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Zina Gomez-Liss's avatar

"the fact that we’re all supposed to blindly (and more importantly, silently) accept these characters as strong badasses, and if we point out the problems of systemic sexism hidden in each, we’re reviled for it: we’re called feminazis, or admonished that we’re reading too much into them, and can’t we all just relax and enjoy the fun superhero movie?

Okay, sure, we can enjoy Wonder Woman for what it is, but as I explained in the first of this series of essays, the way popular media portrays its female characters has everything to do with how our culture treats and listens to real women in real society." Yes, to this. Thank you for writing this series.

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David Perlmutter's avatar

The whole "male gaze" thing is one reason why I have focused on making female lead characters for whom sexuality would be either a non-issue or problematic if it was brought up. (There is one sexy one in the catalogue, but I purposely made her a buffoon to parody the type). Once you discover that there are exceptions to rules ("The Powerpuff Girls" did it for me), you should concentrate on mining the exception, especially when the rule lode is running dry.

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