Dear Hollywood:
I enjoyed Rogue One. It was a good time. But, yet a-fucking-gain, can I just say: making your main character a woman doesn’t mean you’ve met your quota and don’t need to include any other women in your whole movie.
How is this still so hard for you? 52% of the population are women-people. We’re really everywhere now — just all over the place, doing all sorts of things. Your movie is set in space, in the future. It’s probably safe to assume there are some women-identifying folks in future space. They probably even do things like fly planes and shoot blasters, because you don’t really need a penis to operate either of those.
Of the thousands of people who appeared in that movie: in crowds and villages and bases and meetings and squadrons, I counted 11 who were discernibly female. 11. And that includes the main character, her mother, and the cameo at the end. Other than them, I saw two rebel leader types, two rebel pilots, and four others in the background of the big resistance gathering.
Everyone on the side of the empire appeared to be male. Admittedly, you can’t tell a stormtrooper’s gender, but every visible officer/bureaucrat/worker was a dude. All the engineers were men. Everyone who volunteered for the rebel crew. The six visible women in that big resistance gathering is not equality or representation: it’s the most pitiful of token efforts. In order to make crowd scenes with so few women, you surely have to really be trying. We are, again, 52% of the humans. We tend to just sort of crop up when humans are gathered.
And apart from the little critter with the glasses in The Force Awakens, have any of the non-human characters been women? And, while we’re at it, why do all the robots need to sound like dudes?
In a movie that did a great job with casting minorities and generally being a good time without being batshit insane, it’s disappointing. And frankly, I want to watch a movie where I don’t have to do this. It’s distracting and it makes me angry, and then I hiss things at Brazil under my breath and ruin the mood for everyone around me.
It’s not that hard, surely. Just look at all the people you’ve got standing around and talking and doing stuff, and unless their genitalia is actively necessary to the plot, make half of them women.
Seriously. Just do that. Please. Because half of us are.