A Feminist Defense of "Captain Marvel"

A Feminist Defense of “Captain Marvel”
3/22/2019 by Amanda Finn

This piece is dedicated to the men next to me who fell asleep and snored through the entire film, and the dude bro behind me who snickered every time Captain Marvel did something awesome. It’s also dedicated to the little boy in front of me who exclaimed, during an alien examination scene: “They’re laughing because they can see his daddy parts!”





Captain Marvel is not the best superhero film I’ve ever seen—and believe me, I’ve seen them. I love superhero movies. I swoon over the ridiculousness of Tony Stark. I adore Batman. I’m Bruce Banner’s number-one fangirl. (And before we begin: Get outta here, Marvel-versus-DC purists!) But regardless of my opinion, the facts show that Captain Marvelmatters. The film made $150 million in its opening weekend. It was Marvel’s first film starring a woman. It was Marvel’s first film with a female director. It featured MCU’s first female composer. From the get go, Captain Marvel was going to have a hell of a time pleasing male fans, especially after the (debunked!) rumor that Brie Larson told white men the movie isn’t for them. Here’s the thing: Larson could have said that. This movie isn’t made for them, and that’s okay. Not everything can be about white men. Men get to spar over a plethora of personalities that they align with as fans, duking it out to see whose hero is best. Why are women still fighting just to see their heroes come to life?

“The truth is that the comics industry has had a complicated relationship with female characters,” Amanda Shendruk explains in her book Analyzing the Gender Representation of 34,476 Comic Book Characters. “They are often hyper-sexualized, unnecessarily brutalized, stereotyped and used as tokens. They’re also rare. Only 26.7 percent of all DC and Marvel characters are female, and only 12 percent of mainstream superhero comics have female protagonists.” Gender isn’t the only barrier to parity facing the superhero sector, either. We’ve got far to go in terms of equal representation. White men are still overwhelmingly overrepresented in the genre, despite the fact that Black Panther was the best superhero film to date and Wonder Woman was the highest-grossing.

But the industry has time to change—and we’ve got their backs as they take on the challenge. There is a clear desire for non-white male superheroes from fans. Let’s review, for instance, all of the MCU movies that Captain Marvel ranked higher than on Rotten Tomatoes when I was writing this piece: Thor, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World and The Incredible Hulk. The movie was also ranked higher than Marvel TV shows “The Defenders,” “The Punisher,” “Iron Fist” and “Inhumans.” Earlier this month, Captain‘s overall score on the site was 80 percent—making it tied with both Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The First Avenger.

And let’s not leave our DC friends out of this game. Captain Marvel has rated higher than every single DC Extended Universe film released to date, with one incredible exception: Wonder Woman.(The Nolan Batman franchise is not considered part of the DC Extended Universe, FYI.)\.


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https://msmagazine.com/2019/03/22/a-feminist-defense-of-captain-marvel/