 cultural minority, so I was used to entering into and seeing the world through the lenses, the privileged perspective of the white person, generally, the white man, and I naturally took to things like Choose Your Own Adventure books. I had a lot of them, dozens of them, and as I look back on it now, every Choose Your Own Adventure book that I bought was from the man’s perspective, even though it was from a different culture and time and history.
But I don’t think I ever picked up Choose Your Own Adventure in which I had to enter into and play the part of a woman in the adventure and it never even occurred to me to want to do that. I was never encouraged to do that. Again, I don’t think women were encouraged to enter into the male adventure, but I think the majority of the opportunities out there to enter into a perspective, whether you had a choice or not, was the white male perspective.
Even just looking at the first three phases of the MCU, again, we’re looking at mostly, I mean, exclusively, except for Black Panther and Ms. Marvel, the main characters are white men and aliens, and there were only two aliens who were women and the stories were told still from the perspective of the white man.
But the main characters, you’ve got Tony Stark, Captain America, Thor, the three main big guys are obviously white males, though Thor is supposedly an alien, and then you got the Hulk and Ant-Mman and Star Lord and Doctor Strange and Spider-Man, and based on the reviews, it looked like it was a lot easier for the core MCU audience at the time, which were single white men and mostly millennials, to accept Black Panther rather than Captain Marvel. Part of that might have been animosity towards the sort of in-your-face feminism of Brie Larson and not so much the character Captain Marvel.
But, anyway, it’s like you got the one female character that starts at the beginning with us, and we have to kill her off first before she even gets her own feature film, and then, oh yeah, we ought to give her something and so here’s a feature film with Black Widow.
I’m writing a book and I’ve discovered that in the writing of the book, some of the people who are helping me edit it, giving me feedback are pointing out, people who are older and more experienced in writing, that the description of the female characters is vague, in general, and as I reflected on why that was so part of it, it was that I didn’t want to reveal, say too much, too specific to reveal and being afraid of revealing the identity of the women.
It actually works because what it does is it allows in the imagination of the reader, of the other male reader, for him to fill in for him what an HB8 would be, and so he imagines that already. It’s a very lazy and, obviously, disrespectful way, a dehumanizing way of describing the women in the reports, in your journals of what happened in your interactions and so on.
As a result, I discovered that I have very little experience writing descriptively about women, beyond, of course, the basics, beautiful, plain, hair color, height, that sort of thing that the average immature man tends to see as physical features of a woman.
This past year, I’ve been training my mind’s eye to notice a lot more in how to write richer descriptions of women that appear in the stories and the challenge really is noticing the things I didn’t notice or pay attention to before. Of course, I’m not talking about personality traits, that’s something I’ve always noticed, but in a quick description in a story, when you introduce a woman, a female character, you’re having to describe her physicality in ways that are not just sexual or not just the features that an immature male would most notice.
But when reading the negative reviews of the recent TV shows, including Hawkeye that featured the development of a woman character– By the way, I forgot to mention, one of the First Phase main characters was Hawkeye, another white male. I was realizing that a lot of the negative reviews by men of these female-centric, women-centric TV shows were they were suffering from the same cognitive bias that I had been suffering that had led to superficial descriptions of women characters in my writing.
Guys like female characters that are basically like dudes, but with breasts and a vagina.  It was like there’s all of this online criticism about these TV shows and it seemed like Marvel not only didn’t give a damn, but that they kept ratcheting up the stakes in each new episode that they released and each new show that they were putting out.
Then it finally became obvious in She-Hulk, where they flat out not only trolled their more extreme sort of incel-like hater demographic, but also showed that they not only knew that this was happening, but that they predicted, and not only predicted that it was happening, but they counted on it happening, because it was written into the plot of the TV shows, and then they just owned them by making it a central plot point and joking about it.
When I first learned about how feminist philosophy is different from the way philosophy used to be done, because the way philosophy used to be done was through argumentation—taking your opponent down, cutting them down. It was argument, counter-argument, strengthening of your argument through resistance, through criticism, and that was the main way that philosophy was practiced and probably still is practiced in the universities and philosophy departments—and that the feminist alternative or their different way of doing it is a lot more caring and nurturing, and supportive and allowing more space, literal pausing and time to allow people who may not be as confident, may not be as sharp-witted or as fast on their feet to come up with their arguments, formulate them and then say them out loud, or even provide them a forum where they can submit the written form of it if they don’t have the confidence to read it out.
But if all you’ve ever known is the combative style, it would probably really annoy you when the teacher or the moderator was preventing the combative style from taking dominance and was making room for or making space for, or holding the space for other approaches, other styles that might be at a very different pace, that might have a different order of the way things will go and how things will be conducted, to allow for more voices.
In many ways, it’s like what I just mentioned about philosophy. A woman’s or a feminist’s or a feminine approach to philosophy is one that is more nurturing and supportive, and by the way, is a much more effective way of doing philosophy in many other cultural contexts, like Asian contexts where you’re not encouraged to raise your hand or to interrupt your interlocutor or to talk over them as you are encouraged to do that in a kind of Oxford Cambridge style of debate and that became the dominant way of doing philosophy in person in Western university departments.
As someone who grew up shy and is introverted, I had to learn how to verbally joust and that wasn’t a natural way that I was taught in my culture, and it’s definitely not the way that philosophy is done in China or Japan. Returning to the woman’s point of view in She-Hulk are the things that a woman in her socioeconomic bracket at her age and being single cares about, and that’s the story arc that’s most important, like getting justice for her point of view, for her invasion of privacy, like winning the lawsuit at the end and getting the guy, or at least continuing the dating relationship.
It’s not just that the main character is female. It’s not like taking the Captain America movie and then just swapping out the main character for a woman, but keeping the story otherwise the same. That’s what I meant by a female male character. Instead, what the TV series She-Hulk does is it fights to make the story be told from the perspective of a 30-something attorney, and a 30-something single attorney who is struggling with her dating life and struggling with self-esteem, so it’s centered around the concerns of a 30-something-year-old woman.
This explains a lot of the backlash, because the old core audience just assumed and have always had the stories told from the point of view of the man of the core audience, back then which were white males, now older, 10 years older now. Actually, more accurately, Iron Man was in 2008, so it’s been 14 years now. The fans that they grabbed with that Iron Man movie are now 14 years older. They need to go back and get the new audience, the younger audience, and that younger audience, a bigger proportion of them, have been used to taking different points of view, but the old core audience of white males, who are now 14 years older, are not used to taking the other points of view.
Black people might have experienced something similar when they watch Black Panther. I wouldn’t know. I really enjoyed Black Panther and I can’t wait for the sequel to come out, but I went, “No, because I’m not black, so I don’t share that experience,” but it was easy for me to enjoy it because it was still an action movie and it was culturally rich and visually stunning.
Even Tinder, these sort of swipe rights, swipe left, “make an immediate decision” type of dating apps are very much skewed against men and it’s only the top 5 percent of men that actually do well on these apps, so