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?
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 students read the scripts with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers, and try to determine the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the script.
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 the 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 ~30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the actors’ roles and had the female actor performing the “male” part (determined by the earlier script reads) 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.
I think its just that people don’t like shoe horned female empowerment, idk what percentage of female lead content is that but it does detract a lot from the experience.
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.
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
I don’t know. I live a good female lead. Ripley, Furiosa, Marge Gunderson. There’s so many, that’s just the first three that come to mind. Half the time when I’m playing Fallout, it’s female characters.
There are definitely bad female leads in things, too. Just like there are bad male leads. Like, Borderlands 3, basically unplayable. I never finished it. And I really want to be clear, the characters aren’t bad because they are women, they are bad due to poor writing. That game had such potential, but it felt like the script was written entirely by highschoolers.
I mean, look at the news; there’s a LARGE number of anti-DEI people out there who would say exactly what you’re complaining about.
That said, Hollywood is trying Wanda and Agatha were both very diverse. She Hulk was pretty diverse, and Wednesday was pretty mixed. Even captain marvel and ms marvel tried to fill out the stands better.
Of course, it’s hard to tell what’s going to happen now. Will government force the hands of the show runners to reverse the trends?
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.
Yup this is exactly the argument I bring when it comes to this. People act like female leads just suddenly started to exist, and usually get irritated if I state those particular movies suck. A character being female or gay should not be the entirety of that characters use in the movie. If the story is done we’ll and they happen to be female, gay, trans, whatever, and those things compliment and show a strength they wouldn’t have otherwise and assist them in the story: Fucking fantastic. But that’s not what we are getting majority of the time. We get ‘hey this character is female therefore this movie is amazing’. Nah.
Examples of well written female leads off the top of my head:
The Hunt (2020): I actually reference this one specifically because it destroys the trope of ‘females being weak and needing rescue’. This chick flips the whole movie on its head.
Kate (2021): Another action film (sorry) but more of the same. Well written gritty main character who happens to be female.
Everything, everywhere, All at Once: Pretty much everyone knows this movie at this point. I wanted to include this one specifically because it’s an example of being well written characters and story where being female is a strength and deepens the story and characters. The mother / daughter connection and the turmoil of growing children, etc makes the movie. Arguably it would be worse if they tried to replace them with men and have the same impact.
I could keep going but by this point I’m sure I’m beating a dead horse.
I think it’s cool, but I also really like strong women so…
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.
I’ve never heard anyone complain about it unless it was a remake or different from the original story.
Sexism
A simple answer for a very long post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Titanic literally the box office champ for a decade with a female lead (close to 50-50 to be fair). Terminator 2 as well, and Mad Max Fury road, 2 of the greatest action movies of all time (you can fight me but, name aside, that story is all about Furiosa). Those movies work because the female leads are just good. The selling point isn’t that they have women in them, the selling point is they are really really good movies.
Edit: and Kill Bill, where a lot of critics call The Bride (the lead of the movie) the greatest movie character of all time.
I was thinking of some of those too - Buffy, Xena, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, etc., but aren’t those also targeted towards a female demographic?
First, I don’t think I can find anything not perfect about Alien or Aliens, but the “female-led” context there is emotionally strong in very primal sense, liking those movies doesn’t prove anything because both movies (especially the second one) just give a new spin to pretty traditional perception of women.
Xena is nice, but uses some stereotypes as well, just more lesbian than traditional, ahem.
Anyway, I wanted to say I’ve been accused of being such a whiner and screecher about Disney fake Star Wars, and Rey there is just a shitty character.
Star Wars outside of movies has plenty of very cool female characters, and the “conservative fans” Disney accused of being racist and misogynist are supposed to know most of them.
So let’s please remember that companies are sometimes trying to do damage control with things that are just bad, by accusing people not liking those of racism or misogyny.
It’s a huge difference when you hear just that some movie is not cool and when you also hear that those calling it not cool are very bad people. If you didn’t like the movie in question yourself, you might stop telling others it’s bad, and even try to reconsider your opinion, probably buying another ticket.
liking those movies doesn’t prove anything because both movies (especially the second one) just give a new spin to pretty traditional perception of women
Blatantly untrue, Ripley was written as assumed to be a man in the script and they didn’t change it after the lead actor got the role as a woman.
I’m talking about my feeling from watching them and about the design of the aliens, this might have been unintentional initially in the first movie.
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?
I don’t think you are. The intrusion of “romantasy” is a serious issue with book publishing because they’re chasing what makes the most profits, and right now that’s the trend. No matter that romantasy is not proper fantasy…
I like the ringantasy over romantasy any day. Sometimes I also read sword-and-sandalsantasy.
+Old man grumbles over the youths word usage+
Hey, I’m just the messenger – blame the publishers. They’ve gotten sloppy, too, have you noticed? I’ve seen major grammatical/continuity errors and typesetting issues, even if the book is from the Big Five – even Tor. It’s disappointing, the ‘enshittification’ is happening before my eyes in real time.
I know, I’ve even heard of pages missing from paperbacks published by reputable print houses here in sweden
It’s making me get into book collecting and finding older/out-of-print editions, so at least that is a silver lining.
Is a nice site if you want to expand into Nordic/Swedish books in your collection
Thanks! A great one is also BookFinder - there are a few versions of it, I know .com and .de and I’m sure there are others.
