As much as we, guys, don't care about it, it still influences and shape our reality in ways.
I am always surprised to see people claim some kind of superiority of what they ingest, as if it doesn't bother them or effect.
We are what we ingest, as cliche as that may seem. What we do and spend our time consuming is very much a great indicator of who we are and what are attitudes we will possess.
Agreed.
What I'm thinking about is what if the situation was reversed? Imagine things like these:
• Your favorite superheros are all females, the movies that feature them barely have any male dialogue that doesn't talk about females, and most characters in the story are female. At the very least, it'd be disappointing and underrepresenting of a large part of the audience who are males.
• Males are constantly portrayed in movies as dependent people who seek female companionship for protection, success, strength, and every other cliche there is. That'd be outright annoying and possibly even insulting (again, to a large part of the audience, i.e., males), not to mention unrealistic.
• Your favorite movie which has a deeply philosophical storyline and well-developed female characters who have thoughtful conversations throughout the story features a couple of male characters whose primary concern is whether they're loved by a specific female character(s), and they're always busy seeking the female character's companionship while the latter is engaged in all kinds of adventures and risk-taking.
Yeah, that
would suck, and it'd suck even more because those portrayals would be absurdly inaccurate to any males I know.
I think the fact that such portrayals are considered palatable by many people and not even a concern points to a desensitization resulting from decades of movies doing this—the "What's the big deal? It's nothing new!" sort of desensitization.