As much as my 19-year-old English-major self is loath to admit it to my current self, I’m a pop-culture junkie. Red-carpet interviews, the latest tweet about Miley Cyrus, reasons to hate Twilight, the next Hollywood blockbuster, you name it.
I’m also a devoted fan of Marvel’s Avengers movies. I’ll defend that series of giddy, overblown superhero films until I die. I’m counting down the sleeps until the première of Thor 2. (I’m sorry, 19-year-old self.)
Unfortunately, a major flaw of this much-adored juggernaut series is that we’re seven movies in and only one of them has featured a main female hero. Even worse, she was only the fifth or sixth most important character in The Avengers cast, at best. Women are in these movies, sure, and are sort of well-written, I guess, but they exist as love interests, sidekicks or helpless civilians. They’re not heroes.
On the posters, our main female characters are forced into spine-breaking contortions intended to indicate either sex appeal or fawning adulation for the male hero.
Meanwhile, attempts to bring a Wonder Woman film to screen have failed over and over again, victims of the attitude that in order to have a female-fronted superhero movie, everything must be absolutely perfect, instead of simply being what almost every male-fronted superhero movie of the last decade has been, which is simply a fun movie.
Perhaps it’s the sense that there’s so much riding on such a venture … but then again, we’ve already survived Elektra and Catwoman. The bar couldn’t be set any lower.
It’s a long-standing problem, a convergence of sexism in nerd culture and sexism in Hollywood that’s given us a dearth of female characters and countless fictional worlds that depict our gender as a minor complication at best and completely negligible at worst.
This is no secret: The amount of criticism about sexism in Hollywood blockbusters has exploded over the last two years, and most of it boils down to the same incredulous refrain: Why is this so hard?
Spoiler: It isn’t.
Last week my friend and I went to see Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet) at the Belfry Theatre. It was revisionist Shakespeare, performed in truly bawdy Elizabethan fashion, with a good dollop of academic jargon on top (you’re welcome, 19-year-old self).
It was fantastic. Belfry performances almost always are, but it had been a while since I’d been to a live show, and I was reminded what degree of excellence you find in the Victoria arts scene. It had three main female characters and our protagonist was a woman. Some of her problems were uniquely female, some were not, and she remained an accessible, identifiable character, deeply flawed but ultimately heroic. And everybody laughed.
See? Not so hard.
The whole sexism-in-movies thing is a bit like watching American politicians talk gun control. They go round and round arguing about freedom and rights, never for a moment thinking to take a look at other countries’ success in decreasing gun fatalities.
The same can be said for superhero sexism: There are solutions all around, and people who are pushing for them, but time and time again the refrain goes: “We’ve never done this before” or “The timing just isn’t right.” There’s a solution, I swear! It’s sitting right next to you!
This isn’t to say that there’s no sexism in the theatre; that would be a silly thing to claim. Still, the joy of Goodnight, Desdemona was in watching innocent Juliet decide that she really liked sex and that Romeo was sort of dull, or in seeing Desdemona behave like a bloodthirsty Amazon rather than a wilting flower. Perhaps it was because the play was written by a woman, and Hollywood films almost never have a female writer on staff. It’s one thing to have more female characters onscreen, but if all those parts are being written by men, are women’s experiences really being represented?
This isn’t a call for a boycott (Thor 2! So excited!) and it’s not a call for action, per se. It’s just a reminder that women’s stories are all around us, often hiding in plain sight, because we’ve been trained to think that only men’s stories “count,” or that Hollywood is the sole arbiter of entertainment.
So go to ground. Go local. Our stories are here, right in front of us.
