Why not Stevie Rogers?

I just finished watching Black Widow, and it was quite a spectacular movie. the back and forth between Yelena(Florence Pugh) and Natasha(Scarlett Johansson) was a delight to watch. The action sequences were just right, did not feel unnecessarily prolonged. Somewhere along the movie, i realised that this type of content with strong heroes going on to save the world is something men have grown up watching. But as a woman, i have barely ever seen a strong female lead barge into a compound filled with bad guys and blow their brains out with guns. And this got me thinking if i had the fortune of watching such movies from childhood rather than having watched action movies where the girl is the damsel in distress waiting to be saved by the man. For the longest time, action cinema has been the same- A strong male lead going on dangerous missions to save the female lead whose only contribution is struggling to escape her capturers.

it’s always the women waiting to be saved, while the men do the saving, and frankly I’m tired of the same beaten up script being shoved down our throats. As if we don’t live in a world where men are in fact our biggest predators. The number of women being subjected to violence by men on a daily makes these action movies seem even more far fetched and unrealistic. Give me more of women leading action roles rather than waiting to be saved, since god knows we are more than capable of it.

I wonder how much more confident I’d be if I’d grown up watching the Avengers where instead of a big muscle-y steve rogers, I had seen a Stevie Rogers save the world.

Boys grew up seeing themselves as the hero by default. Girls? We had to search for scraps of that representation, or twist ourselves into believing we were "like the boys" just to see ourselves in power. It has subconsciously associated power to the male gender.