Gift_of_Gab (they/them)

You should probably delve that particular line of thought more deeply, tbh.

I know you meant this flippantly but I came out as nonbinary last year; having (especially white) men act like entitled toddlers online was a helpful push into embracing more femininity.

And I fully agree, the way the op posted it with “counter point” already send the discussion in the wrong way.

I think the ‘discussion’ failed the moment someone said “how come men are angry at women doing ‘x’” and the entire fucking thread is full of men talking about men.

Like I’m not surprised, I’m just mildly amused I’m yet again changing accounts for awhile while my inbox fills with angry men shouting messages at me I never read. Every. Single. Time. A thread about an experience a woman has with men being shit in it is always filled with comments from men “nuh uh, whatabout…!” in response.

Every. Time. It’s so fucking embarrassing I wish I could literally just not be my gender for awhile. We’ve been in power for almost the entirety of humanity but oh my God a woman made a comment about how shitty men are to them, so let’s constantly make absolute ironic assholes of ourselves.

Peace out, men, you continue the trend of making us all look like whiny babies who can’t handle not being talked about, and not being The Normal.

Yes, it’s not a counter point but rather an also important parallel discussion. We need to have higher standards for male role models, or we will continue to have incels fill the space.

I feel like it’s awfully interesting though that we have ‘parallel discussions’ whenever someone says “hey this specific thing sucks for women.” The original question posited here was:

Why do males complain about female-led stories or too many female characters when the majority are still dominated by males?

The question is why do men complain about female leads, which they do, when the majority of leads are still male, which they are. The answer to that isn’t “we need better male role models in movies” (though it would obviously help as well) as it’s dodging the original question.

You can’t really compare the two movies,

I’m not exactly, I’m asking why:

A story about a character born perfect and never faltering isn’t fun

Can be true, but also John Wick can never falter and that be fine. Kinda seems like a double standard to me.

First, I’m confused as to why you’d need to segregate books and film by gender, these all have either a male or non-gendered lead: Captain Underpants, Nate the Great, Hal The 3rd Class Hero, The Hobbit, The Lord of The Rings, Treasure Island, Danny the Champion of the World, The Outsiders, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Percy Jackson (all 40 billion of the series), The Giving Tree, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Bridge to Terabithia, James and the Giant Peach, Holes (series), Where The Wild Things Are, The Heroes of Olympus (more Percy Jackson I think), Ender’s Game, Winnie The Pooh, Narnia (series), The Wind In The Willows, The Indian in the Cupboard, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Neverending Story, I Am Every Good Thing, Don’t Hug Doug (He Doesn’t Like it), King Arthur’s Very Great Grandson, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Wild Robot (series), Stuart Little, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, George’s Marvellous Medicine, Lord of The Flies, Calvin and Hobbes (series), The Dangerous Book for Boys, The American Boys Handy Book.

(You didn’t specify age, so I tried to add our family suggestions for about 4-12. Once he’s older, depending on your thoughts on the language, we also have a lot of suggestions for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn)

I think the issue is that the movies aren’t written well. Rey in the third trilogy never saw a challenge she couldn’t master on the first attempt. A story about a character born perfect and never faltering isn’t fun

John Wick gets a pass, though?

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.

I’m sorry you’ve written so much here I want to underscore and shout to the heavens, yet there is so much and I fear I won’t do it justice. Fascism is on the rise, and young men-- just as last time–are carrying it forward. Misogyny has become an assumed character trait in huge swaths of men, to the point you see insane arguments online about how men ‘have it harder’ than the gender held in captivity less than a lifetime ago. It wasn’t until the 1960’s in Vancouver, BC that women could get a loan without a man co-signing (and it was a credit union, not even a large bank.) I grew up and lived as a male, white, for over 40 years, and right now is on par, if not worse in many cases, than it was in the 90’s. Men now rail at the idea they can’t always be ‘the default.’ That the reason for these pronoun-forward changes is because it’s always been man-first, from not even bothering to test drugs on women to ‘room temperature’ being what a bunch of middle aged white men, such as myself, find comfortable. To men being the vast majority of main characters, to the goddamn Bechdel test being oh-so-relevant.

So I wanted to add a quote about just how long this has existed, and the sheer length of fight women have had just to exist unchained. I have not gone through the fight you have, yet I hope you’ll allow me at your side.

"You see, when I was growing up at the time of the Wars of the Medes and Persians and when I went to college just after the Hundred Years War and when I was bringing up my children during the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam Wars, there were no women. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Brontë were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.

So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man." -Ursula K. Le Guin, 1992

I’ve begun to prefer scifi written by women, because then at least I know its not going to be completely cringe.

If you haven’t, check out Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness. Absolutely fantastic novel.

I got back into scifi books recently as an adult and was disgusted to find that virtually all of the “great” scifi authors are menwritingwomen trope goldmines.

Asimov is so, so difficult to read through now that I’m older, as the female characters are just… ouch. The ideas are there, but good gods I wish he’d just avoid writing out conversations at all.

I appreciate what you’re saying, however:

Women are, regardless of any other stat, still under-represented. 2000-2009 is depressing.

No. The cartoon only makes sense if you live in the US… which not everyone does.

Canada too, embarrassingly.

While there has been progress in recent years, there are still 31 long term drinking water advisories on 29 reserves including some that have been in place for more than 25 years

I always think of Metallica’s Saint Anger:

🎶 Medallion noose, I hang myself

Saint Anger 'round my neck

I feel my world shake

Like an earthquake

Hard to see clear

Is it me? Is it fear?

I’m not even angry with you

I’m not even angry with you

I’m not even angry with you

I’m not even angry with you

🎶

Yet the real lyrics are:

I’m madly in anger with you

I’m madly in anger with you

I’m madly in anger with you

I’m madly in anger with you

… sigh…

I am from Canada, and while the flag could go either way for me, mounties, even in their blood-red uniforms do turn my stomach. (Paintings by Kent Monkman, showcasing the “Sixties Scoop”

Our past further back has not been much help.

In addition to the physical appropriation of land was the colonial effort to eliminate the transmission of cultural identity, traditional skills, and connection to the land. Beginning in 1883 (while this was the date of the first federally established church school, similar institutions existed as early as the 1830s, years before Canadian federation) Indian Residential Schools (IRSs) were established in Canada (as were American Indian Boarding Schools in 1862). Children were forcibly removed from their families and were institutionalized in IRSs with the explicit goal of ‘taking the Indian out of the child’. These mandated church-run IRSs endeavoured to save the souls of the ‘savages’ by immersing them in Euro–Christian beliefs and eradicating access to traditional socialization values, language, practices and ways of life. By the 1930s, roughly 75% of First Nations children attended IRSs, as did many Métis and Inuit children. The last of the IRSs was closed in 1996, but by then several generations of children had experienced the mistreatment that abounded in these institutions.

Then to really prove we could be as evil as everyone thinks we’re polite, we added this gem to our crown.

“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem.” -Duncan Campbell Scott to BC Indian Agent Gen. Major D. MacKay.

And there are those who say it is in the past, and everyone is crying over things from long ago, yet 1996 is not so long ago for Residential Schools, and our police deny any ongoing wrong-doings. I for one do not feel patriotism for our past, though I have some small hope for our future.

Discoteca, muñeca, la biblioteca

I blame women.

For not murdering enough. The streets would be safer if men had the same fear.

Delilah Bon agrees.

I’m so sorry you’ve lost him. Thank you for sharing your love of him with us <3

Okay, I’m Canadian, but let’s play ball:

Republicans (right-wing) want to ban abortion.

Democrats (*left-wing) want to not ban abortion.

What’s the Centrist solution here? Is it… some bans on abortion by any chance?

(*I’m aware they’re basically right-of-centre at this point, but not wanting to ban abortion is a ‘left’ stance.)

Centrism is the range of political ideologies that exist between left-wing politics and right-wing politics on the left–right political spectrum. It is associated with moderate politics, including people who strongly support moderate policies and people who are not strongly aligned with left-wing or right-wing policies.

The issues described in the comic/thread is that when you have one ‘extreme’ calling for the removal of rights/the lives of one group, and their opposite ‘extreme’ is calling to not do that, Centrists ask for some middle ground that cannot exist. You call the top right panel a ridiculous strawman, but go into any thread about immigration, women’s rights, etc, and you will see (slightly less hyperbolic most of the time) comments that line up with that panel. What’s the Centrist reaction to abortion bans? Partial bans. So all the Right has to do is ask for the entirety of something (abortion ban, force striking workers back to work, etc) and Centrists will give them part of what they want.

Wow, author doesn’t know what centrism OR horseshoe theory are, lol.

“In popular discourse, the horseshoe theory asserts that advocates of the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together”

What’d they get wrong, exactly?

With all the demonizing of men in the last 40yrs…

ah hahahahhahahahahha