Are you familiar with the concept of object permanence? Object permanence is a major milestone in the cognitive development of a baby. It’s when an infant is capable of understanding that an object still exists even when it cannot see the object. Before that time, a baby will be playing with an object, but will instantly forget that the object exists the second that somebody hides it from his vision.

Upon reading that first paragraph, you’re probably asking “Why the fuck is Larsen talking about early childhood mental development?” To be honest, this post isn’t specifically about infancy—far from it, it’s actually about the dismal state of pop culture. But I want you to keep the idea of object permanence in your mind, because I think that a form of it, or rather the lack of it, explains a certain phenomenon we see embodied time and time again with woke Hollywood writers and other purveyors of mass media.

What phenomenon am I referring to? The phenomenon that Youtuber The Critical Drinker refers to in this video, the idea that any work of fiction starring a woman has to have the woman as an unbeatable uberfrau from the start of the story (with a male villain being, correspondingly, a pathetic, incompetent putz) whose victory at the end of the story is never in the slightest doubt. Anybody who has ever written a story or directed a film or done any kind of narrative creation will immediately recognize that this situation instantly robs the story of any drama or tension—why bother watching if there’s no doubt the hero will win?

One would think that this would be blindingly obvious, but the arbiters of our culture don’t seem to understand this.

These people are under the impression that showing a woman as being weaker than a man is an assault on womanhood, even if the woman only *starts* as being weaker and becomes stronger over the course of the narrative (y’know, Joseph Campbell hero’s journey 101). The fact that she was weaker at any point means that, in their eyes, she will always be seen as weak.

And here is where I feel the concept of object permanence can be applied, albeit to a purely intellectual concept. Call it “female strength permanence”. Just as a baby can’t conceive of an object existing if it’s not directly in his line of vision, so too can the rainbow hair feminist angry mobber not conceive of a female character being strong and aspirational if she is ever shown in a position of weakness or even being not-quite-as-strong-as-a-male-antagonist.

No matter how strong, brave, and competent the formerly weak female character will become by the end of the story, if she was ever shown to be not perfect at any point in the narrative, then that is apparently a personal attack forcing all women to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

To you or I, that’s absurd, because we have above average IQs and we’re capable of both remembering things that happened two hours ago and of conceiving things that will happen two hours into the future. But the Tumblrista cannot do this basic application of theory of mind, which can only lead me to believe that they have the minds of infants.

As the Drinker says, this is why Captain Marvel spends the whole movie being a nut-cutting snarky bitch who effortlessly zaps the villain at the end of the movie. This is why what’s-her-face in the new Star Wars movies can effortlessly use Force Powers and defeat trained Sith in lightsaber combat despite spending her entire life as an unlettered orphan trash collector on a pissant backwater planet (hey, remember when Luke had to spend 3 movies learning Force powers and even then he still is shown failing at them sometimes?) And it’s why nobody will gave a damn about those movies in 5 years, while the originals will live on.

For that matter, this is why movies with actually good female protagonists *WILL* live on for years to come. Movies like Alien, The Terminator, or Silence of the Lambs will live on in a way that the Sequel Trilogy won’t because they understand that a hero needs to A) Develop, and B) Have a competent and threatening villain.

Turns out men were always amenable to watching movies that star women and are from women’s perspectives. They just have to not suck.