No wonder Danny Boyle has ditched directing Bond – even a 'reimagined' 007 film makes no sense in modern society

I’ll start by being honest: I really don’t have much time for James Bond. When I was 12, I sat down with my dad as he was watching one of the older films on TV, and even at that young age – before I recognised society’s sexism overtly or knew what the word feminism was – I remember thinking the depiction of women was awful.

I was a “tomboy” growing up, and I looked up to many male characters on TV where the mainstream failed to provide women or non-binary role models – from Spider Man to Power Ranger Tommy Oliver. But the way Bond treated women shocked me, so much so that instead of idolising him, I left the room about half an hour into the film and have pretty much avoided the secret agent ever since.

For many of us, James Bond is a literal representation of what is wrong with most cinema – a terrible portrayal of anyone who isn’t a straight, cisgender, white man. The films are sexist – with flat, one-dimensional women who are written to be helpless objects of male desire. They are also incredibly hetero- and cis-normative – there’s not much gender bending in Bond! Or, indeed, anything that steers away from the macho man/weak woman tropes.

I say that it has terrible representation of anyone that isn’t a straight, cis, white man, but in fact the male representation is pretty awful too – 007 is the quintessential symbol of toxic masculinity. He’s physically strong without showing any emotional weakness, he’s brave without showing any sign of fear and he treats women like objects for him to rescue and then sleep with. He’s an unrealistic ideal – and a poor one at that. He represents a cutout masculine stereotype that many of us are fed up of seeing, and just don’t buy into anymore.

Now Danny Boyle has dropped out of the James Bond film because of “creative differences”. Who knows what those differences are, but regardless we need to pose the question of whether any writer could script the next Bond film in a way that moves past all the lazy tropes and worrying depictions of women.

After all, society is much more “woke” than when Dr No was released in 1962. I’m not saying that poorly written women characters ever had a place, but the sexually submissive female pin-up girl of the 60s definitely doesn’t carry today, as we re-examine how Hollywood has perpetuated and contributed to widespread male violence against women.

It’s taken long enough for us to get to a point where we speak openly about sexual abuse as a society – with the MeToo movement opening up a conversation that many of us participated in, or knew of someone who did. But MeToo isn’t enough – MeToo only scratches the surface, and there’s still so much more that we need to do to support survivors and move towards a society where there is less male violence and less trauma.

That starts, quite simply, with what men and boys understand to be their place in this world. No boy is ever taught to be a rapist when he grows up, but equally boys are very rarely taught to respect women and see them beyond a very narrow ideal of sexual desirability.

James Bond has forever reinforced these ideas – depicting men as macho “playboys” who have no respect for women whatsoever, and can therefore treat them as sex objects instead of human beings.

I’m glad Idris Elba isn’t playing Bond, because I honestly think he’s too cool for the role. If anyone is to play Bond as Bond, we will see another misogynistic, flat film, that fails women, non-binary people and also men. We need more nuanced masculine characters. We need more representation of minority groups – as the box office successes of Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians have shown, elevating minority voices is exactly what most of us want from modern cinema.

Perhaps a writer could try to reimagine 007, write him in a way that isn’t terribly macho and sexist. But in doing that we would lose the essence of who James Bond has always been. “007 gets woke” doesn’t quite have a ring to it.

What we really need is to scrap the embarrassing characters of the past and put new, more reflective stories centre-stage. What’s the point in rehashing sexist old films when we could create new characters that are so much more relatable, so much more relevant and just a hell of a lot cooler?