One conclusion that you can make from the attorney’s thread is that some men definitely have women heroes while others are upfront about the fact that they idolize other successful men. In other words—a lot depends on each individual person.
However, why are some men more reluctant to have female heroes? It might be related to the fact that some boys have trouble accepting women superheroes. Actress and Harry Potter star Emma Watson touched on this issue in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. In her opinion, boys have been conditioned to look up to male superheroes and avoid female ones.
“It’s something that they are not used to and they don’t like that. Anything that deviates from the norm is difficult to accept. I think if you’ve been used to watching characters that look like, sound like, think like you and then you see someone up on the screen and you go, ‘Well, that’s a girl, she doesn’t look like me. I want it to look like me so that I can project myself onto the character,'” Watson pondered.
She added that girls feel less threatened and have an easier time relating to all characters, whatever their gender might be.
“Women are great at doing that. We see whoever is on screen and we recognize the human qualities in the man that we relate to and there’s not such a gap, but for some reason, there’s some kind of barrier there where [men] are like, ‘I don’t want to relate to a girl. I don’t want to, I don’t want that,’ which I think is inherently part of the problem,” the actress and UN ambassador for the HeForShe initiative said. However, not everything’s grim and Watson believes that things are slowly but surely changing.
