I have been aware, as most of you are, about the way women are portrayed in media, and that it’s not always the best. Those are other articles for other times, but today I’m talking specifically about Peggy Carter. I became a huge fan of her from her series and while I tend to dislike period pieces where men are blatantly bigots, Peggy was just awesome and her story was great. (It was the beginning of the end when they gave her dementia, but I digress.)
I watched the Marvel’s What If series, and the first episode was ’What if Peggy had gotten the Captain America serum instead of Steve?’ . I’m watching this episode and the fact that Peggy gets injected instead of Steve comes down to whether one man in charge sends her up into the stands vs staying on the floor where the procedure is going to take place.
And it suddenly hit me. Captain America, one of Marvel’s first and biggest heroes, and all it took for that to be a woman instead of a man was an inconsequential decision in the story. That’s all it ever took, but the people in charge didn’t make those decisions. And in the middle of this episode, I began to mourn every woman superhero who was never created. Every female artist who was denied the chance. Every girl who grew up seeing only male characters doing heroic things. I even mourned the female comic book characters we do have, created in the male gaze, for the male gaze, who only in the past few years have been written with any dignity and depth.
All those stories that were never told. All that history that will never exist. And it’s not just comic books. It’s media. It’s life. Women forgotten, pushed aside, buried, and restricted by the male gaze. Stories left to die without ever being seen. And we don’t even know what we’re missing.
In that moment, it became more real to me than it had ever been before. Overwhelmingly. There is nothing I can do except shine a light on women in stories as brightly as I can, to raise awareness, to shift the expectation. Because women deserve to tell their stories, and have those stories seen.
