Unpopular Opinion: We Should Let Women Bulk

With Comic-Con 2015 coming to a close today, we've gotten a lot of new information about upcoming films and a lot of those films include female superheroes. Now this is good news as representation is always important but I couldn't help but notice the lack of diversity in character type; that is to say when are going to let the female characters look super?

Maybe I should clarify this because this may sound like bodyshaming;when I say super I mean that they physically resemble how that character would look like in real life. Let's look at Thor and how he looks in the comics typically

He looks pretty powerful right? After all he's a god, his physique should be that of one. Now let's look at how he translates to movies

I'd say that's pretty accurate, he looks big and powerful here too, very godlike. How about we do Captain America next? First the comic version

And now the movie version

Again I'd say, in terms of physical build, that this is a pretty damn spot on translation from comic to film. I could do this for pretty much any male superhero and you'd get the point, every male hero gets into ridiculous physical shape to play the character; however when its a female character there is a limit as too just how in shape they can get for the role. Gal Gadot is set to debut as Wonder Woman in "Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice" and then in her own solo film. Wonder Woman is a warrior who is tough as hell and has been training pretty much since birth so you'd expect her to have a pretty solid build, especially as a person with immense physical strength. This is how Wonder Woman will look in the film

Now there is nothing wrong with Gal Gadot's body ( I am not attacking her here) but when I look at the other heroes it makes sense for them to look that way. Thor is a god so he should look big and powerful, Cap is a super soldier so he should look pretty strong but Diana is an Amazonian warrior who trained for years and I don't get that from Gal. She looks...normal and that's the problem. They never let the female heroes have any real muscle or bulk to them and it doesn't make sense. I am not asking for a bodybuilder or anything but I do think it would be nice if she was able to look like a warrior. Take Serena Williams for example, she is a powerful looking woman but also has an

Real life Wonder Woman

elegance about her; the perfect mixture of beauty and power. If someone with that build were to portray Wonder Woman I'd totally believe it; I wouldn't question her ability to lift up a tank or survive a hit from someone like Superman with no problem. Their seems to be a massive apprehension on the side of the studios to let the female heroes get into the correct physical shape. Everyone female hero I've seen looks exactly the same except for the upcoming appearance of Angel Dust (played by Gina Carano) in the 2016 film "Deadpool"; for the most part they are thin with almost zero muscles and yet I am supposed to believe that take can take out multiple armed thugs with enough force to knock them unconscious when they look like their arms would snap from doing a push up.

Going back to Wonder Woman, a lot of the criticisms she received (aside from her chest which is highly irrelevant) was that she is simply too thin to believable portray her. Now this isn't something you'd hear if it were a male hero because we expect them to go from Steve Rogers to Captain America, that is to say that we already know they will put on the weight in order to look the part; there is no such level of reassurance when it comes to female heroes and I for one think it is ridiculous. When I go to see superhero films and I see all the heroes in great shape it motivates me to get myself into great shape too but when I see the women on their I feel like it's telling them to look "womanly"; don't look strong but look thin instead. I don't know I could be wrong but I feel like there is a very specific look for superhero women and it's extremely limiting. Let them have some muscle, it doesn't make them any less of women and it also shows that beauty does not have a specific guideline to adhere to. I get that we are all on a diversity kick but that doesn't just mean sex and race, body type diversity is important too. We can have our thin Widows and Invisible Women in films but we should also be able to have the muscular Wonder Women characters also, show women that whether they are thin or muscular that they are still women and can still be beautiful and heroic. Hollywood needs to move away from this archaic view of femininity and let us have kick ass women that actually look like they can kick ass.