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Men who complained about 'women only' Wonder Woman screenings offered free DVDs

DVDs… compensation offered to me who complained about ‘women only’ Wonder Woman screenings – Credit: Warner Bros
DVDs… compensation offered to me who complained about ‘women only’ Wonder Woman screenings – Credit: Warner Bros

The men who filed legal complaints of sexual discrimination over ‘women only’ screenings of ‘Wonder Woman’ hosted by a cinema in Austin, Texas, have been offered compensation.

But it’s perhaps not the kind of compensation they were hoping for.

Each of the men who filed a complaint against the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain – which held two sold-out, women-only screenings in June – are being offered a DVD of the film by way of apology.

Two formal complaints are being processed under the city’s sexual discrimination laws, one from a law professor from Albany, New York, and another from an unidentified man.

Equality laws in Austin prohibit the limitation of services such as the cinema provides based on factors like gender and race, so the screenings did actually fall foul of the law.

They took place on June 6, at the Austin Ritz, with the marketing spiel telling movie buffs ‘we’re embracing our girl power and saying ‘No Guys Allowed’… And when we say ‘People Who Identify As Women Only,’ we mean it’.

(Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

News of the screenings soon went viral, with men’s rights types getting involved and heavily criticising the cinema.

Even the city’s Mayor Steve Adler waded in, after one blogger called for a male boycott of Austin in its entirety.

Adler replied to him, writing that ‘your email account has been hacked by an unfortunate and unusually hostile individual’.

“Please remedy your account’s security right away, lest this person’s uninformed and sexist rantings give you a bad name,” Adler continued. “After all, we men have to look out for each other!”

The Alamo Drafthouse has since admitted that it did indeed break discrimination laws, and has moved to put in place its own form of recompense, including the updating of its own discrimination policy, its social media policy and its training materials, in order to use the incident as a case study in future operations.

Missy Reynold, the chain’s director of real estate and development, added that had men bought tickets and turned up to the screening, they would not have actually been turned away.

One of the complainants has agreed to settle the case, but for the sum of $8892, according to The American Statesman.

An agreement has not yet been reached.

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