Ok, so Brie Larson says she thinks an all female Avengers movie would be cool (A Force!) And all these dudes loooooosing their mind. “What about an all MALE Avengers film?” Uh….the first Avengers films you mean. I get that Black Widow was in it, so I’ll compromise. We’ll have Captain Marvel, Scarlet Witch, She Hulk, Wasp, Photon, and Storm…..and Hawkeye.
An all female team? So what, they are just gonna fight each other?
Never read A Force, huh?
Isn’t it funny how propaganda for decades has “taught” people that women will naturally fight with each other when in fact men are the violence class and in every mammalian species but hyenas, where the females are soaked in testosterone, males are more likely to fight each other than females are.
It’s not that women don’t fight each other – they do, but not nearly to the same extent that men do, so if you can imagine an all-male superhero team that doesn’t spend all its time in internal fighting, it should be easier to envision an all-female superhero team doing the same thing.
Jesus leave it to tumblr to take that literally. Let me break it down. Men physically fight because we are built and socially guided into roles that suit that. Women judge and compete to destroy each other on a scale so high that I’ve never worked a job where the women I worked with weren’t actively trying to get each other fired. You just don’t see a lot of all female teams anywhere. Definitely no ship crews/sanitation or construction. Women aren’t defending nations or building them. Blame whatever excuse you want, but there are teams of men everywhere on every part of the planet working together. Why can’t women organize on that scale?
Women have been organizing on that scale since the dawn of time. PTA, quilting bees, pretty much all communal work done in a farming community that pertains to either textiles or food preparation, the gathering part of hunter-gathering.
If you’re a man, you don’t get involved in all-female teams and you probably aren’t even aware they are happening. The work women do is consistently devalued by men in every society that anthropologists or sociologists have studied, to the point where the Russians devalue medicine because most of the doctors are women.
Most of the professions you mention women not being part of are because women were explicitly excluded, and since we moved away from being primarily agrarian in small farming towns to mostly working outside the home for large corporations, a lot of the work women used to do communally is now either done by one woman at a time, or a married couple, or it’s done by a corporation that wants you to pay for it (such as the making of clothing). So yeah, there is a lot less evidence in today’s society of large groups of women working together, because the all-male teams you refer to were always about working together outside the home, and the all-female teams were generally about working together to make everyone’s homes better, and the trend has been to isolate people into individual nuclear families so that we have to buy services from companies that in the past groups of women would have performed for the households of all the women involved, but which are way too much work for one or two people and especially if they work outside the home too.
BTW, higher male aggression toward males is actually one of the only biological differences between the sexes, as opposed to cultural – it appears in almost every human society and in almost all mammals and throughout history. It’s true that our culture trains men to make this problem significantly worse rather than trying to fight this tendency, but this is one of very few differences between the sexes that is genuinely rooted in biology (which doesn’t mean it’s universally true of all women or all men; there are many gentle, pacifistic men and many aggressive, violent women, but statistically, human men are biologically more inclined to be violent and especially toward other men. 80% of all murder victims in the US and 90% of all murderers are men.)
If you’ve been in a lot of environments where women backstabbed each other a lot, my guess is those environments were highly competitive and very sexist, so that very few women could get ahead. It’s a lot easier for a woman to get status by backstabbing a woman than by backstabbing a man; what you end up with is a large number of women competing for a small number of high-status slots that might be open to women, with men taking all the other high-status slots. I’ve been in the working world for over 30 years as a woman and I’ve never worked anywhere that this kind of thing happened; also, all of my bosses have been women since I was in my early 20′s and all of them were supportive of my career ambitions and helped me to grow in my field, and in all of them I had a lot of female co-workers that worked well together, too.
(And women aren’t involved in “building nations”? Really? What kind of work do you think goes into building nations? Do you think it doesn’t involve education, medicine, farming and food preparation, all of which are worldwide majority female domains?)
