The issues with Bond are that he’s uniformly portrayed by white men who are only portrayed sleeping and slapping women. Give us a Bond who sleeps and slaps men with the same abandon that he does women, and interest in Bond movies will go through the roof. And:

An intelligence agency that only employs straight male secret agents is an intelligence agency doomed to fail from the start. I have to hope someday that the Broccoli family grows a spine someday and shows us a Bond who is a woman, being just as much of an arrogant slut as Sean Connery’s Bond. They did a great job with that Bond, and certainly that’s a desirable archetype! It’s just gotten boring and overplayed to see that leading Bond role manner only played by the same boring and overplayed white men for decades now.

There was a scene in The Americans where the husband and wife Soviet agents talked about / reminisced about their training. And that to the Soviets, sexuality was just another tool in the box. If you're seducing for the job, what does it matter? The husband was taught about seducing men, and the wife women, as much as the opposite sex (this is not an attempt to simplify / reduce sexuality, just how it is portrayed in the show).

The nut smasher

> Mads Mikkelsen says 'Casino Royale' director told him and Daniel Craig to stop improvising during a nude torture scene

It turns out that the actors tried to advance the needle here, and make it into a psych torture and have it be more than just a basic rudimentary beating! But no, “it’s a Bond movie”, sigh, and so what could have been a deeply uncomfortable and memorable scene was neither.

Bond slapping people is about power and control fantasies. Bond was created at a time when women were finally wielding power of their own again in modern culture, and showed what was appealing to the men whose desires preceded the rise of women having power independent of men. Decades have passed since that moment in time, but Bond has remained fixed in stone, with only the barest concessions to reality, using women just as he always has - that is, needlessly different from how he uses men, without any cause other than stereotypes inherited from the 1950s.

The power fantasy of Bond is that Bond is a high-functioning sociopath, who has no problem using people for whatever meets their needs and then discarding them utterly. That power fantasy used to be the exclusive privilege of straight white men. That is no longer the case. Seeing all Bonds be straight white guys who only slap women is boring. That power fantasy is played out and dull and on its way out. I don't care if some Bonds are straight white dudebros, but it sure would be a lot more in character if they slapped everyone – and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them slept with non-women on screen — and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them weren't white.

Asking an intelligence agency to stop sending people to hit people for information is nonsensical. Only showing people reacting by providing the information is also nonsensical. There are quite enough people out there that would bust out laughing at that attempt, not to mention a few that would outright try to bite his hand off the next time he swung at them. I do respect that the mores of the time were afraid to show Bond actually punching a woman, but with all due respect, that was, rounding up, about a hundred years ago. Intelligence agencies have moved ahead with the times. Yes, I pointedly mean that Bond should be doing just as worse to the women as to the men, when it comes to getting information — whether that's slaps, punches, CBT, or buying them champagne and getting their shirt off.

There's a lot of us waiting in the wings to see the exact Bond power fantasy portrayed in that slapcut, by people that we can imagine ourselves being. Generic white guy #12 is not going to qualify, no matter how cool he is. (And let's face it: Foghorn Leghorn is a much better detective than Bond anyways.) Focusing on slapping is a distraction from the real problem: Bond was created, and has been maintained since, as a sociopathic power fantasy for straight white men alone. Until that broadens to represent that exact fantasy for others, I see little hope for the future of the franchise.

Don't change Bond-the-sociopath. Just remove the artificial restrictions on Bond's skin color and gender, and who he slaps, hits, flirts, and sleeps with.

I worry sometimes we're headed for a situation where media and stories are almost whitewashed. There are some fandoms I'm into where fans go through past books and raise issues where "isn't this character being a bully here" and the answer is kind of... but they're also a kid at that point and kids do say mean things ... that's reality.