At some point as a kid, I unconsciously inherited the belief that to be a girl was to be less than, and thus undesirable. Classmates mocked throwing/kicking/running “like a girl” in gym class. The boys and men in the movies and TV shows I consumed were usually the protagonists, the ones the audience is supposed to identify with from beginning to end. Girls and women were often outnumbered and peripheral, siloed as the love interest. For every “Never Been Kissed” or “Love and Basketball,” there’s a seemingly infinite supply of “American Pie.”

And so I attempted to identify with the male heroes of these stories, perhaps to the point of overcorrection. I couldn’t feign even a passing interest in ESPN, but when I became obsessed with all things movie-related around middle school, it was easy enough to channel my own version of the “cool girl” (as Gillian Flynn so astutely defined women who assume the identity of a demeaning male fantasy in “Gone Girl”) into film nerd-dom.

When you’re an impressionable teen entering that vast world, you’ll look to devour the canons and seek out the so-called authoritative voices on film. The “definitive” lists of the “best” and “must-see” movies. You might date guys who insist Wes Anderson is God and Quentin Tarantino’s gender and race politics aren’t up for debate. Your film history class may only devote one session to female filmmakers for the entire semester.

And if you’re a woman or a person of color, you may not immediately notice that hardly any of the movies or filmmakers in these collections speak directly to your existence, because the erasure is so deeply woven into the fabric of pop culture that it seems unremarkable. You’re just reveling in your obsession.

I saw — and still do, to some extent — one’s movie preferences as a deliberate form of sartorial display. As much as I enjoyed “Superbad,” there was also a bit of performance to my enjoyment. It was a way for me to both conform and stand out as a black girl who could love a raunchy, cartoonishly violent buddy comedy relying heavily on penis jokes. Putting, say, “Mean Girls” on my dating profile when I was in my early 20s was to be expected. (Based on its cross-cultural popularity in the mid-’00s, “Anchorman” was also predictable.) “Superbad” was a “cool” and edgy choice; it showed men that I was chill. Or so my regrettable thinking went.