Asklemmy

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.

Sexism

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.

Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.

Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that's just about people living live in an imaginary situation, so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren't white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males ones, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.

(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)

This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of "suspension of disbelief" going on.

If you want a neutral metaphor, it's like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that's there just feels natural.

I don't accept the premise of the question. People don't complain about female led movies, as long as those movies are well written. What people complain about (and this should include people looking for increased female representation) is projects that prioritise having female leads over having good writing.

Take the trend of gender swapped existing male characters into female ones. If, as a writer, you're prepared to follow through on that concept and explore how it changes the story, then it can be interesting. A chance to experiment with the differences in motivation between genders and how obstacles can be navigated in different ways.

If you're just going to swap "he" for "she" in the script and call it a day... Well that's boring and doesn't deserve anyone's time. It's not interesting or clever. In fact it's often bad take. You can end up with a woman on screen showing that to be a hero they have to display hyper-masculine traits. How is that a good female role model?

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.

Why do males complain about female-led stories

They don't? Or are you taking 4chan and Twitter as representative of the whole videogame audience?

The imbalance in numbers isn't just in movies. Think about the judiciary, legislators, business leaders... It's everywhere. In my own career I was the first woman to hold a senior position with one of my employers. Crazy. Achieving even what we have has been uphill all the way. I'm glad you've woken up to this - maybe you can keep spreading the word!

How do I feel about it? Really fucking exhausted. It's not just the movies, it's my everyday life. Being patronised, talked over, ignored, belittled... Ugh. A lot of men seem to outright despise women. On the bright side, most of this behaviour comes from men of my own generation (I'm old). Young men in general seem much less arrogant, more respectful of women. My sister suggested this is because we remind them of their grannies, lol, but they speak well about women their own age too, and regard them as equals. (Apart from this one young bloke who talked about "women and other minorities", sigh.)

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

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've always thought that it might be disingenuous. Like they just throw in minorities, lgbt+ people, and women just for the the sake of appealing to the young progressive crowd.

I'm totally fine with it but some movies you can kinda see that it's not done tastefully.

I think it really depends on why the story has a female lead.

I think Alien is a good example, Ripley could have been male and it really wouldn't have changed the plot that much. If I'm not mistaken Ripley actually was male at one point in the movies writing.

Doesn't matter that the shift happened, it happened, Sigourney Weaver fucking smashed it out of the park and the rest is history.

If the story is good and happens to have a female lead, I don't think people are actually against it. The Menu is the first movie to come to mind, I don't think anyone said anything about the lead in that being female (although being a lead in an ensemble cast with damn near equivalent amounts of screen time is kind of meaningless). I think what people are against is blatant pandering because it usually indicates that the product is poor.

Edit: this is my limited, anecdotally rooted opinion. There are probably a decent amount of people who will just not watch a female lead. I've known women who won't watch something or play a video game without a female lead or the ability to create a female character, so I assume the same has to be true for men.

I don't know if it's because i'm not a native speaker, but i consider people who use "male" and especially "female" instead of "men" or "women" very very weird at best.

There are a lot of female lead movies / tv shows, but on the internet there are also a lot of toxic, misogynistic little bastards. I think you're waking up a bit to the media you consume.

Black swan, alien, death becomes her, million dollar baby, thelma and louise, ghostbusters afterlife, crazy ex girlfriend, orange is the new black, schitts creek (50/50) Buffy, dead to me, xena, just off the top of my head. All massive hits, all majority / equal female presences.

That said, there are screechers and the whiners all over the internet..and they're dipshits being amplified beyond what they should.

I do not have a problem with a female lead in a show. One thing that may be overlooked her is when they make a movie with a female lead and make a bad movie.

My wife watches a lot of spy, military action type movies. A lot of the time, the stories are poorly written and cheesy when they put a female lead in the show.

One example of this was a movie where the girls dad who died was CIA. His daughter somehow ends up involved in some CIA thing and is able to survive the whole thing even though she has no formal training. So, while this issue occurs with male leads, there are fewer movies like this with female leads so it may look like there is a higher percentage of movies with female leads that people do not like.

Look at the movies with female leads that are great, (Almost anything with Michelle Yeoh), Star Trek Discovery, Star Trek Lower Decks, hidden figures, Alien, Zero Dark Thirty. I am sure there are more that I can't think of.

I think that the female lead may get blamed for a bad movie, or people just don't like bad movies and it is assumed it is because it is a female lead.

Bad writing is to blame for most of the criticism I think. They are just point scoring if they push a female lead because it’s a female lead. Shitty male leads are pushed constantly but the criticism of them is often ignored because the pedestal is often lower. I couldn’t give a fuck about anything Kevin hart or Dwayne Johnson is in for instance, same with plenty of other badly written male characters. Well written characters do more for films/tv than any shoehorning ever could.

I think you're reading too much into intent here. The only reasoning that goes into these decisions is target audience. Who will buy what you are producing? When most of the comics that you mentioned were written, the perception was very much that their readers would be boys.

If there's anything to be mad about, it's that focus testing and demographic targeting makes for shit entertainment. It means companies are trying to make something that sells instead of trying to tell a story.

imo

Main Points

1. most people (including most men) do not actually give a fuck.

2. a tiny insignificant group mumbling in a dark corner probably do care, but noone should give a shit or listen to them.

3. 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).

4. unoriginal drones parrot those amplifications because they'll get angry about whatever their screens tell them to this week.

5. society has leaned male-dominant for too long, so genuine efforts to be fair are perceived by some idiots (see #2,#4) as "unfair".

6. 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.

One thing people do seem to hate is hoe they add a token female character who is just badass for no justifiable reason. Rey from starwars, that ninja turtle who they gave multiple weapons. That just feels like shameless pandering.

Also female characters complaining about female problems to people who went through actual hell.

Like in she hulk and she hulk was going off to Bruce about how she has to constantly keep her anger in check due to men. Completely tone deaf and ridiculous as a statement alone, but saying this ti Bruce banner of all people from the mcu is crazy. It's either bad writing or intentionally inflammatory.

Just make female characters who feel genuine and aren't trying to be the jock character and people wouldn't complain as much. And they need to stand on their own, not try to eclipse a counterpart character

I don't think there's a significant amount of people that complain about women led movies. Certainly not enough to just say "men" as a group.

Probably it's just a low quality ragebait post. Because I also don't think that there's a significant amount of people that believe that "men" don't like female led movies, first example that comes to mind is Kill Bill, most if not al men I know love that movie.

Edit: Funnily enough, I've been thinking and I don't think Kill Bill would pass a reversed Bechdel test: "two man talking to each other and the subject is not a woman". As there are little conversations between two man in the movie and probably most of them refer to the protagonist. Still a widely loved movie.

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.

Because -isms exist in a binary world (sexism, racism, etc...)

Any increase in visibility for whatever minority they happen to hate, is a decrease in visibility for them (in their feeble transactional little minds) and it drives them bonkers.

Men that are scared of women leads are pussies

I've never heard anyone complain about it unless it was a remake or different from the original story.

I believe the answer can be broken into three parts:

1. valid criticism, when a movie is genuinely bad and has a female lead, the valid criticisms of the film are overdhadowed by slop online articles criticizing fans for not supporting women and hating a female lead. Captain Marvel is a good example of this. The movie has genuine issues, and is not considered a good Marvel movie, but the overall online discussion focused around Marvel fans not supporting a female lead superhero movie, when Wonder Woman found success and Captain America: The Winter Soldier is arguably colead by Scarlett Johanson.

2. Pre box office reactions. Any movie which can be summed up as “X but with women” lands here. Same with any movie which intentionally admonishes the male audience and advertises itself as for women and only, then get mad men didn’t see the movie. Charlie’s Angels, Ghostbusters, and Captain Marvel fall into this category.

3. Genuine oddities and sexism. I believe this applies to the gaming industry more than the film indistry, but it can blead over. I believe the initial outrage over _The Marvels _ was this, but the movie ended up having major issues and went to category 1.

Oh, it's pretty simple, really.

Had a friend who I realized would always complain about women in his movies, shows, video games, and whatever.

Turns out: he just hated women. Oh, he loved looking at "attractive" women and fucking women, mind you. But he just hated women. He didn't even really grasp it and would deny it every time I to brought it up.

If a woman isn't "hot" and/or willing to fuck them, the woman has no value. Anything they say or do also has no value if they're not providing some kind of sexual stimulation for a man.

That's why.

“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

Most of those superhero teams were originally created by comic book companies staffed almost entirely by men. The heroes created are therefore how they visualize heroes being, which mostly takes inspiration from their own experiences, and therefore creates mostly men.

Being a woman is "marked" while being a man is just the default, so anything that strays from the "default" sticks out and it seems reasonable that it requires justification. This goes in reverse in some cases, like the need to refer to someone as a "male nurse" - why do we feel we need to say this? Because the default nurse is assumed to be female.

Because they are assholes.

Because they are so privileged they REALLY believe that they should see themselves in all stories.

Because they were taught from a young age that empathy is not manly.

Because, at the end of the day they were failed by their parents and society as a whole.

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.