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?

  • dicksteele@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 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.

  • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    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 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.

    • Baylahoo@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 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.

  • tazzy@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 month ago

    I’m male, I’ve never complained about this. I think it’s not good to generalize everyone

  • Yeather@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • ArchRecord@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 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.

  • Kanzar@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    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.

    • Murple_27@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 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.

    • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 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.

    • MuskyMelon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 months ago

      I’ve had excellent and poor women leaders. The difference with a poor male leader, I could argue with them head-to-head, no harm no foul. But with a poor female leader, if I argue head-to-head I’m suddenly hurting their feelings or being misogynistic.

  • averyrandomusername@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • Azal@pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 months ago

    I’ll preface with I’ll agree that for the most part, it’s men being whiny about “woke” and other nonsense. They’re assholes. I really don’t have anything to add to that front.

    So I’ll add a perspective of the small other crowd in situations friends of mine and I have found ourselves in, that having criticisms of women led stories gets us lumped in with the above group when the same criticism of a male led roles/stories are fine and dandy. And we’re not exactly a group that hates women led stories despite our love of scifi action. Sarah Conner, Ripley, Jesse Faden if anyone has played the game Control.

    Some of it I get as a female led cast movie/show will get hate before the first previews even launch so legitimate discussions can happen. However, I can go on absolute rants about how terrible movies can be: Tom Cruise remaking The Mummy was, attempting to do Hellboy without Ron Perlman and Guillermo Del Toro, whatever the Conan the Barbarian attempt Jason Mamoa had, and no one bats an eye. (Lets be honest, those were all terrible movies) However I’ve been called a misogynist when I talk about in the list with those above ones how absolutely terrible the all women cast remake of Ghostbusters was. Again, I knew there was a lot of undue hate, but if I ever discuss it, I’ve had to outright asterisk it every time that none of my complaints were to the actresses themselves but the movie from worldbuilding to some of the concept of it being made itself (As in: It’s Ghostbusters, an IP that’s been around for decades, did we need to dedicate screentime to remaking it from scratch? A complaint I’ll have at every reboot of a popular IP.)

    And there’s legitimacy to the why. As you point out, there’s very few women led movies/stories which (I assume) means that with some representation there’s the want to nicer to it, especially as there are people who are outright assholes about it. Vs Another White Guy Does Things is easy to deride a movie because… speaking as a white guy, I’m going to be there mocking that movie too. But that’s why I put the “(I assume)” earlier, because it’s not like I’m lacking in some form of representation, so it’s easy to mock it.

    I will wrap up this though with again, it’s a small extra outside perspective for a different viewpoint. If people just complain “There are too many women in x”, no, they’ve stopped having legitimate complaints and are just being jackasses.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 months ago

    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?

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    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.

  • JoshCodes@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • accideath@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    2 months ago

    Just pure fragility. You’d think at least a film from a different perspective might be interesting, but no - can’t even deal.