Asklemmy

Men that are scared of women leads are pussies

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.)

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.

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.

Because men are babies.

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.

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.

Why do men complain?

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.

Insecurity.

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.

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.

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