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.

I don’t accept the premise of the question. People don’t complain about female led movies, as long as those movies are well written. What people complain about (and this should include people looking for increased female representation) is projects that prioritise having female leads over having good writing.

Take the trend of gender swapped existing male characters into female ones. If, as a writer, you’re prepared to follow through on that concept and explore how it changes the story, then it can be interesting. A chance to experiment with the differences in motivation between genders and how obstacles can be navigated in different ways.

If you’re just going to swap “he” for “she” in the script and call it a day… Well that’s boring and doesn’t deserve anyone’s time. It’s not interesting or clever. In fact it’s often bad take. You can end up with a woman on screen showing that to be a hero they have to display hyper-masculine traits. How is that a good female role model?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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

It’s because they’re used to male perspective being the default focal lense for all media they consume. Male gaze is more about perspective than it is about aesthetics, something that has seemingly failed to translate into current online discourse.

In essence, all media in a genre they deem belongs to them must see them as their primary audience and must reinforce the perspective they feel is theirs. It’s a kind of patriarchal social egocentrism. Women can exist in those pieces of media, but they have to be defined in relation to a male perspective. This can be a male character within the same work, or it can even be the audience itself by presuming the audience is male.

It’s been so pervasive throughout media over the years that they think of this as being “just how media is”. When media deviates in really any way that media becomes the aberration of the norm. It can be as simple as one of the female characters having a side plot about her that doesn’t involve any of the men, or a female character who isn’t sexually appealing to what the current male psyche desires. The media in question becomes inherently an act of political activism. A transgression.

It’s notable that media from genres deemed not “belonging to the male perspective” is not judged the same way. Men do not become outraged at chick flicks or romcoms or romance novels. They don’t become outraged at drama TV shows made for women about women. Because those things are socially permitted to exist outside of men’s perspectives. It’s usually seen as unique when a man enjoys media that has a female perspective. It’s assumed that he won’t. This essentially means that female perspectives in genres they do see as belonging to them comes across as an explicit attack on them. They avoid the female perspective as much as possible, they denigrate it and demean/belittle it constantly. They do not want to be forced to see the female perspective and will actively resist it.

There’s lots of examples that go beyond this. Lots of media over the past hundred years has broken the rules and been lauded instead of denigrated. But we live in a time where an organized effort exists specifically to promote patriarchal thinking among men and those efforts mean that more scrutiny is being applied to this than ever before. There are entire content engines driving constantly to produce as much patriarchal outrage content as possible, all the time. And it works.

These problems existed long, long before the modern far-right movement started. It’s partly why it works so well. This male egotism in media existed before, and less resistance to it also used to exist. That change in social atmosphere means that men can be manipulated into further and further misogynistic beliefs. All it takes is dogwhistles and a loud, angry, entitled male gamer, and you can radicalize thousands of people into misogyny. And they will repeat that cycle with more or less any boy or man they know.

To make a long story short, anxiety about their perspective not being the default in their favorite genres of media presents a great opportunity to turn young men into fascists. The far right has capitalized on this, and that’s why you see so much outrage about it online. It’s also likely that algorithms have picked up on you being male and will probably show you more of this exact type of outrage content.

A while ago, I read a sociology or social psychology study about children and how they were given attention by their teacher at school. The sample was like a bunch of 9yo, 50% girls, 50% boys.

It showed that when the attention given was like 30% for girls, 70% for boys, boys would feel the girls were given unfairly high and constant attention.

The way they’re educated by their parents and, more potently maybe, society as a whole.

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?

Because when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.