Do Female Film Critics Need a Safe Space?

Article here. Excerpt:

'Social media have been buzzing this week with anger and anguish about the gender breakdown of critics of the new movie Captain Marvel. Most are men. There is an excellent reason for this: Most movie critics are men. And there is an excellent reason for that: Men are much more willing publicly to express opinions than women. There is a natural experiment on the matter, which is the letters pages of newspapers. Anyone can write a letter to the editor; there are no barriers to entry. The vast majority of those who do so are male.

“All the negative reviews for #CaptainMarvel are from men,” declared a tweet by the feminerd site The Mary Sue. This assertion can easily be disproven, and it immediately was, as helpful readers appended to that ridiculous claim excerpts from negative notices by Stephanie Zacharek of Time, Mara Reinstein from Us, Kristin Lopez of Culturess, Lindsey Bahr of the Associated Press, Laura Clifford of Reeling Reviews, etc. The story linked by the tweet hedges a bit with the headline, “Captain Marvel Is Fun and Most the [sic] Negative Reviews Are Written by Men … Shocking” before going on to state, in the body of the story, “It is telling that every negative review of the movie was written by a man.” A bit of a waffler, this Mary Sue person. Somewhat of a flibbertigibbet.'