The short answer is that X-Men the movie informed me, as a geeky ten year old girl, that comic books and in fact the whole of the super hero genre could be for girls as well.
It’s not that I was ever big on following stereotypes. I wore dresses Friday, played on quads Saturday and watched football Sunday. For the most part, I never felt much of a rejection from the geekosphere because of my gender. There were talks where I had to assure boys that, yes I, as a girl, did indeed play video games. That I liked Dungeons and Dragons. And I in fact watched more nerdy television shows than they did.
Eventually my nerdiness became a bit of a non-issue (except in the ‘she’s so cool’ sort of way.)
But superheroes remained a boy zone.
I blame Saturday morning cartoons. For the most part cartoons (at least the ones I enjoyed) were very male dominated, much like everything else. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, and Pokemon all had resoundingly boy dominated stories. To get something girl oriented I would have to flip on over to the Lizzie Mcguire Show and there was nothing about it that I found enjoyable.
Yet despite the blatant guy-ness of these shows there was a decent enough female presence and even the lead male characters seemed pretty agendered at the end of the day.
I suppose I should also point out that I can perfectly appreciate a male led story. I do, in fact, enjoy male characters and don’t mind them having arcs. I can’t stress that enough. I can even project on male characters. But it has always been easier to do so with female characters and I’d like to see my gender portrayed more often. Since there’s nothing wrong with my gender, any more than there’s something wrong with the male gender.
Yet the picture I was gathering from my cartoon commercials was that superheroes go a step beyond a male led story to this no woman land.
Imagine it: sitting there, excited for the upcoming female arc that’s been promised in one of your favorite shows. Then the commercials start with names like Batman, Spiderman and Superman. Better yet, pretty much all sidekicks and side characters were boys as well. From what I gleaned from my father, a comic collector when he was a younger boy, the superhero world was pretty male populated.
I suppose it seemed sort of cool, heroes fighting crime with super powers (except for Batman because he’s Batman) but there were no girls. I wasn’t interested in something that seemed to have quite literally zero girls. Star Wars at least had one girl! Who kicked general butt and was hinted at having the same magickal powers as her twin brother. The few female names associated with the superguys (Lois Lane and Mary Jane) were just love interests. Nothing more.
I wanted none of that. It just didn’t seem interesting to this little girl.
In the year of 2000 when I turned ten years old, the X-Men movie came out. Suddenly girls had super powers and I couldn’t have been happier. Not only that, but I had choices: Rogue, Jean, Storm and Mystique! I felt spoiled.
I remember after that happened peppering my dad with X-Men related questioned. I learned about characters like Kitty, Colossus and Nightcrawler. All of whom sounded pretty awesome.
My memory fails me on which order the next events came at me in so I’ll just go with most important first.
The real game changer was the Christmas my dad gave me The Dark Phoenix Saga as a present. This was my first ever comic book. I devoured that thing, feeling pretty jazzed up about that whole comic book idea.
And then there was Jean Grey aka the Phoenix. Sure, she spent the majority of the arc as the unequivocal source of conflict for the X-Men but let’s keep in mind that until now all things superhero genred had been named after men. Here, for the first time, was a title based on a female character who was the focal point for an entire multiple issued arc.
This was no little thing for my inner girl power.
I became mildly obsessed with Jean, though the majority of my knowledge remained based on that comic and the X-Men films. A small bit from online role playing and fanfictions. This love of Jean Grey was so much that Last Stand, though disappointing in its use of the Phoenix, remained my favorite X-Men film until quite recently (it was the only one I owned until three years ago when I purchased X-Men Origins.)
There was something about how a woman could be a hero and a villain, a love interest yet not the damsel that captivated me. It was simply nothing I had seen thus far, especially not near the superhero genre.
And I think it’s because of X-Men that I feel so strongly about female representation in my media. In 2000 it pushed the envelope on what I thought was possible. That even to me, who was all about blurring the lines between ‘girl stuff’ and ‘guy stuff,’ superheroes seemed solely to be a town populated by guys. X-Men blew that theory out of the water and said ‘look here, women are special too and can save the day.’
Unfortunately there has been nothing since 2000 that has pushed that envelope again and it’s seriously disappointing. In fact, we’ve gone backwards. Not since 2005 have we had a superhero film named after a woman (Elektra) with no real promise of anything this year or next. A decade since the last female led superhero movie.
As had been said before, we’re getting a movie with a talking tree person and a talking raccoon but DC can’t even get a Wonder Woman movie to work.
The cast of X-Men: Days of Future Past is entirely male heavy even ignoring the fact that two characters have two actors portraying them with no promise of a main storyline for any of the possible female characters.
Basically, I see no progress: only stagnation.
Luckily the television side of things seems to be holding up better. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is rocking a fifty percent female main cast and Agent Carter looms on the horizon as the next Marvel produced TV series.
So, yeah, I’m happy.
I’m also unhappy.
X-Men shattered my preconceptions on a genre I might have ignored all my life. But now I have higher expectations that aren’t being met and I don’t even really feel like I’m asking for the moon here.
Just more love for the fans that actually exist instead of the ones Hollywood seems to think exist.
(And just because, Dazzler as a S.H.I.E.L.D agent because until Fox and Marvel get along, it’s never going to happen in TV or Movie land… Please tell me somebody is as sad about this as me)
Writing in the Skin 