The State of Feminism, Marvel Movies, and Fanboidom

Hello Nobody,

I'm The Noah, and this is my blog where I write things No(ah)body cares about. I bought noahbodycares.com too, if you’d like to bookmark that page. My brother Nicolas and I are still working on the page, but I think it looks cool thus far.

^{Look at All These Fonts.}

_nifty!

Brie Larson what a transition, is the lead actor (or actress if you prefer) in the latest Marvel Studios film CAPTAIN MARVEL. According to a lot of random people on the internet, she is a radical feminist (I haven’t looked up any of her opinions on things because I don’t really care what a random actor thinks about complex issues that barely affect them), but a lot of young men on the internet seem to really care. The film has been bombarded with negative reviews since the review pages opened, some by anti-feminists who haven’t even seen the movie. Everyone agrees that this is disgusting, regressive, anti-woman conduct…………………… and I agree…………… but I want to talk about where these young men are coming from.

PART 1: In Defense of The Indefensible I Guess?

[OPENING UP ABOUT ME: Here’s something I haven’t told many people. Back in high school I started watching a lot of videos about politics, and I followed a lot of people who self-identified as “anti-feminists.” These people have compelling ideas, especially for a depressed white male who has never faced any significant oppression or extreme external conflicts like High School Noah. I don’t consider myself to be among the ranks of the anti-feminists today, but I felt like sharing that with you would help you understand where I’m coming from. Hopefully the people who know me won’t hate me because I used to listen to people with wrong opinions, while I was forming my own. I may have just ruined my ability to run for public office, but I want to be honest with you nobody.]

Like all “smart people on the internet” I’m going to start off with an unnecessary, wildly incomplete history lesson to make it seem like I did research.

We’re

Going

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BACK!!!

To 2016. In 2016 the Ghost Busters reboot with an all-woman cast was met with mixed reviews to put it mildly. The next year, Star Wars: The Last Jedi made a few female characters like Rey and Leah arguably overpowered and “extra-force sensitive” or whatever. A lot of internet-savvy, young, male, right-leaning or apolitical fans (I’m just going to call these people fanbois so I don’t have to write all those adjectives again)… Anyway, many fanbois hated these movies for a host of reasons: plot holes, miscasting, awkward dialogue, continuity issues, etc. But when you’re articulating WHY you hate something, sometimes it’s convenient to point to ONE thing, ONE issue that “ruined the whole franchise.” The ONE thing many fanbois and anti-feminists online pointed to was the most obvious feature of these two movies: identity politics.

Now, to the outsider (of the fanbois’ corner of the internet), their complaints might sound like hatred of women. But I don’t think that’s fair. They don’t hate the movie just because it contains women. Many, I’d even dare say most, fanbois rank Wonder Woman as a top tier DC film. There hasn’t been a big push back against Ocean’s Eight or the Pitch Perfect franchise from the fanboi community. The REAL REASON many fanbois pushed back against The Last Jedi with negative reviews felt it was “too political” or “feminist propaganda”. What bothers fanbois isn’t that Rey is powerful and a woman… it’s that they feel like Rey is only powerful because she is a woman. They feel that feminists are reshaping their movies and franchises, and that strong women are just added in to fill secret feminist quotas. THIS IS OBVIOUSLY NOT TRUE, but if you read enough articles from feminists celebrating Disney’s “breakthroughs” it’s easy to reach that conclusion.

PART 2: This is going to be a long blog post. Sorry. I won’t be offended if you just skip to the TL;DR at the bottom.

From the fanboi perspective, franchised movies they grew up with have been getting worse. Hollywood, nowadays mostly Disney, is vomiting up loveless corporate sequels and reboots 5-8 times a year. At the same time, They see a political shift that’s difficult to quantify with words… So, I’ll try to explain it with a graph:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/245462/democrats-favor-moderate-party-gop-conservative.aspx

According to this GALLUP poll. Left-leaning people IN GENERAL (not everyone) seem to want more moderate candidates from the left, while right-leaning people IN GENERAL seem to want more conservative and less moderate candidates. There’s this shadowy feeling online that “the left” is shifting further towards left-extremism. Obviously, this is a debatable premise, and one could argue that Trump has pushed the right further toward extremism and Gerrymandering also plays a role, but that’s the oversimplified narrative many Fanbois feel.

If you take a minute to stand in the fanboi’s shoes, you’ll look out at a slew of franchises “going down the drain” and an increased radicalization of a few vocal feminists. Hopefully you can see how they might correlate the two. Maybe you can sympathize with the people who get defensive when they hear that the newest Marvel movie will also be a “celebration of women”, premier on Women’s Day, and feature well-known feminist Brie Larson as the lead... Maybe? No? Okay. Then please don’t stop reading right now!

PART 3: I THINK THE ANTI-FEMINISTS ARE WRONG ABOUT CAPTAIN MARVEL.

One Top-Tier Chris for Reference

I just disagree with the fanboi’s premise. I think they are wrong about what movies are saying, about Hollywood, what feminism is, a lot of things. A movie can CONTAIN a feminist with the movie itself “saying” that that person is correct. Just in the mcu there are dozens of opinions and perspectives shared that are open to interpretation. Captain America is a conservative/libertarian patriot who says there’s only one God. MJ is a high-school liberal who sits out of a school field trip event to protest slavery. You can view this as Disney themselves “saying” the things these characters say, OR as characters in a movie interacting with other characters in a movie. It makes sense for Captain Marvel to talk about women being empowered because she was a women who was disempowered (both literally and figuratively) for most of her life.

ABOUT HOLLYWOOD: In my opinion there are a lot of problems with The Last Jedi. It threw away a ton of intriguing setups in the previous film, such that every major plot twist was the movie showing the audience that something that the audience previously thought mattered didn’t. They paused the action to have long conversations about about slavery, “slavery with extra steps”, and income inequality in a side mission which like most things in the movie turned out to be pointless. I can understand why this ticked off a lot of hardcore Star Wars fans. Ghostbusters had a totally different set of reasons why it didn’t work, and Wonder Woman had a completely different set of reasons why it was enjoyable (despite all the many plot holes that arise from sharing a cinematic universe with the block of plot swiss cheese that was Batman V. Superman). ONE common thread between all these movies is that they are acted by prominent female actresses (or actors if you prefer) who were feminists in their free time. All movies contain a few pieces of dialogue that could be taken as political statements if one chose to. But these similarities apply to VIRTUALLY EVERY MOVIE MADE IN THE LAST DECADE and are as irrelevant as the type of camera the cinematographers used to the overall connectedness of the movies.

One BraVe DeFEnDer of
WoMEn's RIgHtS for reference 

Guess what! Everyone in Hollywood is left-leaning-to-far-left. When they aren’t covering for sexual abusers, sexually abusing each other, or tolerating sexual abuse to stay in the game, they’re giving press conferences about how much they respect women and how bad sexism is. It’s all part of the movie making scene and it’s been that way for generations (I’m not saying that’s a tolerable or unchangeable situation, just observing the reality). So of course if a fanboi is looking for controversial statements about feminism by an actor they dislike, they will find some.

WHAT FEMINISM IS: It’s a well-documented fact that mostwomen do not identify as feminists, and that most people generally agree with the statement that men and women are equal in value and ability… which is the definition of feminism. So why don’t most people call themselves feminists? Well, like with any movement you can’t just point to the dictionary definition of the name of the movement and expect everyone who agrees with that definition to IDENTIFY with the movement. [Citation: there are three political movements called Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, and the It’s Okay to be White campaign. Literally everyone believes those statements to be true, but not everyone considers themselves a MEMBER of all three movements.] If you think feminism is about treating both sexes fairly, then call yourself a feminist. If you think feminism has gone too far and is now about elevating women above men… don’t call yourself a feminist. BUT if you define feminism as male hate, then call yourself an anti-feminist and fight against the extremists who hate individuals for their unchangeable characteristics, and DON’T fight AGAINST feminists who just want men and women to be treated equally because virtually EVERYONE wants that.

TL;DR Just because a female-lead movie says that men and women should be treated equally and is lead by a feminist doesn’t make it a bad movie. That doesn’t make it a good movie. And that doesn’t make it connected to all other movies like it in some sinister trend. Just go see the freaking movie.

I’ve been The Noah. I had to get that off my chest. Please don’t pin me as either a feminist or anti-feminist depending on which one you hate. This post was insanely long, and if you made it to this point I’m impressed. If you made it to this point AND you hate me now, thanks for reading anyway. I’m going to get some sleep.

~ The Noah