>My interview with James Cameron prompted outrage – but

>Another good rule about journalism is that it’s always best to be honest, because readers can sense artifice. So I’m going to hold up my hands here and say the reason I totally missed this story, despite being the person who literally wrote the story, is that, well, I agreed with Cameron.

>The people who got so angry forget where he’s coming from, which is the 1980s and 1990s. Now, there are plenty of bad things one can say about those decades (don’t even get me started on the jeans), but Hollywood was a lot better back then at getting female characters on to the screen. No, it wasn’t all perfect – we are talking about the era of Pretty Woman, after all, the happy story of how sexy prostitution is. But there were so many movies about women back then that Susan Faludi could dismiss the 1987 comedy Baby Boom as anti-feminist garbage in her seminal book Backlash. Today, a movie about a woman in her early 40s who kicks ass on Wall Street, doesn’t want a baby, inherits a baby and then builds up her own business empire sounds, compared with what’s playing in your multiplex right now, downright Dworkin-esque in its radicalism.

>This is the Hollywood into which Cameron emerged, in which he wrote original heroines like the brilliant and prickly Dr Lindsey Brigman (played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) in The Abyss, and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a teeny bit wet in The Terminator and then breathtakingly awesome in Terminator 2.

>Which brings us to today, a time when women have been so neglected by the movies that we have to get excited about Wonder Woman, a character Hollywood has been knocking out since the 70s. It was extraordinary to see how defensively women reacted to Cameron’s comments: do we have so few heroines that we have to cling to the ones who come along?

>Look, I liked Wonder Woman. You’d have to be as heartless as the Terminator not to enjoy it, and I’m glad that if Hollywood’s focus is now superheroes, then someone finally got round to making a movie about the one well-known female superhero. But I can also say that a movie in which an objectively gorgeous woman, played by a former Miss Israel, kicks ass in her underwear isn’t exactly breaking down the barriers in terms of representations of women on screen. It’s not fashionable to say this now, in an era where strident opinions must be expressed in fewer than 140 characters, but things don’t have to be all or nothing.

>I get why women would be so angry with Cameron – a man, and a former arsehole at that – mansplaining feminism to them; but it can also be acknowledged that the man does know a thing or two about female characters. The truth is, the most interesting female characters are now on TV, in shows such as, and hardly limited to, Transparent, Chewing Gum, Orange Is The New Black, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Scandal, Fleabag and Game Of Thrones. I hope movies get more heroines, too – maybe even ones who spot a news story when it hits them in the face. But surely only a superhero can do that.

>women with internalized misogyny

sigh

I hope Cameron learned something from this experience.

>>87439977
that he should make another female lead movie and break 2 billion and shut these whores down

>>87439579
>but things don’t have to be all or nothing.
i feel this is the important point when considering cultural discussion. society today has lost all of its nuance, its sense of greyness that anything is either heralded as a success or a failure. nothing is relative

I said Cameron was right on normiebook the other day. Wonder Woman isn't half the strong female character Sarah Conor or Ripley was 30+ years ago.
I got cyber lynched by a bunch of ideologically possessed women and low-test men.

Nobody even talks about the film, they all talk about the cultural significance of it. 10 years and it will be forgotten.

>>87440071
>10 years

lol

>>87440071
>10 years
more like ten months. and that goes for 97% of the movies released this year.

Glad it's being said. Will tumblrites denounce her?

>>87440114
We live in an era where even a Star Wars film that breaks 2 billion is forgotten by the general public in 3 months, until another one comes along