Girls can be what they see — strong

“She’s so strong,” the little girl seated next to me at a Brooklyn screening of Wonder Woman kept repeating to her mother, occasionally shielding her eyes. It was the first fight scene of the movie, and I was trying not to sob.

Half an hour earlier, I’d been contemplating skipping the film. I never read the comics. I wasn’t a superfan. The last action movie I saw was Batman, the remake before the remake, in my parents’ living room with my younger brothers, sometime in the mid- to late 1990s.

But 20 minutes into Wonder Woman, the director Patty Jenkins’ take on the iconic DC Comics story, the tears came uncontrollably — as the Amazonian women twirled and glided, fierce and muscular and graceful at once, engaged in battle moves that looked as if they were choreographed for women’s bodies (which, it turned out, they were). I mean, the outfits were a little absurd. Their gladiator sandals seemed to have wedges. And yet, much like Jill Lepore, the author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, put it in The New Yorker: “I am not proud that I found comfort in watching a woman in a golden tiara and thigh-high boots clobber hordes of terrible men. But I did.”

In fact, I was proud. So were legions of women I know who took daughters, nieces, nephews, mentees or simply went in droves, some of them to women-only screenings — and walked out of theaters with a strange feeling of ferociousness. One friend immediately purchased 40 tickets for a group of girls she mentors, along with all their friends. A group of women writers has raised more than $7,000 in a GoFundMe campaign to send New York City girls to see the film.

Indeed, there was something deeply visceral about it: a depiction of a hero we never knew we needed, a hero whose gender was everything but also nothing. Yes, she was a female superhero. But she was also just a superhero. A superhero who happened to be a woman. As Jenkins said in an interview with The Times, “I wasn’t directing a woman, I was just directing a hero.”

George Orwell once argued that clichéd language produces clichéd thinking. The same could be said of visual storytelling — which brain researchers will tell you is processed tens of thousands of times faster than the written word. And yet so much of the messaging we receive about who can do what in the world is subliminal — the absence of what’s missing more even than what is there. We’ve grown accustomed to the largely white, largely male default.

But then suddenly you’re a 35-year-old woman sitting in a theater and you see the thing that was missing — the boss, the doctor, the president or the righteous superhero who happens to be a woman — and something clicks. Oh, this is what people mean when they talk about representation. This is why it matters.

It will come as a surprise to no one that the industry is stacked. According to research by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, 81 percent of working characters in 21 G-rated films released from September 2006 to September 2009 — that is, characters with jobs — are male.

Male characters are more likely to be depicted in medical science, business, law or politics. But you know that saying about how “you can’t be what you can’t see” — or, perhaps more accurately, that you can be what you can see? It’s the idea that role models, such as a black president or a Latina Supreme Court justice, or a black female director or an Israeli female superhero, in fact matter.

According to research by Davis’ institute, even seeing a fictional female president on television made people more likely to vote for a female president. No, we don’t want girls to strive only to be superheros. But we do want them to believe they have the strength to be one if they could.