Among upcoming offerings by Hollywood, there is a TV show called Supergirl which seems to be the story of Superman’s obscure cousin becoming a hero, and is created by Greg Berlanti, who has already produced two other superhero shows, “Arrow” and “The Flash”, but now is taking his game to a grown-up TV network. IIRC, he also did the Green Lantern movie, which is generally regarded as a failure, by both comic book fans and normal moviegoers. Berlanti’s extant shows are tonally very different, one dark and brooding, about a grim vigilante who is a flat-out Batman rip-off, and the other cheerful and humorous, bordering on silly, and dignifying the most adolescent character and behaviors on it. Yet, on both shows, the female lead characters faced backlash and criticism from the fans and critics alike for their portrayals as stupid and danger bait, and apparently existing only to make life difficult for the heroes (the flipside no one mentions when they complain that female characters exist only to support the male lead’s story – they are supporting figures for good and for ill), and replacement love interests were interposed.

In Supergirl, the promotional material suggests she was sent from Krypton as Kal-El’s babysitter, but something went wrong and she ended up hiding and living as a normal teenager without apparent contact with Superman. The adds show her having kept her head down and hidden her abilities for all this time, before deciding to let her talents show and be the heroine she is born to be. The brief glimpses of her normal life suggest she is as “adorkable” as the actually popular secondary female characters of Berlanti’s other shows.

The show appears to be marketed as some sort of feminist appeal to quiet the internet flaks who are disgruntled that Hollywood has failed to make a movie about female superheroes, and never mind that there are not any with the mainstream recognition of Superman, Batman or Spiderman who have at least 18 movies to their credit between them, and another due next year. The nerd fans of a bunch of picture books want people to treat their niche characters like the real thing, just as women expect to be taken seriously as, or in pretending to be, soldiers, police officers, athletes and husbands, to have their inferior abilities receive the same recognition and recompense as a man who can lift greater weights, run faster, work year round without being pregnant, subdue suspects without drawing a gun, or provide superior economic support to a family unit … or draw audiences into movie theaters. At which women suck. People went to Glenn Close's best-selling film to watch Chris Pratt and a talking raccoon. The best actress or actor in the whole thing was a mere curiosity. When she and her performance are the main attraction, she makes much less money at the ticket counter. Hence paying her less.

It seems, that in an effort to avoid the same lack of audience interest that plagues lead female shows & movies, they are trying to market this as some sort of female solidarity thing. They have held special advance showings for exclusively female audiences, with the lead actress showing up for photo ops with the girls she is supposedly inspiring.

But what is so female-empowering about the show? What is the message of gender equality? “This made-up species of human-like aliens has females?” If the rules for Supergirl are the same for Superman, she is an indestructible demi-god who can go anywhere and do just about anything. When she saves a crashing airplane, she is not really being heroic so much as charitable. A hero is someone who takes a risk for others or for a cause. A hero risks his life or sacrifices his own interest to the betterment of others. Supergirl is just doing something she thinks is cool. She’s not going to die if her plane caper goes wrong (although it seems to me, the application of the incalculable force of Kryptonian self-propulsion applied to an aluminum airplane fuselage, and concentrated in an area the size of a petite female handspan, could drastically reduce the odds of the survival of the occupants). Superman is a hero, because he could do whatever he wants, and has all the power he could wish for, and chooses instead to help people, while allowing his personal friends and associates to look down on him and treat him like a big goober, in order to keep them safe. Supergirl, as far as the trailers show, is all about seeking to exercise her powers to a greater degree for her own self-satisfaction and with the encouragement and approval of other people in her life, and possibly inspired by the acclaim and approval Superman is already receiving.

If they are really trying the ham-fisted metaphor of women allegedly being held back in society and subtly discouraged from pursuing their optimal talents, they are missing by a mile. The show seems to be dismissing Supergirl’s decision to pursue an unrewarding career, and instead approving of her making the most of her innate physical abilities and taking care of weaker and more helpless people. Directly applied to real-life women, that is promoting motherhood over the corporate world! How is creating an example where the rules for normal people do not apply, supposed to have meaning for normal people? As I have noted in the past about other explicitly feminist TV shows about super-powered women, “She’s admirable because of the potential achievements deriving from her superior innate physical prowess” is probably not the optimal feminist message.

The other aspect of the general call for a female superhero, and female lead roles in general, in accordance with the marketing of this show, seems to be the contention that male heroes do not satisfy the needs or wants of female viewers. In my experience with female fans of superhero movies, they are almost never enthusiastic about the action roles given to Scarlett Johansson or Evangeline Lily or Jaimie Alexander. Rather they get excited about Chris Hemsworth taking off his shirt, or sticking his tongue down the throat of the skinny little whiner who pines for Thor to save her, rather than his strapping, butt-kicking female peer. But if it is true, that women can’t be happy with male leads and need females, how is it any different for male viewers? If they cannot be expected to accept male heroes, why should men be expected to except female heroes? (Or white people black heroes by the same rationale? )

At best, this mindset, if correct, means female lead shows and films are reaching for the approval of the gender whose advocates are the first to claim has less money than the other. If they still somehow manage to offset the less money available to women to spend on superhero entertainment with the slightly larger potential audience, they have the issue of feminist advocacy to deal with.

The same feminist advocacy that creates an artificial demand for female superheroes has definite ideas about what those superheroes should be. Although they still seem to be nodding appreciatively to Evangeline Lilly saying “About time!” when her character is shown a female costume in an epilogue scene to the Ant-man movie, if that costume is ever worn by Lilly on screen, I imagine they are going to find all sorts of things to say about the absence of total body coverage of the depicted uniform. No doubt there are already feminists fuming about Supergirl wearing a skirt and having long hair. Although in this age of facial recognition software, it would probably provide a better disguise for her secret identity than a pair of eyeglasses. The skirt is a good point, however, since that is undoubtedly a garment originally designed with certain gravitational and altitudinal assumptions taken for granted. But the fanboys of picture books have to be appeased, and she probably has a skirt in the source material, so…

In related issues, in two separate superhero franchises, in two separate universes, there is the case of a woman busting the glass ceiling and successfully operating a multimillion dollar technical industry company, with all the self-satisfaction evinced on the part of the show and films in question at these female accomplishments, which ignores that they are not female accomplishments. They were handed to the women in question by men, with whom said women engaged in sexual relationships. Since that is how feminist icon Gloria Steinem became a magazine publisher it is apparently a perfectly acceptable feminist thing, but I sure can’t see how.

It’s not like Felicity Smoke or Pepper Potts climbed the corporate ladder and put in their dues. If they had been men whose fathers turned the companies over to them on similarly short notice, there would be snide comments about being born with silver spoons and pampered princes and being promoted by Daddy. In fact, there was a movie a number of years ago, in which the protagonist’s plan to run a company was condemned by the “voice of reason” character on the basis that working for several months at an entry-level job was not sufficient qualification, regardless of the relationship he had developed with the future owner and his skills in an unrelated area of activity (finance in this case). It was called Wall Street, and featured Dr. Pym, Ultron and Uncle Ben. But Pepper Potts is qualified to run a cutting-edge research and armaments manufacturing company on the basis of picking up Tony Stark’s dry cleaning, and being obnoxiously condescending and slut-shaming to a woman who achieved a much greater degree of professional success at that point in her career, as well as demonstrated competence at her primary job skill. Christine Everheart’s job is finding out stuff that is not generally known and telling people, which she does repeatedly throughout both movies; all Pepper Potts does is not cause bankruptcy a company that has exclusive production of next generation energy sources and futuristic weaponry, but her slut-shaming Everheart for sleeping with a man she will later sleep with herself makes her a Strong Female Character.

Tony Stark might not have earned the gift of Stark Industries from his father, but has more than proved his father’s equal at technological development. Pepper has done nothing on that scale to prove she deserves the gift of Stark Industries from her paramour. Felicity Smoke does pretty much the same thing on “Arrow”, being put in charge of a company founded by a tech-genius who invents a flying suit of armor, despite a very short resume and very limited field of employment within the company. Felicity is nearly young enough to be Pepper’s daughter, and could not even have picked up a fraction of whatever applicable knowledge Pepper could arguably have obtained with more than a decade fetching Tony’s coffee, and her computer expertise is even less likely to be applicable to the running of a major corporation than Bud’s stock market expertise in “Wall Street.” But she’s an awesome spunky chick AND she is the nerd stand-in, so between those two roles, she’s never, ever wrong or less than superbly capable at anything significant (the recent 4th season premier episode reveals she’s a bad cook).

Speaking of which, who are fanboys that they must always be appeased? I am morally certain that aeronautical engineers are going to be even more disgusted with the portrayal of Supergirl saving a plane by pushing really hard on a tiny spot on its underside than fanboys would be at her lack of a skirt. Readers of actual literature are told in effect by Hollywood adaptations “Hey, you know all that character development that made the story so meaningful to you? Well fuck off and die. We’re going to pander to a 2 hour attention span, rather than the two days you took reading the book.” Historians and history buffs are all but mocked with depictions of famous historical events. Just about every profession has sharp words for their profession’s depictions on television and film (actual lawyers determined that the most realistic portrayal of a trial is in “My Cousin Vinny” a farcical portrayal focusing more on the cultural clashes of New Yorkers in rural Alabama; kudos to “Vinny” but that means how many serious legal dramas with far more critical acclaim and incentive to get the law right, actually did worse? ). Hollywood sucks at getting things right, so why is it only comic book fans who get so much respect or whose complaints are taken so seriously? Hollywood can buy the rights to a couple of obscure novels and turn them into the Die Hard franchise or a novel about Africa and make a Vietnam hindsight propaganda film, so why can’t they take the rights to Superman's equivalent of the WNBA and keep whatever elements fit their story and say “Hey folks, it’s a show about a hot chick who gets involved in special effects action sequences! Wearing whatever we think will generate the best ratings!” And then cast an actual hot chick, not an obscure actress with resting cry-face who vaguely resembles most drawings of her third-most noticed anatomical feature (there not yet being human beings with the proportions of her more notable anatomy). If Hollywood can cast John Cusack as both Richard Nixon and Brian Wilson, or Tom Wilkinson and Live Schreiber to play LBJ at the SAME AGE, why do they need to care about how closely their actress resembles a person who never actually existed?

You can pander to feminists or comic book nerds or a regular audience. Young can probably get away with pandering to more than one if you do it right. But CBS has an awfully quick trigger for shows that earn CW ratings, and most of the people doing this show don't have a much better track record in their careers on various superhero shows. And if Supergirl crashes and burns, it's all going to be sexism's fault that the show was cancelled, when male shows like Arrow & Flash continue for multiple seasons with similar ratings. Or its going to be the audience being threatened by a powerful woman. As always.