Tomato

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The thing that pisses me off so much about that article is that it reinforces that there’s something SPECIAL or RISKY about female led action projects, and that it’s SO MUCH better to wait for the perfect project, the perfect moment, the best team of people with the best story and the best characters.

This all SOUNDS good until you remember that while female geeks have been waiting 15 movies for a single shot at fair and equal representation, male geeks have plenty of mediocre to awful films produced with male leads just inside the MCU. Where’s our Ant Man? Where’s our Thor 2?

The idea that the MCU’s first ever female led project needs to be exceptionally good reinforces a toxic idea that female led projects are not allowed to be just sort of good, just good enough, or fail completely. By extension, women and girls are being cheated out of their opportunity to fail.

Failing is important, failing means learning from mistakes, failing is a step toward learning how to keep trying rather than just give up. Women can’t fail because their failures are seen as evidence of an inherent lack of skill, especially in male dominated settings like comic books, action, and STEM.

You wanna know why the majority of female led superhero projects are so bad? I would argue that it’s in part because they are written, directed, and produced almost entirely by men, but in large part its because there’s 1 Supergirl movie and 6 Superman movies, 8 live action Batman movies to 1 Catwoman movie, 15 MCU movies centering men and ZERO centering a female character.

These films are not going to get better while Hollywood is being “strategic” about their female led projects by putting them off, they can’t get better if you don’t go ahead and MAKE THEM.