Multiverse of Misogyny: A Dive Into Gendered Questioning in Hollywood
by Zehra Aslanhan
Avengers: Infinity War dir. Joe and Anthony Russo
Superhero movie press tours in Hollywood have a gender problem. Whether it's a woman always playing the mother after turning 40 or being squeezed into stereotypes like cool girl or the manic pixie dream girl. Or sometimes it's a woman being sexualized to no end. When Scarlett Johansson sat down for the Avengers (2012) press tour, they asked her the infamous question: “Were you able to wear undergarments?,” Johansson handled the question with grace but social media users rightfully did not let the question slide. It led to people recognizing patterns in all kinds of interviews, let alone Marvel ones.
During an interview around the same time, when Chris Evans was doing his own promotion for his Marvel debut Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), he was asked a slightly more professional question: “How the heck did you shoot those scenes where you look that skinny? [ . . . ] it's amazing.”
The difference between the two questions is small enough to brush aside if you are not looking for it. But if you look at dozens of interviews side by side, it becomes impossible to ignore, and the pattern gets alarming quickly.
Press tours for superhero movies, much like their creation processes, are well-oiled machines. Actors spend weeks doing late-night show appearances, interviews, and Comic-Con panels. Sometimes they even get to do a fun appearance on Chicken Shop Date (2014) or Hot Ones (2015). All of these opportunities help the actors reach gigantic audiences. When under such a spotlight, what an interviewer chooses to ask informs the audience of how the actor should be perceived. To understand how deeply this runs, it helps to look somewhere the machine is most exposed. Superhero press tours are broadcast at scale, for weeks, to millions of people. And to be clear: This isn’t only a superhero problem. It’s a Hollywood problem. The press tours just make it impossible to look away.
I pulled 60 questions from dozens of interviews—30 for Johansson, 30 for Evans—and found that both actors received plenty of questions about the acting process, character motivation and career decisions. But the real problem starts when we look past the quantity of the questions and focus on the quality.
Johansson's interviews return, again and again, to her appearance, her diet, her body, her costume, and what she wore beneath it all. They ask her everything about Black Widow but not about her character development.
Evans' appearance-focused questions drift toward technique and craft. How did they shoot the pre-serum Steve Rogers scenes? How did they manage to make him look skinny? His body is treated as a tool for storytelling, while Johansson's is treated as the story itself.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier dir. Joe and Anthony Russo
None of this happens in a vacuum, and it didn’t start with Johansson or Evans. Long before Black Widow suited up, Hollywood was already writing the same script: Women are defined by how they look, men are defined by what they do. This genre is just the easiest place to count. In superhero media alone, women make up 26.7% of DC and Marvel characters, and only 12% of superhero comics have female protagonists. The difference is visible even at the naming stage. Analysis of superhero character names reveals that female characters are more than twice as likely to be assigned names that show diminutiveness, vulnerability, or inferiority compared to male characters. While 30% of male characters with gendered names include the suffix "-man" (like Batman, Spider-Man, Superman), only 6% of female characters have the equivalent "-woman" suffix. Conversely, 13% of female characters that have gendered names carry the diminutive suffix "-girl" (Batgirl, Supergirl), compared to only 5% of male characters with "-boy" in their names. They tell people that women are lesser to men even if they can just as easily lift mountains and save children from burning buildings.
Carolyn Cocca, academic and author of the Eisner-nominated work Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation, argues that the underrepresentation and subordination of female characters in stories has material consequences. As she claims, when the dominant story told by popular culture is that women are not leaders, not agents of their own lives, and not present in professional settings, it can reinforce undervaluing of women and girls. Because there are fewer female characters to begin with, each is burdened with the impossible task of representing all women.
The character of Natasha Romanoff joined the MCU in 2010. She did not receive her solo movie until 2021—years after her character had already died and was not given a proper farewell, according to the fans, compared to her male colleague Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) cinematic send-off.
In her earliest appearances, she was repeatedly sexualized. In Iron Man 2 (2010), she undresses in front a male character played by Jon Favreau who, funnily enough, also directed the scene. In The Avengers, she is strapped to a chair and threatened with sexual violence as an interrogation setup—played for laughs. In Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), in what became one of the most criticized moments in the franchise, she describes herself as a monster because she was sterilized as a part of her training, framing her inability to have children as her defining flaw. Her arc, her history, her inner world was largely left unexplored until after her death in Avengers: Endgame (2019).
Florence Pugh (left) and Scarlett Johansson (right) on set of Black Widow with Director Cate Shortland (center)
The bias documented in these interviews is rarely loud. No interviewer asks Johansson an openly sexist question. What happens instead is sneakier: a slow pull toward her body, her appearance, and her personal life—even when the conversation is nominally about her work. Evans, along with her other male costars, gets pulled toward his choices, his craft, his career.
As stated earlier, this pattern appears well beyond superhero movies. During The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) press tour, for example, Margot Robbie was often asked about her nude scenes, kissing Leonardo DiCaprio, and the vulnerability of filming intimate moments. DiCaprio, meanwhile, was far more often invited to discuss the psychology of his character, Director Martin Scorsese’s direction, and the film’s themes.
These questions may appear harmless in isolation. Asking an actress about nudity, a diet or her costume is not inherently sexist. The problem emerges through repetition. When women are consistently asked to discuss their appearance, desirability, or personal lives while men are invited to explain their performances and creative decisions, audiences begin to associate women with visibility and men with authority.
The distinction matters because celebrity press now travels faster and farther than it ever has due to social media. What gets asked of a performer, again and again, is a form of perception. The question worth asking is this: Who gets defined by their work, and who gets defined by their body?