From Daredevil to Game of Thrones to Avengers, genre movies and TV shows are currently dominating culture—and they've brought some issues with them. Combined with Hollywood's longstanding sexism, it's kind of a perfect storm. For everything that makes you think, "Hey, things aren't so bad!"—like DC Comics and Mattel's pretty-great sounding DC Super Hero Girls, "an exciting new universe of Super Heroic storytelling that helps build character and confidence, and empowers girls to discover their true potential"—there's something else that makes you remember, "Oh, wait, no. Right. Things are still awful." (Earlier this week, Joanna Robinson at Vanity Fair looked at how when it comes to Avengers merch, "Black Widow’s conspicuous absence is part of a larger, sexist pattern.")

Obviously this is all part of a bigger picture, and while the very general sense I get is that things are sloooowly getting better on the entertainment side of things (take Kathleen Kennedy's promise, for example, that the new Star Wars films will feature "really strong women"), there's still a lot to think about just about every time we take in this stuff. And since a lot of the issues come from how these things are made, and who's making them, the below two pieces are well worth reading. If, you know, how culture affects our lives is something that interests you.

• "Does Ex Machina Have a Woman Problem, or Is Its Take on Gender Truly Futuristic?," by Kyle Buchanan, at Vulture, is an interview with Ex Machina writer/director Alex Garland that delves into the film's much-talked-about portrayal of gender. It gets bonus points for using the word "himbos."

“Let’s say 50 percent of a narrative is offered by the person providing the narrative,” [Garland] suggests, “and 50 percent is from the recipient of the narrative: what they project, what they want, their own life experience, what they're interested in.” If that’s the case, then my own 50 percent is certainly different than its critics, because I found the movie’s portrayal of gender to be bracingly modern and even poignant. To me, Ava read as post-gender, her circuits whirring underneath a body she’s been placed into but feels skeptical of. At the same time, she’s still just as hemmed in by male expectations as any real human woman would be: Kept imprisoned by Nathan in his remote hideaway, Ava is born into a literally patriarchal system that measures her worth based on how men respond to her, and it’s up to her to either exploit that system or learn how to circumvent it.

• "‘No Room For Failure': Female Directors Discuss Michelle MacLaren’s Wonder Woman Exit," by Victoria McNally at MTV, in which several woman directors talk about the issues surrounding director MacLaren's departure from the upcoming Wonder Woman film, and how that plays into the film industry as a whole.

Women might come at filmmaking from a different place than men do, Brenda Chapman told MTV News over the phone, but “we’re still capable of telling a story just as well as any guy is… And for all I know, [MacLaren leaving Warner Bros.] could just be pedantic creative differences; that they just didn’t see eye to eye on how to tell the story, and it had nothing to do with being a woman. But what I find is that there are probably more men in the room that the woman director, so you’re also getting a different point of view. If the guys can’t relate to the woman’s point of view, then that can turn into creative differences. It’s coming from a different place.”