It’s been 63 years since Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel and 54 years since the inaugural Bond film. After all these decades, it remains one of the most proudly chauvinist franchises in cinema history, with scores of young, scantily-clad, and ultimately disposable love interests for the older, more sophisticated male protagonist. Is it finally time for a distaff 007? Several Tumblr users think so, but they’re not going to wait around for Hollywood to get around to it. Instead, they’ve brainstormed a treatment for the proposed gender-reversed film, with Helen Mirren as Bond and Lucy Liu as the president-kidnapping villain. The series’ trademark sexism has been retained, but here, it’s the film’s token male character (known as “Strong Male Character” or “Action Boy”) who is treated like a piece of meat. The thread began with a suggestion from Tumblr user Kehinki:

I want an inverse spy flick. The spy is a woman. Her whole team is made up of diverse women. All the villains are women. There is only one man in the entire movie and he is a Strong Male Character who is like 25 and decently ripped and has a scene where he slowly steps out of a pool wearing speedos because he is Confident and In Control of His Sexuality. We see his ass when he has to tug down his pants to get at the knife strapped to his thigh. His nipples are always erect for no fucking reason.


The participants in the thread seem to want to use this new, female-centric Bond film as an opportunity for revenge for decades of cinematic chauvinism. Here, for instance, it is the male character who has to show his ass, parade around in a towel, and get killed off simply to provide the heroine with an emotional beat in her story. As for casting, the name of actor Matt Bomer is bandied about for the love interest, but it’s decided that he’s “way too old” at nearly 40 to be dating the 70-year-old Mirren in a Bond movie. Instead, Bomer will be relegated to the role of Bond’s “sadder-but-wiser ex.” Perhaps Justin Bieber, 22, or Zac Efron, 28, is available. Mathematically speaking, that would be in keeping with past Bond films starring Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Turnabout is fair play.

The entire exchange is included below:


[via Metafilter]