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:

  1. Luther (Number One / Spaceboy)
  2. Diego (Number Two / The Kraken)
  3. Allison (Number Three / The Rumor)
  4. Klaus (Number Four / The Séance)
  5. Five (Number Five / The Boy)
  6. Ben (Number Six / The Horror)
  7. 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?

  • @Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    1102 months ago

    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.

  • @Kanzar@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    Once female speaking time reaches 30% or more, males believe that the females are dominating the speaking time.

    Female encroachment on what has traditionally been considered male spaces is not taken well. Female empowerment is considered taking from deserving males.

    Essentially the general male population don’t like females, and only tolerate them as a subservient subclass who should be seen and not heard.

    EDIT: This should probably annoy you a little too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2qCjL6-n4

    And it may also explain why people complain that there should only ever be one female character - it minimises the chances of males having to watch two females interact, because that would be excluding the male experience and they couldn’t possibly relate to two females interacting.

    EDIT2: comments in that video do claim there are more scenes… whether or not that really adds much is up to you.

    • Skeezix
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      72 months ago

      This is one reason why shows like Ms Marvel and She Hulk tanked so bad.

    • @Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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      52 months ago

      Essentially the general male population don’t like females, and only tolerate them as a subservient subclass who should be seen and not heard.

      This is a WILD claim to make.

    • @Murple_27@lemmy.ml
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      22 months ago

      Female encroachment on what has traditionally been considered male spaces is not taken well. Female empowerment is considered taking from deserving males.

      The problem is that in the context of a “winner-take-all” society it does do that though.

      Obviously the general solution is to make a society that is overall more equitable between those who succeed & those who don’t.

      But if you aren’t going to do that then you will get a reaction from those who are losing ground, even if that happening is the morally progressive outcome.

  • @ganymede@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • @habitualcynic@lemmy.world
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    262 months ago

    “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

  • @dicksteele@lemm.ee
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    252 months ago

    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.

  • ArchRecord
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    242 months ago

    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.

  • SharkEatingBreakfast
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • @daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • @PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • @Baylahoo@sh.itjust.works
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      42 months ago

      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.

  • @Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • Kilgore Trout
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    152 months ago

    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?

    • @Heyting@lemmy.ml
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      52 months ago

      Do you mean Twitch and YouTube? The biggest gaming content platforms where the largest accounts do complain about women being in movies/games quite a lot?

  • /home/pineapplelover
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    142 months ago

    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.

    • @Sarmyth@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yeah, i like it when they mix it up. Diverse backgrounds make for interesting stories and engage new people with the genre. Its really lame and insulting when it feels like theyre just trotting a character out to meet a quota and don’t give them any development beyond they’re cultural origin though.

      If women want to see more female characters, they should definitely write them and probably not do it with the intention of creating a character “for women” to resonate with, but the larger fandom as a whole. Whenever people declare a target audience, they inevitably alienate others.

      • /home/pineapplelover
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        22 months ago

        I remember I was watching the show Batwoman or Batgirl or whatever it’s called, and all of a sudden they just replaced the lead character with a black women. Like wtf happened there, literally just yoinker her and replaced her.