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The Token Woman

The Problem with Superhero Teams

By Alexandrea CallaghanPublished 12 months ago 3 min read
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In a world with an incredible amount of superhero movies and action movies there are many badass, heroic men. More impressively there are exactly 25% as many token women. The Token Woman trope is an extensive, and consistent one. Who knows where it started? We don’t know but we do know that the trope is bullshit so of course I have opinions about it.

Starting with The Avengers, both the comic and MCU versions. The team debuted in The Avengers #1 in 1963 and was comprised of Iron Man, Ant-Man, Hulk, Thor and our first token woman, Wasp. She is perhaps the most classic and quintessential of token women as she was included because she was married to Ant-Man. It's also worth noting that since 1963 each of the male members of the original Avengers have had multiple solo titles, team up and front and center stories. Wasp just received her first solo title this year. In the MCU they follow a similar suit, the first Avengers team on screen consisted of Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Hawkeye, Thor and Black Widow. Hulk has had several solo movies, Iron Man, Captain America and Thor all received a trilogy before Black Widow received 1 movie. Oh and when she did her character was already dead.

Marvel is actually notorious for this, the original X-Men team was Cyclops, Beast, Angel, Iceman and Marvel Girl…their opposition being the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants consisting of Magneto, Mastermind, Toad, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. This was also in 1963, though this set a trend, established a pattern that only one woman on a team was necessary. This had and continues to have harmful consequences on the way women are treated in media.

DC comics are just as guilty; the original line up of the Justice League (Brave and the Bold #28 1955) was Superman, Batman, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman and Wonder Woman. Now we know that there have been more women on the team since, as with the Avengers but it doesn’t change the fact that Wonder Woman has been DCs go-to woman for decades now. She was created to be such a feminist icon that DC seems to think that they can just rest on their laurels because they have her.

This sexist phenomenon is rampant in superhero teams the Fantastic Four, the New Avengers, the Marvel Family, the Guardians of the Galaxy all have a single female character on their original rosters. The Inhumans get away on a technicality with 9 members of the royal family 2 of them are women, but I think we are understanding my point. In the original Justice Society of America and Defenders teams there were no women at all, an even more common phenomenon. 30% of all superhero teams have no women whatsoever, 12% of all superhero teams have more women than men BUT most of those teams are all female teams. So less than 5% of all superhero teams include everyone and have more women than men. Which means out of around 2800 teams between both Marvel and DC most of these teams consist of far more men than women.

This wildly, deeply sexist trope is often referred to as the Smurfette effect, or Smurfette syndrome. Having a solo woman on a team is problematic for many reasons, the first being that it gives the writers far too many opportunities to oversexualize her. The second being that the woman is always given less care in her writing, we see this plainly in how Marvel wrote Black Widow for 10 entire years. Not only was she oversexualized but her dialogue always sounded like it was written by someone who's never talked to a woman before.

“Am I always cleaning up after you boys”

The whole “kiss me” scene in the Winter Soldier

Just her entire existence in Iron Man 2, it's ridiculous and insulting and we are all ready for it to stop.

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About the Creator

Alexandrea Callaghan

Certified nerd, super geek and very proud fangirl.

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