#WhereAreWomen
Oh fuck this shit. I am so sick of it. Fuck it. Women exist, god damn it. We’re not some afterthought, some nonentity, some bit of decor, some piece of sweater fluff it’s fine to brush off. We are people too.
Shane Black, the director and co-writer of Iron Man 3, has said he was forced to change the gender of the film’s villain from female to male after pressure from the production company Marvel, which feared toy merchandise would not sell as well.
In an interview with Uproxx, Black said the original Iron Man 3 script featured a female version of Aldrich Killian, eventually played by Guy Pearce. “We had finished the script and we were given a no holds barred memo saying that cannot stand and we’ve changed our minds because, after consulting, we’ve decided that toy won’t sell as well if it’s a female.”
No women. No women no women no women, none at all, ever, in any entertainment, because women are a drag and nobody will pay any money to watch or play or read anything that has even one women in it, ever. Except porn. You need them in porn, obviously, but that’s absolutely it. Women are garbage.
It is the second time this year Disney has been embroiled in controversy over their superhero merchandise strategy. In January a Star Wars-themed Monopoly game was released by Hasbro without a figurine of Rey, the lead character of the latest chapter of the film franchise. It followed complaints she was also under-represented in figurine packs, with fans rallying under the hashtag #WheresRey on social media.
Disney was contacted but declined to comment.
Too busy erasing women.
Huh. Action movies with female leads did great recently–but now they’re nixing a female character because the damn toy sales might be affected.
(Why don’t they just market the female action figures to girls? They say boys won’t buy the damn things because ick, girl cooties, OK maybe, but there’s no reason not to reach out to the other half of the market.
I mean, no reason beside the obvious one.)
OMG! Action figures for girls? Do you want to confuse the poor darlings? Oh, I guess they could sell them with tea sets and baby cradles, and then it would be all right….
Women are just invisible to marketers, unless they are making pink Legos, pink pens, pink power tools….pink. Yuck! I’ve been doing an informal survey, and I’ve noticed that women (and girls) who are old enough to choose what they wear for themselves seem to wear very little pink. At work, it is almost unseen, not only on the instructors but on the students. In fact, at one of our faculty meetings, the only one wearing pink was male.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have a lot of money. The six of us shared toys. One Mr. Potato Head, one GI Joe, a handful of matchbox cars, and some stuffed toys. The rest of it we created out of our imagination, using Mom’s best dish towels for superhero capes, and her best blankets thrown over the clotheslines for tents. Until she caught us – then we used the old beat up ones with the holes. They weren’t boys toys or girls toys, they were just toys. We had one Barbie and one GI Joe. Ken lost his head early on, and was dutifully buried in the back yard. My brother presided.
And this was in a family that was rigidly gendered. My parents were very traditional. Girls were going to be wives and mothers, boys were going to get to do neat stuff when they grew up. I refused to accept that, and perhaps part of the reason was my always being the other male superhero when my brother was outnumbered and needed a sidekick. I got to believing I could do that stuff, too. And I was right. I could.
Now we’re trying to hide girls from the fact that they can do that stuff, too.
Hasbro is THE problem here… they own damn near every toy product line in existence.
Rolls eyes.
I was in the Disney Store recently with my daughter and we were looking at the Star Wars action figure sets. One set was a collection of characters – Finn, Poe, Kylo Ren, General Hux and what appeared to be an anonymous stormtrooper. Yes, a minor bad guy and a nameless bit of cannon fodder got included in the set and the female lead didn’t.
I would have adored SW action figures when I was a kid. My daughter has action figures of the first 10 Doctors from Doctor Who lined up on a shelf above her bed. Who says girls don’t want this stuff? It’s shite. Girls would love it but it falls outside the relentless imposition of gender norms on children – something I strongly believe has, in some ways, actually got worse since my young childhood in the 1970s.
I will give Disney credit for the little Rey dress-up outfits that had not been “pinkified” in any way. And my 19 year old daughter is utterly disgusted that she can’t get either a) Poe Dameron’s jacket or b) a furry Wookie hoodie in her size…
Disney actually triggered a fairly major ‘feminist consciousness’ moment for me, back in the day.
My then-girlfriend and I had just gone to see Mulan in the theaters, and loved it. So we left the movie humming the songs and talking about the film and then, as we were walking through the mall, decided to check out the Disney store. Since Mulan had just come out, of course, there were shelves and shelves of toys set out. And guess what the ONLY Mulan figurine was?
Bridal Fucking Mulan.
The white-faced, gown-wearing version of her that exists for just a few minutes in the film solely to be rejected by her before the end of that scene.
Of course, there were lots of armor and swords available for boys who wanted to be Shang. But nothing for little girls who wanted to be the STAR OF THE GODDAMNED MOVIE. (I think there was also one figurine of “Secret Messenger Mulan” or somesuch, which might’ve been moderately okay if she had ever taken on a spy/courier role in the movie.)
Ahem. Sorry. It’s still a bit of a sore spot for me. It was also the first time I ever ranted in public. I think I went on for a good fifteen minutes griping about how completely absurd it was.
Wow. That’s disgusting. Not at all surprising, but deeply disgusting.
Talk about female socialization…
[…] a comment by Freemage on […]
Is this at all similar? I have noticed how often callers on the Savage Love podcast will identify themselves not as women, men, or guys, but as “females” and “males.” It always seems strange to me. (“Hi, I’m a 25-year-old female living in a large West Coast city.”) Is this evidence of some kind of… stigma or something around the worlds “woman” and “man”? Are we being discouraged even from thinking of ourselves as women and men?
Also note the subtle secondary message, there, re: Spy Mulan. Girls can be heroes, but they have to use (feminine) wiles to do it. No action sequences in your playtime, little Suzy; you just get to lie and deceive. (See also: Black Widow. Sure, she’s also a very skilled hand-to-hand combatant, but a large part of her backstory and actions in the movies and the comics are based on seduction and manipulation, because she’s a girl and that’s how girls get to hero.)
I so wish they had gone with Mockingbird (a canonical Avenger and Hawkeye’s original girlfriend/wife). She was pure martial arts bad-assery, with a scathing wit (hence the nom de hero). She also had one of the few rape storylines in the comics that wasn’t completely appalling. It was still a rape storyline, of course, but she actually dealt with it herself, via her own strength of will, and in the end killed the rapist. The reaction of the rest of the team when they learned the truth was… less than enlightened, which was both infuriating and true-to-life in a depressing way. (Basically, they were shocked that she violated the typical comic-book morality code against killing, despite the fact that she was isolated with someone who had made a sex-slave of her and would clearly do so again if given the chance.)
Ben #8,
I wasn’t sure exactly what you meant by “is this at all similar,” but I have a thought about the above. I think it’s because “woman” and “man” have gendered baggage, whereas “female” and “male” are seen as objective descriptions. If you’re a man and you’re about to provide your categorization, and the word “man” makes you stop short because of all of the implications like “man up” and “be a man” and “manly man,” you might just decide to sidestep that word and choose “male” instead.
And if you’re female, you might phrase it that way because, no, you don’t “identify with” having less power, less freedom, and no-win expectations of you. You aren’t “cis”, you’re a human who was born in a female body and doesn’t feel at all like gender is a privilege.