It can be difficult being a nerdy girl. Nerd culture has always been saturated in misogyny that can be devastating to young women. From fanboys belittling female fans to the uncomfortable over sexualization of female characters, it's easy to lose your voice in the hyper-masculine world of Nerd-dom. But there's hope on the horizon. With the current popularity of the super hero genre and the growing demand for more diverse universes a door has been opened for female fans. Marvel and DC, the most widely known super hero juggernauts, are both making efforts to put out material that showcases their strong female leads. Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, and Agent Carter are among the the landscape altering roles women and young girls have to look up to. They're a big deal! They're important for more than just people who are interested in comic book mythology because the current popularity of the genre sets a bar for what's to be expected from everyone else. I'm going to talk about it more but I also want to address how both companies still fall short. It wouldn't be fair to the disenfranchised masses who are still left woefully under represented in pop culture not to highlight the short comings in the media. Women of color and Women of the LGBT+ community are too often left out of mainstream projects or are reduced to supporting characters. So despite the steps these conglomerates have taken towards diversity they're relatively small in the grand scheme of things. It's great that we can celebrate where we are but important that we recognize we still have quite a ways to go.
Recently both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Cinematic Universe have expanded their testosterone laden character rosters with Female leads. ABC's Marvel's Agent Carter (canceled by the network which absolutely infuriates me) continued the story of Agent Peggy Carter who began her story as Captain America's "best girl" (No, I'm not crying! You're crying!!). The show gave the character a chance to grow into the heroine audiences craved. One who had brains, brawn, and heart all the while allowing Peggy to remain feminine. Allowing a character to be portrayed as both powerful and feminine is massively important as contributors to the action genre typically write their female characters as one dimensional dominatrices or helpless waifs. They're little more than eye candy or a token female to round out the pack. Women are reduced to a punchline or a gimmick. Power and beauty are not a dichotomy! Super Girl on CBS is another example of that. Kara Zor-L is making the same strides as Agent Carter to show girls you can be yourself and still save the world. These are leading ladies who are badass and not the super sexualized characters women have come to expect. It's always been an unspoken compromise that we're no longer going to make.
Jessica Jones, another Marvel property on Netflix, is a complete departure from Peggy and Kara, in a good way. She's not traditionally feminine but that's actually amazing! In real life, women come in all different shapes, colors, sexualities, and self-expressions. Some women feel powerful in a dress and heels, others in jeans and combat boots and that's perfectly fine! She's a crass, messy, heavy drinker who struggles with severe PTSD related to violence and sexual-assault. Jessica's story centers more around a healthy, non-competitive relationship with her female best friend than her romantic endeavors. Strong female/female friendships are very difficult to find and I think that the show having been written by a woman helped to finally realize that type of relationship for the audience. Not to mention the show features a romantic subplot focused around a high-powered female Lawyer's divorce from her wife after beginning a very serious affair with her female assistant. These are the first openly Lesbian characters I can think of that Marvel has put on screen. To me, the drama and anguish of the love triangle is refreshingly human, something interesting and imperfect that you don't often get the chance to see from non-straight romances on television or in movies. The dark tone of the show is unprecedented for female action heroines, as well, who, like I said earlier, are not usually written to be emotional. That's really a turn off to female viewers who don't want to tune into a show or spend money on products that don't treat them like valuable consumers. That's where the argument of "But women don't like the thing" usually comes from. We do like it, we just want more women doing cool stuff and acting like people and less of... whatever this is...
(I mean really?! What is this??)
(Tessa Thompson to play Valkyrie)
(Alexandra Shipp as Storm, X-Men: Apocalypse)
The comics come a bit farther than the movies and t.v shows, however. Ms. Marvel is a young Muslim American girl, Thor is now a woman, and a new predecessor to Iron Man has been revealed to be a 15 year-old black girl who built her own replica of Tony Stark's armor. The problem is, change is not happening with as much speed as it should be. I don't know if I'd consider comic books themselves a part of pop culture so the diversity there really doesn't apply much to this particular argument, but it does still matter. And, for the record, I think all of it's amazing! However, the progress that has been made has been very slow going. It's still left many fans out in the cold and wondering when or if they'll ever be represented. As much as I love Agent Carter and the Avengers, I have to be critical of the lack of diversity there. Where are the women of Color? Where are the members of the LGBT+ community? Both companies have had ample opportunities to include women from anywhere and everywhere as they've added several new characters in the last 4 years alone. Black Panther, which features an almost entirely black cast of characters, doesn't come out for two more years. Thor: Ragnarok isn't set for release until November of 2017. Marvel debuted the cast, revealing Actress Tessa Thompson as the actress chosen to play Valkyrie (Seen side by side above). Yes, that's great! I love that casting choice. However, it's rumored that she could be the new love interest for Thor rather than her own character so the two kind of cancel each other out if that's true. And as happy as it makes me to see the ever expanding lineup become more realistic I can't help but be disappointed we have to wait so long. At least we still have Storm. She's not part of the MCU but she's a freaking awesome Queen and all around badass! Plus, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D on ABC is slowly (glacially) but surely adding more women of Color.
To both Marvel and DC's credit they have made efforts to create a more inclusive environment for women despite the above image of the cloth draped Elektra and many like it. There are a host of characters of color that I didn't list but that you can easily Google for yourself. Just as it's not fair to overlook the lack of representation in the media in favor of what we do have, it wouldn't be fair to say both companies haven't made efforts in diversifying their unique worlds. All I'm saying is, though these movies and shows will regardless mean a lot to the girls that have never had a superhero that looked like them before, Marvel and DC are still very capable of doing more. We still don't have a black female lead, or prominent characters of Hispanic, Latinx, Asian, Jewish or Middle Eastern backgrounds. We don't have openly Queer women kicking butt and taking names, either. They're sometimes in the comics, but again, that's not exactly part of pop culture media. Not everyone who enjoys the movies and shows reads the comics, anyway. I know I don't. Even still, people do deserve to see their favorite characters on screen just like any other nerd. As a straight cis-gendered woman I know how important diversity is to me so I can't imagine what it must feel like to be so close but so far away from representation. We all deserve to feel like we can be super heroes. On our worst days those representations can make you feel invincible. It's great that we have strong leading women but until we can include all women it's not true diversity.
