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Copying men is not progress for women

By Scott Tibbs, April 24, 2018

I have heard it said that feminists are angry because they were born women and would rather be men. That keeps popping up when I hear about male characters in fiction being transformed into female characters. This is not progress for women, this is making female characters a pale shadow of an existing male character.

The specific example that brought this to mind is the silly idea of making James Bond into a woman. Bond is clearly a male character, and has been so for generations. Is it really "progress" for the representation of women in fiction to make a female copy of James Bond? No, it is not. It simply makes the female character into an imitation of an existing male character, and that imitation will never be viewed in the same light as the male character no matter how well her story is told.

With James Bond (Jane Bond?) we have an obvious question. Why not craft a new story, with a new female agent, in the same universe as the Bond movies? Bond is Agent 007, and we know there are more 00 agents in MI-6. Alec Trevelyan was traitorous Agent 006 in Goldeneye, and M told Bond that she sent 009 to kill the terrorist Renard in The World is Not Enough. So why not introduce 008 as a brand new character, a female 00 agent? Perhaps she could even rescue Bond after he is kidnapped in an opening scene. Bond shows up early, and we actually do not see him again until the final scene.

Comics are guilty of this too. Jane Foster Thor is not her own character. She is a female imitation of an existing male character. If Eric Masterson and Beta Ray Bill can be given their own hammers and act as their own characters, why is it that Marvel cannot do the same with Foster? How about creating a brand new set of powers that do not involve a mystical hammer? I could list comic book characters who are gender-swapped versions of male characters all day long, starting with Supergirl.

I have to roll my eyes when the entertainment industry pats themselves on the back for how progressive they are by gender-swapping existing male characters instead of going through the work of actually creating a new female character that does not rely on the fans' love of an existing male character. This is not feminism. This is lazy virtue signaling.