He/She/They Slimed Me

I'm not sure what to think about this new Ghostbusters movie. If you haven't heard, the main characters are all female. There are a lot of people complaining about it on the grounds of, ew, girls. I’m certainly not in agreement with them.  I like the cast, and the people from the original movie don't seem horrified by what's going on.  So I'm sure it's got as good a chance as any reboot.

Some have seen it as a milestone for women in a couple of areas (blockbusters and comedy) where they're still searching for acceptance. But others have said that it seems like tokenism. After all, producers decided that this movie would feature female leads before anyone had been cast. So you can look at the gender switch as progressive, but it also looks like a publicity stunt to set it apart from all the other reboots and sequels out there.

Into all this comes Annalee Newitz's article criticizing news outlets (including her own site io9) for referring to this movie with descriptions like, "the all-female Ghostbusters." Complaint being that we don't refer to the original as "the all-male Ghostbusters," and this, we're contributing to the idea that women are the exception and men are the rule.

In most cases, I'd agree. But when conceived from the start as all-female (and we'll figure out which particular females later) then I think it's reasonable to identify them by gender.  It would be wrong to refer to say, The Supremes as an all-female band, since you wouldn't refer to, say, The Beatles as an all-male band. However, I wouldn't be against referring to a band as all-female if it was conceived of as specifically female. That is, you wouldn't call Weezer "all-male" yet I think it's reasonable to call their tribute band Sheezer "all-female."

Having said all this, I realize that there is a counterargument: I'm criticizing the fact that this movie was conceived of as "all-female," but the fact is that lots of movies are conceived of as "all-male," even if it's not explicitly stated.  For instance, The Expendables probably wasn't described by its producers as an all-male action movie, but the genders of its characters were as certainly male as the new Ghostbusters is certainly female.