I’ve said for a long time that the only requirement for being a feminist is to believe that men and women are equal. It’s a pretty low bar (that a disturbing number of people still can’t manage to achieve). You’ll notice that this low bar totally allows for the existence of male feminists. That’s partly because the favored enemy of feminism, The Patriarchy, is a structure that hurts everyone, including men.
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At some point in my education as a gender studies scholar, I learned that one of the (many) reasons that the purveyors of television, books, and movies feature predominantly male protagonists is that boys and men are reluctant to identify with female protagonists, while girls and women are willing and able to identify with male protagonists. So by featuring a male lead, studios and publishers hedge their bets: men will identify with the character, and women probably will as well. Whereas if they allow women to be represented in media, then they risk losing that sweet, sweet male consumer cash. So it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle—boys and men are never asked to identify with girls and women, so they never learn to identify with girls and women, and so then in the next generation we continue to feature primarily male protagonists, and value predominantly masculine characteristics. Because why risk positive social change if it could cost some money? Not in capitalism, thank you very much.
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