I have now been a journalist for a midlife-crisis-inducing 17 years, and I have learned many things along the way. I have learned, for instance, that Sesame Street lied and honesty is not always the best policy – at least not when it comes to celebrities asking you what you honestly thought of their new movie/song/perfume as you sit down to interview them. One thing I have apparently not learned, however, is how to spot a story when it is right in front of me.

Two weeks ago I interviewed, for the second time in my life, the director James Cameron. We talked about many things, my old pal James and I (another lesson: just because you interview someone, it does not mean he’s your friend). We discussed why he was so much less of an arsehole than he was last time we met, and how – most excitingly, I thought – he could finally admit that Jack might have shared Rose’s board with her at the end of Titanic. When it came to writing up the piece, I wondered if I should even include his thoughts on the new Wonder Woman movie, which he described as “a step backwards”, because, I asked myself, who really cares what Cameron thinks about Wonder Woman? Everyone, turned out to be the answer.

When the interview was published, the internet was suddenly filled with very, very angry women, with everyone from Lena Dunham to Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins outraged that Cameron had dared to say Wonder Woman wasn’t a glorious feminist triumph. And that’s cool: every journalist wants their work to be noticed. But guys, did you miss that exclusive revelation about Rose’s board?

Another good rule about journalism is that it’s always best to be honest, because readers can sense artifice. So I’m going to hold up my hands here and say the reason I totally missed this story, despite being the person who literally wrote the story, is that, well, I agreed with Cameron.

The people who got so angry forget where he’s coming from, which is the 1980s and 1990s. Now, there are plenty of bad things one can say about those decades (don’t even get me started on the jeans), but Hollywood was a lot better back then at getting female characters on to the screen. No, it wasn’t all perfect – we are talking about the era of Pretty Woman, after all, the happy story of how sexy prostitution is. But there were so many movies about women back then that Susan Faludi could dismiss the 1987 comedy Baby Boom as anti-feminist garbage in her seminal book Backlash. Today, a movie about a woman in her early 40s who kicks ass on Wall Street, doesn’t want a baby, inherits a baby and then builds up her own business empire sounds, compared with what’s playing in your multiplex right now, downright Dworkin-esque in its radicalism.

This is the Hollywood into which Cameron emerged, in which he wrote original heroines like the brilliant and prickly Dr Lindsey Brigman (played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) in The Abyss, and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a teeny bit wet in The Terminator and then breathtakingly awesome in Terminator 2.

Which brings us to today, a time when women have been so neglected by the movies that we have to get excited about Wonder Woman, a character Hollywood has been knocking out since the 70s. It was extraordinary to see how defensively women reacted to Cameron’s comments: do we have so few heroines that we have to cling to the ones who come along?

Look, I liked Wonder Woman. You’d have to be as heartless as the Terminator not to enjoy it, and I’m glad that if Hollywood’s focus is now superheroes, then someone finally got round to making a movie about the one well-known female superhero. But I can also say that a movie in which an objectively gorgeous woman, played by a former Miss Israel, kicks ass in her underwear isn’t exactly breaking down the barriers in terms of representations of women on screen. It’s not fashionable to say this now, in an era where strident opinions must be expressed in fewer than 140 characters, but things don’t have to be all or nothing.

I get why women would be so angry with Cameron – a man, and a former arsehole at that – mansplaining feminism to them; but it can also be acknowledged that the man does know a thing or two about female characters. The truth is, the most interesting female characters are now on TV, in shows such as, and hardly limited to, Transparent, Chewing Gum, Orange Is The New Black, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Scandal, Fleabag and Game Of Thrones. I hope movies get more heroines, too – maybe even ones who spot a news story when it hits them in the face. But surely only a superhero can do that.