
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corporations don’t actually give a shit about equality, so their maliciously half-arsed pretense at fairness rings hollow, adding more fuel to the flames.
Bonus
If you want to know more about this problem in general, see the Bechdel test, once you see it, you can’t unsee it everywhere you go:
The test asks whether a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man.
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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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.
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.
In a word: Insecurity.
It’s not like they’d feel any safer with female superheroine.
I complain about popularity of fantasy romance vis a vis non-fantasy romance, and that now most published (or advertised) fantasy books are fantasy romance.
That genre is typically written for women, with female lead and is heavy in certain tropes.
That genre isn’t for me.
Am I a person that you’re ranting about OP? If not, could you point me to an article or opinion piece that you’re talking about, so I can read it and come back here?
