You should probably delve that particular line of thought more deeply, tbh.

I know you meant this flippantly but I came out as nonbinary last year; having (especially white) men act like entitled toddlers online was a helpful push into embracing more femininity.

And I fully agree, the way the op posted it with “counter point” already send the discussion in the wrong way.

I think the ‘discussion’ failed the moment someone said “how come men are angry at women doing ‘x’” and the entire fucking thread is full of men talking about men.

Like I’m not surprised, I’m just mildly amused I’m yet again changing accounts for awhile while my inbox fills with angry men shouting messages at me I never read. Every. Single. Time. A thread about an experience a woman has with men being shit in it is always filled with comments from men “nuh uh, whatabout…!” in response.

Every. Time. It’s so fucking embarrassing I wish I could literally just not be my gender for awhile. We’ve been in power for almost the entirety of humanity but oh my God a woman made a comment about how shitty men are to them, so let’s constantly make absolute ironic assholes of ourselves.

Peace out, men, you continue the trend of making us all look like whiny babies who can’t handle not being talked about, and not being The Normal.

Yes, it’s not a counter point but rather an also important parallel discussion. We need to have higher standards for male role models, or we will continue to have incels fill the space.

I feel like it’s awfully interesting though that we have ‘parallel discussions’ whenever someone says “hey this specific thing sucks for women.” The original question posited here was:

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

The question is why do men complain about female leads, which they do, when the majority of leads are still male, which they are. The answer to that isn’t “we need better male role models in movies” (though it would obviously help as well) as it’s dodging the original question.

You can’t really compare the two movies,

I’m not exactly, I’m asking why:

A story about a character born perfect and never faltering isn’t fun

Can be true, but also John Wick can never falter and that be fine. Kinda seems like a double standard to me.

First, I’m confused as to why you’d need to segregate books and film by gender, these all have either a male or non-gendered lead: Captain Underpants, Nate the Great, Hal The 3rd Class Hero, The Hobbit, The Lord of The Rings, Treasure Island, Danny the Champion of the World, The Outsiders, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Percy Jackson (all 40 billion of the series), The Giving Tree, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Bridge to Terabithia, James and the Giant Peach, Holes (series), Where The Wild Things Are, The Heroes of Olympus (more Percy Jackson I think), Ender’s Game, Winnie The Pooh, Narnia (series), The Wind In The Willows, The Indian in the Cupboard, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Neverending Story, I Am Every Good Thing, Don’t Hug Doug (He Doesn’t Like it), King Arthur’s Very Great Grandson, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Wild Robot (series), Stuart Little, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, George’s Marvellous Medicine, Lord of The Flies, Calvin and Hobbes (series), The Dangerous Book for Boys, The American Boys Handy Book.

(You didn’t specify age, so I tried to add our family suggestions for about 4-12. Once he’s older, depending on your thoughts on the language, we also have a lot of suggestions for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn)

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

John Wick gets a pass, though?

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.

I’m sorry you’ve written so much here I want to underscore and shout to the heavens, yet there is so much and I fear I won’t do it justice. Fascism is on the rise, and young men-- just as last time–are carrying it forward. Misogyny has become an assumed character trait in huge swaths of men, to the point you see insane arguments online about how men ‘have it harder’ than the gender held in captivity less than a lifetime ago. It wasn’t until the 1960’s in Vancouver, BC that women could get a loan without a man co-signing (and it was a credit union, not even a large bank.) I grew up and lived as a male, white, for over 40 years, and right now is on par, if not worse in many cases, than it was in the 90’s. Men now rail at the idea they can’t always be ‘the default.’ That the reason for these pronoun-forward changes is because it’s always been man-first, from not even bothering to test drugs on women to ‘room temperature’ being what a bunch of middle aged white men, such as myself, find comfortable. To men being the vast majority of main characters, to the goddamn Bechdel test being oh-so-relevant.

So I wanted to add a quote about just how long this has existed, and the sheer length of fight women have had just to exist unchained. I have not gone through the fight you have, yet I hope you’ll allow me at your side.

"You see, when I was growing up at the time of the Wars of the Medes and Persians and when I went to college just after the Hundred Years War and when I was bringing up my children during the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam Wars, there were no women. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Brontë were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.

So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man." -Ursula K. Le Guin, 1992

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

If you haven’t, check out Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness. Absolutely fantastic novel.

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.

Asimov is so, so difficult to read through now that I’m older, as the female characters are just… ouch. The ideas are there, but good gods I wish he’d just avoid writing out conversations at all.

I appreciate what you’re saying, however:

Women are, regardless of any other stat, still under-represented. 2000-2009 is depressing.

as many many people pointed out, this was poor planning.

So fucking organize it better then.

Jesus this American shoulder-shrug-why-do-anything-if-it-isn’t-perfect is so frustrating to watch.

The thing is if everyone said “fantastic! This will be huge” and the actual protests are underwhelming, well that serves to confirm the false narrative that a very small minority of people are upset.

But nobody did, they just said “this day this time go protest in your capitol”.

The optics of pulling off a huge protest in only a week would have been amazing, but just impossible in the real world.

It was a protest across the entire country, and it can be done again, and again, and again.

Seriously do you guys even need opponents? You just give up and convince each other to not do anything unless it’s perfect and then sit back and watch your neighbours get put in camps, declaring that you sure don’t agree with those actions.

Apologies I made another comment in a virtually identical exchange where I mentioned strikes.

To be clear: Protests -> Strikes -> Sympathy Strikes -> General Strikes.

That’s how you beat fascism. As soon as people push back at their money base they crumble. If people let them do what they want they keep pushing for more and more until stopped.

I didn’t realize police stopped shooting black people.

Dude that’s totally disingenuous and you know it. Protests/strikes aren’t fucking fairy magic. They show people in power what the people in general think of something. The more people do these things the more it’s clear to those in power what will play out and what won’t.

If americans, say, went out en masse and started protesting, striking, blocking day-to-day life from happening, in response to putting people in concentration camps, capitalists would put a lot of pressure on the fascists to step the fuck back. Then people could, I dunno, realise they can’t passive-resistence their way out of this and started fighting the fascists, this would be over extremely quickly.

Fascism requires you do one of two things: Help them, or don’t resist them. If you resist it becomes too hard for such a small number of people to succeed against a massive amount of people constantly defying them.

The Women’s March on January 21, 2017 was one of the biggest protests in US History.

I didn’t say protest, I said strike. They are not the same thing. Protests require Centrists and ‘moderates’ to care enough to join them. Strikes are meant to directly impact Capitalism. Going to marches every night for a week doesn’t hurt business owners, but a week of strikes loses them money in a big way. With sympathy strikes you can get the capitalists fighting each other. With a General Strike all of the lines-go-downward and they’ll freak out.

Until masses are seriously prepared to get violent, we are fucked.

Guess which step precedes that?

Get the fuck out in the streets, prevent cars from getting places, block entrances, cause consumers to avoid places, then they’ll start paying attention.

God it’s so fucking frustrating watching your older brother whining there’s nothing they can do when there are provable things they’ve done in the fucking past that have worked.

Look at the Pullman Strike. Seventy people were killed by cops/military, the strikers still won and it was a massive, historical win for American labour laws.

Jesus Christ I don’t think I’ve ever seen a posts comments so full of reasons this won’t work.

You guys don’t even need your media to dissuade you, you just convince each other not to do anything.

Yeah but Americans have fought back before, too, just not Gen-X or Millenials.

Look at the years on those. American workers gave up and gave in from 67 till 83, and then never did it again. It’s sad.

Our healthcare is tied to our work here in America

And general strikes were how you got any health care, time off, better work hours, work safety, etc. The fact is, we’re at the point where people have to do this, and it sucks, and no the boomers didn’t, but some of their parents may have (depending where you’re from.)

The fact is Americans believe the narrative that they can’t strike because they’ll ‘lose too much,’ but the reality is they’ll lose it anyway. A Fascist Oligarch is literally stealing their SSN’s and personal info to put them on lists and they’re still saying “yeah man but if I don’t work my shift at waffle house I won’t make rent.” What about when decide you’re not white enough to work? Or not white enough to cross the street? Or that women aren’t allowed to do that job anymore? Or when they just arrest you because you looked at a cop at the wrong time?

Kids being born just to throw onto the wage slavery pile, the worst healthcare of any peer nation (and most below), leading cause of death for pregnant women is being shot by their partners, concentration camps being set up, an entire middle class gone and replaced with people a hundred bucks from destitution, a child’s most likely cause of death is gun violence in their schools, super PACs, Citizens United, the Patriot Act, skyrocketing rental costs, skyrocketing grocery costs, and you just roll over for all of it.

What WOULD it take for you guys to do something?

Why are people talking about a general strike in the USA? Surely you must realise everyone is too busy keeping their heads above water.

As opposed to the other general strikes done in times of plenty and happiness?

When men talk about being victims of psychological violence, what happens then?

They are reminded that if they wanted to talk about that, they were more than welcome, but a thread about a woman who was talking about her sexual assault isn’t the place to ‘what about us.’

Also cool dodge of having your entire argument torn apart only to abandon it and switch to a different one.

I was a young man who was sexually assaulted, and by a woman, and I still know that doesn’t mean that it’s equal. It’s people like you who de-legitimize what I went through by making it seem like a game of Brinkmanship with women, when in reality it was the women I spoke to who got me through it, and the men who asked if it was possible for me, as a man, to be raped, and then mocked me for it.

If you start a sentence with “all men” then you should take a step back and say “fucked-up men” or suchlike, is all I’m saying.

No. Also in no example was that how anything started. I said women can talk about being victims of violence and men always do what you’re doing right now.

Also side note at least according to the statistics over here in Germany partner violence, if psychological violence is taken into account, is almost exactly even among hetero couples and, in the overwhelming number of cases, mutual: Assholes hook up with assholes they just, statistically, express it differently. Things might very well look differently where you’re from, another reason to not generalise.

The current crime statistics analysis on intimate partner violence by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA, 2024) shows that a total of 167.865 people were victims of intimate partner violence in 2023. This is an increase of 9.1% compared to 2022. 132.966 (79,2%) victims were female and 34.899 (20,8%) male.

The statistics recorded the following attempted or completed crimes:

• 59.1% intentional simple assault
• 24.6% threats, stalking, coercion
• 11.4% aggravated assault
• 2.6% rape, sexual coercion, sexual assaults
• 0.2% murder and manslaughter
• 2.1% other offences

The European Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) published the study “Violence against women. An EU-wide survey” in 2014. For this study, around 42,000 women between the ages of 18 and 74 were interviewed about their experiences with violence in the 28 member states. In Germany there were 1,534 women. Around one in three women said they had experienced physical and/or sexual violence at least once since they were 16 years old.

1/3 of German women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence. ONE THIRD.

Stop trying to make this something that’s even between men and women. It isn’t. You’re giving these guys in my inbox furious about exactly the reason for my original fucking comment a green light to do this shit by hand-waving the reality women face.

If this is how Lemmy is going to be, I’m so thankful pixelfed is exploding in size because women deserve the goddamn break.

People want to know you’re not literally … trying to actively reinforce the toxic AF “women are always victims, men are always perpetrators” narrative etc, but it takes like five words to make that clear.

…

/face in hands

Okay I took a minute and I have to go through this with you.

People want to know you’re not literally Andrea Dworkin, trying to actively reinforce the toxic AF “women are always victims, men are always perpetrators” narrative etc, but it takes like five words to make that clear.

So just so I’m clear, all women have to make clear they don’t think what Andrea Dworkin does (sigh), because all men aren’t responsible for men as a group being, statistically, the perpetrators of rape, partner violence, etc?