Dear Marvel, we don’t want your forced ‘girl power’

By Megan Rostron (she/her)

When a million shots of Scarlett Johansson’s behind are replaced with a scene showcasing women being strong and powerful, you’d take that as a win right? Wrong. With Marvel’s latest film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 having been released earlier this month, it is worth taking a look into their past filmography and whether or not Marvel is actually moving with the times.

The idea of ‘girl power’ and having strong female roles in film are concepts that have grown in demand and popularity in recent years. When reflecting on films trying to be inclusive and stay current, we need to ask, are they exhibiting a true example of female empowerment, or does their attempt fall short to a rather embarrassing and quite frankly offensive forced ‘girl power’ moment?

For Marvel, the well-known Avengers: Endgame scene where all of the lead female characters come together and are shown fighting alongside each other is a great example. The scene begins with Captain Marvel arriving on the battlefield and telling Spiderman that she will deliver the all-powerful gauntlet to safety and, essentially, save the day. When questioned by Spiderman as to how she was going to achieve it, all of the female characters arrive on screen to show that they are going to help her.

The women then go off into the battle and are seen defeating the bad guys as a team. According to Endgame’s executive producer, Trihn Tran, the scene did not bode well with audiences even in test screenings. Tran revealed that the audiences felt the scene was pandering by simply “putting the scene in there just to put the scene in there”.

Cutting the scene from the movie entirely was considered, but Tran was determined that it would remain. This led to filming additional scenes of the female heroes fighting in smaller groups before coming together in an attempt to make the converging more seamless. These changes did not make the scene feel any less pandering and insulting to viewers. Captain Marvel had just flown across the galaxy and now was needing help from characters who don’t possess anywhere near her abilities. Instead of flying the gauntlet to safety, she remained on foot fighting alongside her female companions.

The lack of Captain Marvel using her abilities seemed entirely out of place and like an erasure of how powerful her character actually is. I myself can distinctly remember being 16 years old, in the cinema, and immediately having a bad taste in my mouth.

From the instant I saw the other female characters enter the screen, I knew what was happening. I let out a sigh and a resentful “oh God,” as I watched the next painful three minutes of Marvel trying to be feminist-friendly. This forced girl power scene seemed so out of place and unnecessary I am still shocked that anyone thought it had been executed effectively, or if there ever even was a way to do so.

Audiences would rather the scene have been excluded entirely as it added nothing to the plot, so why put it in the first place? Of course, this is not Marvel's first dance with backlash regarding sexism in their films and certainly wasn’t the last. We have seen them go from critiques of the hyper-sexualisation of their female characters, to anger over them forcing a girl power moment, to the horrific shehulk reveal that none of us will ever forget.

What is so frustrating is that conveying positive girl power is possible. We have seen the success and positive response that Marvel’s Black Widow received, following being directed by a woman. Coincidence? I think not.

So, while we have (hopefully) left the all-too-frequent cleavage and booty shots in the past, there is still a lot of work to be done. With their most recent films, and even more that are planned to be released, it will be interesting to see how, or even if, Marvel has actually taken this criticism into consideration. We can only hope that large and influential franchises such as the Marvel films actively try to do better and avoid any more pandering productions.