It is absoultely the same. The main hero name is the most prominent and important thing here. It doesn't matter how you justify it as being the "man" in human. It's heavily gendered and not representive for anyone but men.
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I can't get over how dumb it is for a "Supergirl" to exist.
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No, that was the Matrix Supergirl, a blob from another universe
It's gendered like this because we didn't make a Woman Superman. Instead the creation of "Supergirl" set the gender boundaries of the title in stone.
Look, outside of his powers Superman resembles a human in everyway, I'm talking more conceptually rather than literally.
Sure she's a Superman. It's a comic book character made decades ago and that is/was how characters were names. It's lazy for sure. We have a character named Teen Lantern and Tim Drake was once named Drake 🤷🏿♂️
This is a totally ridiculous argument. Arguing that the "man" in question is "mankind" is stupid, particularly given the time period the character was created, and particularly now when large swaths of genre-related fandom are sexist and transphobic monsters. Even the cambridge dictionary makes a point of saying the usage of "man" or "mankind" can be and is sexist and to use other terms to describe the aggregate human race.
Star Trek got this right when they changed the "Where no man has gone before" to "Where no one has gone before" with TNG and then even had Kirk correct himself when he said it in the ending monologue to Star Trek VI.
Star Trek got this right when they changed the "Where no man has gone before" to "Where no one has gone before" with TNG and then even had Kirk correct himself when he said it in the ending monologue to Star Trek VI.
FGO? As in Fate/Go Online? I can't tell if you're using a Japanese gatcha game that notoriously reframes male historical figures as female because the creators needed both public domain, long dead famous names and pics of sexy women to sell their game to horny men to make your point about gender in English...
Anyway, "man" used to be inclusive in terms of "mankind", as in "manned spaceships" simply because society used to be so incredibly misogynistic even a century ago that when a lot of people (men) talked about humanity as a whole, they really were talking about just men.
I think the many young girls who grow up seeing characters like Supergirl and Batwoman, knowing that they have heroes that represent them, would disagree.
Do you think it wasn't representation when Jane Foster became "Thor" or X-23 became "Wolverine"?
I don't see how perpetuating the "male pronoun is the default" trope by using the "mankind" argument ("mankind" itself being an outmoded term) is a good idea personally? I wish they all had non-gendered names like Green Lantern and Dr. Strange but if they don't, the next best thing for representation seems to be to create the variant characters? Or am I just super out of touch and misunderstanding?
Wait.
Are you seriously trying to say that Kara Danvers should be called "Superman" because X-23 became "Wolverine?"
Not "because".
Superman shouldn't be a title limited to Men in the first place.
This comes up in Thor: Love and Thunder, someone calls the character Lady Thor, and she yells at them about it, telling them to call her Thor or The Mighty Thor.
In general, I'd rather we not use man or mankind as the default for person, thanks. I personally absolutely hate it and find it super sexist.
I think in certain cases characters can take on these names no matter their gender. For example, I remember a comic where Cass said she wanted to be Batman, and I don't think she would have a problem with keeping the name. But if we only see "man" in superhero titles and not "woman"? Absolutely not.
I think in certain cases characters can take on these names no matter their gender. For example, I remember a comic where Cass said she wanted to be Batman, and I don't think she would have a problem with keeping the name. But if we only see "man" in superhero titles and not "woman"? Absolutely not.
"Thor" and "Wolverine" aren't, tragically, commonly used words to refer to a gender.
You appear to be really struggling to understand how the English word "man" functions nowadays.
It has three meanings.
The most commonly used one is merely the equivalent of "male". A male adult is a man.
The second most commonly used one is as a collective word for humanity, as in "mankind" or "go where no man has gone before". This usage has fallen out of common speech, but it's still encountered a bit in some contexts.
The one you're trying to talk about here, "man" meaning a single human being without regard to gender, is effectively gone from English. It's so gone that I don't think you'd find a single person speaking fluent modern English who'd see the word "man" referring to a single person and not automatically assume it was equivalent to "adult male".
You may not want that to be the case, but it is, and it's not changing back any time soon.
Superman was created specifically as a man. The word "human" is not new, and if the creators had wanted Superman to be a title without a gender, they could have used Superhuman (which is a term that existed long before the character of Superman did) or Superperson.
Yep, although before the debut of Superman, Siegel and Shuster spend years coming up with characters and trying to get published, evolving their ideas along the way, and a whole bunch of them were called "Superman". They had varying origin stories - some were normal humans given some kind of sci-fi potion, and one was a future human time-travelled back to the '30s. So Superman as initially published was alien, but the character and name iterated off a starting concept that was human.
I don't think there should be no heroes at all with "woman" in their titles (if it came across like this in my OP then I apologize), I'm talking more about when these heroes are created as a spin-off from a male character and their defining trait is just "being a woman". Specifically when we are talking about characters that are (or should be) so much larger beyond their gender like Superman and Batman.
Lol, exactly.
When male streamers refer to their audience as "boys" they don't get any backlash, I'd imagine women would get a lot of pushback if they referred to theirs as "girls".
Representation and acknowledgment matter, and men really wouldn't take it well if a male Wondee Woman had the same name.
It's almost like Wonder Woman and Superman were created under completely different circunstances and with completely different intentions.
That said Wonder Woman is a case of a "male Superman" where the gender being at front and center is good and goes against my OP argument.
There's actually a male au Wonder Woman and guess what's his name is
You know what fine, I'll bite the bullet.
It would be fine for a male character (who identifies as such) to assume the "Wonder Woman" role with the same name. Because they would be trying to embody the figure of Wonder Woman and all that she represents, and there is nothing saying that adopting the more feminine aspects of it would be a problem or that it wouldn't fit. So yeah, the name shouldn't change at all, no matter the gender of who took on the "Wonder Woman" mantle.
It would be fine for a male character (who identifies as such) to assume the "Wonder Woman" role with the same name. Because they would be trying to embody the figure of Wonder Woman and all that she represents, and there is nothing saying that adopting the more feminine aspects of it would be a problem or that it wouldn't fit. So yeah, the name shouldn't change at all, no matter the gender of who took on the "Wonder Woman" mantle.
Basically, no one can convince me using man and mankind isn't super sexist.
Once again, because you keep ignoring this point, the "man" in the name isn't gender neutral. This isn't pre-modern English where men got a prefix too. Let's move away from the default being equivalent to the masculine. Even the term mankind is incredibly alienating.
Also, at this point, the defining traits of characters like Supergirl, Batgirl, or Batwoman are definitely not that they are women. That might have been the case in the 1950's, but it is no way true for characters like modern Kara Danvers, Barbara Gordon, Cass Cain, Stephanie Brown, or Kate Kane.
There's nothing saying a woman can't replace Bruce as Batman. (Superman isn't as much of a title but I guess the same holds.) But I'm going to guess not all women want to have "man" in their title, and I would hope stories would reflect that. I'm fine with a character like Cass becoming "Batwoman" as well when she replaces Bruce. The titles Batwoman/Batman and Superwoman/Superman should be interchangeable. If a non-binary character takes on the mantle, we can think of a good gender neutral equivalent or whichever name makes more sense for the character.
Once again, because you keep ignoring this point, the "man" in the name isn't gender neutral. This isn't pre-modern English where men got a prefix too. Let's move away from the default being equivalent to the masculine. Even the term mankind is incredibly alienating.
Also, at this point, the defining traits of characters like Supergirl, Batgirl, or Batwoman are definitely not that they are women. That might have been the case in the 1950's, but it is no way true for characters like modern Kara Danvers, Barbara Gordon, Cass Cain, Stephanie Brown, or Kate Kane.
Honestly I'm struggling to figure out why there's even an argument in this thread. OP is pointing out that the term "Superman" is derived from being "Super Human" and then following that up with criticism of the "Ms Male Character" trope (hence my joke about Ms. Pac-Man lol). This is... fine? What is the controversy here? Is it just the title of the thread making people think OP is saying Supergirl is a bad character? I guess this is the problem with trying to make shocking clickbaity title, to be fair. But I dunno, the take inside is honestly kind of lukewarm? I love Supergirl in some contexts, her story is arguably more interesting than Superman, but the trope that birthed her is admittedly kinda lame.
That being said, to play devil's advocate, the trope was already established and we all know deep down inside that if they didn't gender the name accordingly that audiences would have just gone "why are they calling the girl a man!!". Hell, they'd probably still do that in 2022, let alone the 40s.
That being said, to play devil's advocate, the trope was already established and we all know deep down inside that if they didn't gender the name accordingly that audiences would have just gone "why are they calling the girl a man!!". Hell, they'd probably still do that in 2022, let alone the 40s.
The disagreement exists because the OP is trying to argue that the word "man" is gender neutral when it really isn't, and treating it as such is ultimately sexist.
It would be nice if we moved back to masculine people having a prefix to "man" as well, and letting man go back to being the gender neutral term for person. But until then, having the same word for masculine people
and for all people absolutely sucks. I don't understand how some people don't see that.
It also annoyed the hell out of me how they aged her up into an adult in the CW show but kept calling her Girl. It then simply resonates with the misogynistic infantilisation of women that's so prevalent in society. You wouldn't see an adult male being called Superboy. They even knew and tried to half-heartedly make a pathetic excuse for it in the first episode.
I guess I should be thankful it stopped me investing more time in that show.
I guess I should be thankful it stopped me investing more time in that show.
So this is like deodorant for men and women situation? When both do the same damn thing lol.
This is a different justification than what you first proposed. If someone wants to call themselves by a title with a gendered word that doesn't match their identity, that's fine. Some people won't, some will. Characters can reflect that.
Yes, I find this way more sexist than what the OP is talking about.
User Banned (3 Weeks): Dismissive commentary regarding gendered superhero names, over a series of posts
I'll respond to your previous post later when I have some more time to think about it, that said I wish people focused a bit more on the idea that I wanted to talk about, "concepts that should go beyond gender", a mantle that should represent more of a figure rather than their gender. Superman and Batman these actual titles that are not exclusive to male characters.
Like fine, mankind, "men" are not in literal terms gender neutral, but at the very least some concepts that happen to have these words attached to them (like the mantles of these characters) should be treated as something that don't necessarily need the gender differentiation when a woman takes them on.
I have a problem with the idea that "supergirl" was invented because you could not have a woman assume the "superman" title rather than with the fact that a woman character was created with superman's powerset (???)
Superman isn't derived from "Superhuman" (or at least, the "man" part of it isn't - the "Super" part is arguably so), and the OP is not saying that, unless you also think he's saying that "Batman" is derived from "Bat human".
The OP's argument is that "man" is a gender neutral word that applies to anyone and that the word applies to a woman just as much as it does to a man. And that was, at one point, a commonly accepted English usage. However, that's no longer true.
The OP is also ignoring that women, for the past century or more, have had misogynistic shitheels trying to keep them out of jobs with "man" at the end, or force them out of those jobs once they had them, or forcing them to keep the word "man" at the end when it wasn't representative of them. Jobs like "chairman", "fireman", "policeman", "postman", and so on. Women had to fight to be allowed to have those jobs and then had to fight again to have titles that didn't misgender them. The OP doesn't appear to understand the weight of that.
Okay so I get where you're coming from but I think the disconnect here is that you and OP are starting from different points in the evolution of language and getting caught up in semantics a little bit. Originally the word "man" WAS gender neutral. It literally just meant "person". Words like "mankind", "human", and "woman" are using "man" in this context. But in modern English, we also use "man" to refer to a male human. THAT is where the sexism comes from. But applying that logic backwards to words made before this evolution makes things quite messy. We'd have to reinvent so much of our language and I don't think many people will agree with you that "woman" is a sexist term. It's definitely an interesting thing to talk about, though.
That's exactly the read I took from their first sentence, actually.
"Superman, or the Übermensch, was never about a MALE, right? His concept, the MAN is about the HUMAN. An incredible, ideal HUMAN BEING."
If I've misread their point, then that's on me.
And yet it would be super great if you'd listen to women in the thread saying "yeah, that just feels like erasure."
The gender differentiation isn't needed, but the gender differentiation is already inherent in "Superman". And a lot of women like myself don't like to be referred to as "man".
As to your other point, I don't think anyone here is trying to argue that these concepts can't be represented by anyone of any gender.
Will it happen where the spotlight or "main" title is given to female characters? Probably not for a while... DC has a hard time moving away from Bruce having the title. And they are historically a pretty sexist company so virtually any time someone has replaced him, it's been a man. But I agree, narrative wise, he can definitely be replaced by a female character. It also doesn't mean we have to forgo titles like Batwoman and Batgirl, the latter of which should specifically be limited to actual kids/teenagers and not adults. (Barbara needs to drop the name and just keep Oracle.)
The one time I can think of that a female character tried to stand in for Bruce was Helena Bertinelli in No Man's Land. She wasn't really operating with a formal title, but I recall her being referred to as Batman by other characters.
Yes, I know the origin. You don't have to explain it to me, I've already mentioned it elsewhere.
I never said woman is a sexist term? I said it's sexist to have man be both the term for masculine people AND as the gender neutral term.
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