It seems to me that a lot of feminists just don’t know when to celebrate. It isn’t as if the world doesn’t still have a ways to go before we reach equality between the sexes, we most certainly do. But that doesn’t mean we cannot take note of small victories along the way. What is, at times, even more aggravating is when feminists try and turn positives into negatives.

Case in point, Wonder Woman, which just released this weekend, is a fantastic film with a fantastic star, Gal Gadot, directed by a female director, Patty Jenkins. It is the first female-led superhero film since 1984’s abysmal Supergirl, and the best reviewed DC film on Rotten Tomatoes at a whopping 94%. Audiences are loving it, as the movie has already raked in 100 million. Wonder Woman is all kinds of groundbreaking, but none of that seems to matter to CNN film critic Lewis Beale. Never mind that my two daughters, 7 and 12, were utterly ecstatic leaving the theater, or that I could see in their eyes that same sense of well, wonder, that I must have had at their age watching Christopher Reeve don the cape. For so-called feminists like Beale, Wonder Woman’s virtues are invalidated because Gadot is just too damn pretty, and she shows just a bit too much thigh. It’s at these moments that I wonder (no pun intended) whether people like Beale even understand what feminism is.

Now I have given a great deal of consideration to this notion that female heroes cannot be sexy, as I have struggled to reconcile my naturist ideals with feminism. And while my own heroine, Thelana, will most definitely never come near the status of icon that Wonder Woman embodies, it is worth noting that many of the same arguments in support of a thigh-exposing heroine can be made for my all-nude hero.