Wonder Woman Is Having Women-Only Showings and People Are Tripping

30 May, 2017

This week, the Alamo Drafthouse announced that they were going to have a women-only screening of Wonder Woman about a week after the film’s launch. Naturally, the internet took this in stride and the news was met with lots of head-nodding and polite applause.

Of course not.

Rather, the completely expected happened, with the all-female screening turning into what almost certainly has to be one of the dumbest battlegrounds in nerd culture war history. After a bunch of Very Angry Men took to the internet to vent their frustration with being excluded from a single screening of Wonder Woman, the Alamo Drafthouse added another show, and it’s unclear how many more women-only shows there will be before this dies down. Hopefully a lot.

It’s hard to count the ways in which the people getting mad about this type of screening are idiots. First of all, this is not some exclusive sneak peek where only women are allowed, this is taking place well after the movie has been released. And there are “sneak peeks” of Wonder Woman, early screenings for critics, which, incidentally, are made up mostly of men, given that almost three quarters of movie critics are male.

This is also two shows, possibly three or four or five at most, for a movie that is probably going to open in 4,000 theaters each showing anywhere from 3 to 30 screenings a day, every day, during release. Yet the fact that some women want a couple shows to themselves is a big deal is something to have an MRA meltdown about.

And that’s where we get to the “principle” argument, where you have the oh-so-clever “Well women would sure be mad if we had a men-only Superman screening!” It’s at this point you hear echoes of “Well why isn’t there a White History Month?” the brilliant line I heard a lot when I was in sixth grade living in a 99.7% white Michigan suburb.

The point is that nerd culture has had no shortage of men and movies/shows/comics aimed at men for eons now. Finally, we have a major blockbuster starring a female hero directed by a woman and some women want to get together to celebrate that fact free from dudes for a single night. It is a significant moment, and I simply cannot understand the thought process of someone who genuinely does not understand how this is not equivalent to an all-men screening of Iron Man (I’m pretty sure I’ve been in all-men screenings of a few comic book movies by sheer chance at this point).

I will say I wonder if we’re getting carried away wailing on the few idiots who think this is a bad idea, however, as I’ve just done. There’s now some Heat Street writer who thinks he’s clever securing himself a ticket to this all-female show.

The Alamo Drafthouse will probably throw him out because they can, and he will make some longwinded post about his rights being trampled that will be hate-shared a hundred thousand times as a result.

The problem is that this one guy is now all over my timeline, with people lambasting him left and right, which even though he might deserve it, it’s become the central story of the Wonder Woman screenings, this guy and guys like him saying stupid things. Like you cannot Google an article about this Wonder Woman screening without half of it being dedicated to “the furor” or “the controversy” (including this one). It reminds me of just a few days ago after the Manchester attack where half my timeline was mourning for the victims, but the other half was dedicated to destroying a single freelance journalist who made a truly moronic joke about the tragedy.

My point is that we are reaching a critical mass of stupidity, a point where it’s almost completely counter-productive to engage rather than ignore. I say this as a hypocrite, a guy who gets in Twitter fights, who highlighted that guy’s bad joke, and now just spent half this article on the morons in this Wonder Woman situation, but it’s just becoming exhausting. I worry that we focus on the same thousand aggravating dissenters about X issue when there are probably several million people on the other side of the argument not having a problem with X or flat-out celebrating X. But framing it as “mass outrage over Wonder Woman screening,” you’d think it was a 50/50 split.

It’s the difference between engaging in a 50 tweet, back and forth flamewar and simply muting someone. Sometimes I’m baited into the former, but I almost never regret doing the latter. I know I’m not the first person to say “ignore the trolls” and I understand the problems with that argument. I endure far less harassment than many women or people of color online, so I’m not getting the full spectrum of hate and it might be easier for me to shut it out. But what I’m saying is that giving these kinds of people a platform, turning rando Heat Street guy into some sort of martyr by spreading his idiocy with 10,000 hate retweets (even if you’re “serving” him deservedly), I think it’s doing more harm than good, and helping to bury X positive message or X cool thing in the then-overwhelming story about “the controversy.”

This is coming up for me especially during this Wonder Woman screening because I cannot think of a stupider example where the arguments aren’t more predictable and the answer isn’t more clear (there is literally nothing wrong with all-female Wonder Woman screenings). Sure, we can get into nuanced debates about a variety of issues in pop culture that may produce interesting conversations, but this sure as hell is not one of them. And spending so much time with a magnifying glass on every tweeting idiot only detracts from what a cool concept this is in the first place.

I suppose if this does anything, it reveals that women will be attacked for quite literally some of the dumbest reasons possible online, though sadly that’s been clear for a while now. This may be one of the worst examples I’ve ever seen, but it’s not the first, the second, or even the hundredth.

If you’re on the verge of enlightenment, I hope this argument makes you understand why an all-female screening of Wonder Woman is neat and an all-male Batman viewing would be meaningless. If you’re unable to understand this, my guess is you’re actually just unwilling to understand it, and there’s really nothing to say to you.

Have fun at Wonder Woman, ladies. I will be there opening night, not really thinking about some screening four days later in a state a thousand miles away. But I hope it’s as cool as it sounds.

I suppose if this does anything, it reveals that women will be attacked for quite literally some of the dumbest reasons possible online, though sadly that’s been clear for a while now. This may be one of the worst examples I’ve ever seen, but it’s not the first, the second, or even the hundredth.

If you’re on the verge of enlightenment, I hope this argument makes you understand why an all-female screening of Wonder Woman is neat and an all-male Batman viewing would be meaningless. If you’re unable to understand this, my guess is you’re actually just unwilling to understand it, and there’s really nothing to say to you.

Have fun at Wonder Woman, ladies. I will be there opening night, not really thinking about some screening four days later in a state a thousand miles away. But I hope it’s as cool as it sounds.

Forbes

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