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

Welcome to feminist media analysis. It's an existing academic field and you can find books and YouTube videos on it (and it can go pretty deep into related topics).

One of my favorite examples was when the creators of Avatar the Last Airbender were deciding to create their sequel about the next avatar they decided to make their protagonist a woman and executives at nickelodeon complained that boys wouldn't be able to relate to a female protagonist.

The explanation I've largely heard that makes sense to me is that women are taught women are generally expected to learn to empathathize with male protagonists whereas the inverse is much more optional. You have plenty of men who do get into wonder woman and she ra and korra, my childhood best friends are among them, but you also get a lot of men who don't in a way where I can't think of an inverse that I've seen

Why do males complain about female-led stories

They don't? Or are you taking 4chan and Twitter as representative of the whole videogame audience?

A couple of month ago I was volunteering in my youth centre. We always have the radio on. On air was an interview of a female author writing about a woman and her struggles as a mom and wife, falling for another man. The male interviewer had the audacity to ask if there are any themes in the book which could interest him as a male reader (imagine a very condescending tone).

Reducing “female” themes to lesser themes is so annoying, hurtful and stupid.

The imbalance in numbers isn't just in movies. Think about the judiciary, legislators, business leaders... It's everywhere. In my own career I was the first woman to hold a senior position with one of my employers. Crazy. Achieving even what we have has been uphill all the way. I'm glad you've woken up to this - maybe you can keep spreading the word!

How do I feel about it? Really fucking exhausted. It's not just the movies, it's my everyday life. Being patronised, talked over, ignored, belittled... Ugh. A lot of men seem to outright despise women. On the bright side, most of this behaviour comes from men of my own generation (I'm old). Young men in general seem much less arrogant, more respectful of women. My sister suggested this is because we remind them of their grannies, lol, but they speak well about women their own age too, and regard them as equals. (Apart from this one young bloke who talked about "women and other minorities", sigh.)

You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.

Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had university students read the scripts (with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers’ names, gendered pronouns swapped for neutral pronouns, etc) and try to intuit the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the roles in the script. So if one role was filling a more traditionally feminine or masculine role, had more fem/masc speech patterns, etc, this part of the study was designed to check for that.

Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long they believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.

Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking 25-30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the script (literally) and had the actors play the opposite roles. So the female actor was now playing the “male” (determined by the earlier script reads) part of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination... But it’s not the entire reason.

It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.

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?

An interesting counter point to this.

Kids movies, I'm a dad, I only have boys. Trying to find new movies that have good male parts is challenging. There are plenty of "girl empowerment" movies, but ones with good role models for boys are few and far between.

Everything is based around violence. Like really, is that all boys are good for?

Sexism

I do not have a problem with a female lead in a show. One thing that may be overlooked her is when they make a movie with a female lead and make a bad movie.

My wife watches a lot of spy, military action type movies. A lot of the time, the stories are poorly written and cheesy when they put a female lead in the show.

One example of this was a movie where the girls dad who died was CIA. His daughter somehow ends up involved in some CIA thing and is able to survive the whole thing even though she has no formal training. So, while this issue occurs with male leads, there are fewer movies like this with female leads so it may look like there is a higher percentage of movies with female leads that people do not like.

Look at the movies with female leads that are great, (Almost anything with Michelle Yeoh), Star Trek Discovery, Star Trek Lower Decks, hidden figures, Alien, Zero Dark Thirty. I am sure there are more that I can't think of.

I think that the female lead may get blamed for a bad movie, or people just don't like bad movies and it is assumed it is because it is a female lead.

A lot of it comes down to genre, target audience, and writer's personal experience. Even MC and DC are characters written decades ago. Batman is basically from the 1930s/40s.

Compare that to last decade's best selling YA novels. Hunger Games was constructed to be very balanced from the start including a female main lead, same for Percy Jackson.

My hot take is that most of these instances are actually fine as is because Hollywood in general sucks total ass at writing new characters into existing franchises, especially for the exact purpose of introducing diversity without any depth.

There's literally a 3+ hour series on youtube of how bad the new star wars trilogy is, and a solid third of that rant is about how poorly written the female lead is.

The issue here is that having an equal or majority female (or any other metric) set of characters wouldn't automatically make your story or writing better. You have to develop each character just like the rest, otherwise you end up with inserts that have no purpose other than to equal out a fraction.

Whether that is due to the writers being able to create male characters easier, or just a perceived audience target, you'd much rather have a well written character than a soulless one.

And that is likely not even correlated with male vs female writers. So much so that some critics even believe female writers are better at writing male characters than male writers, which is funny to think about. Ex: Harry Potter is still a 2:1 ratio.

Again though, there are plenty of good examples (mostly books) with very successful stories with equal or majority female characters.

If it makes you feel any better, this argument is old as hell lol. You can find ye olde forum posts discussing the exact same things mentioned in this entire thread from as far back as early 2000s, with plenty of in text examples from books and screenplay.

The general concencus though, is that if the characters are good, the plot is good, and the writing is good, no one really cares about the number because you're absorbed into the story. Your attachment to the story is a direct reflection of your own personal identity. If you notice the lack of X whatever while reading/watching and it breaks your immersion, then it's probably a viable critique of the writing. If it's something you notice after outside the story, then it might not matter as much as you think.

I don't know if it's because i'm not a native speaker, but i consider people who use "male" and especially "female" instead of "men" or "women" very very weird at best.

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.

I think it really depends on why the story has a female lead.

I think Alien is a good example, Ripley could have been male and it really wouldn't have changed the plot that much. If I'm not mistaken Ripley actually was male at one point in the movies writing.

Doesn't matter that the shift happened, it happened, Sigourney Weaver fucking smashed it out of the park and the rest is history.

If the story is good and happens to have a female lead, I don't think people are actually against it. The Menu is the first movie to come to mind, I don't think anyone said anything about the lead in that being female (although being a lead in an ensemble cast with damn near equivalent amounts of screen time is kind of meaningless). I think what people are against is blatant pandering because it usually indicates that the product is poor.

Edit: this is my limited, anecdotally rooted opinion. There are probably a decent amount of people who will just not watch a female lead. I've known women who won't watch something or play a video game without a female lead or the ability to create a female character, so I assume the same has to be true for men.

Once female speaking time reaches 30% or more, males believe that the females are dominating the speaking time.

Female encroachment on what has traditionally been considered male spaces is not taken well. Female empowerment is considered taking from deserving males.

Essentially the general male population don't like females, and only tolerate them as a subservient subclass who should be seen and not heard.

EDIT: This should probably annoy you a little too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2qCjL6-n4

And it may also explain why people complain that there should only ever be one female character - it minimises the chances of males having to watch two females interact, because that would be excluding the male experience and they couldn't possibly relate to two females interacting.

EDIT2: comments in that video do claim there are more scenes... whether or not that really adds much is up to you.

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.

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.

Men that are scared of women leads are pussies

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.

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.

Who complained about the female led movie Alien (93% audience rating on rotten tomatoes)?

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

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.

When there are female main characters that aren't just the authors fetishs, they're typically subjected to violence, with rape used so frequently as female "character development" that it would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.

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

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.

In a word: Insecurity.

As also a man, I don't know any person in real life that complain about women in movies.

I only see it online in spaces that I avoid because those places are generally speaking transphobic misogynistic echo chambers. I would argue those places are also misandristic, by creating a place were you have to follow the doctrine, but it is very different to the active hatred towards women.

So I think the answer is "insecure hateful men will hate on anything that they were told is their enemy."

I have explored misandristic spaces online as well. And unsurprisingly, you see the same general behavior. So I really think generally it is true that:

People like to have an enemy and they like to be told who is that enemy and then they mindlessly hate even to their disadvantage and beyond. Once the social cost has to be paid, they feel validated and jump deeper into the abyss.

And where is that hatred coming from? Gamer gate, which made feminist hating popular, which made hating "the left" popular, which made anything anti-"woke" popular. As the source is based in a profession focussed on maximizing engagement, the need to generate "new" "shocking" Events was big. Therefore any gay character was a scandal and obviously with the questionable attempt to seem humane of e.g. Disney, aka adding diversity, these "new" "shocking" events were any kind of diversity. (Sidenote: diversity yay!!! Corporate diversity program just tend to be rather questionable) As the degenerate hate mob had its target to mindlessly hate, they looked for any excuse to hate anything "woke"™©® and "strong female characters" have to had been a feminist propaganda Tool and not a normal character type in movies for at least a couple decades, so they mindlessly hate that now. I would love to say "as they do anything for a treat of their master" but there is no treat, there is just the self-induced pain of hatred.

And why gamer gate? I guess right-wing Propaganda worked on a group of people who were still afraid/annoyed to be the ones to blame for e.g. violence. remember the whole "video games make you a school shooter" nonsense?

Using males to mean men is as weird as men who says females when they mean women.