Representation of women in the media, stage back and front

I live in the D.C. metro area, which is a very good place to find films. If you don't live in New York or Los Angeles, it's about the best you can do. I'm within 10 miles of a multiplicity of multiplexes, not to mention four theaters I would consider "art house" theaters or at least mixes of wider-appeal fare and smaller stuff.

According to Fandango and some back-of-the-envelope math, excluding documentaries and animation, there are 617 movie showings today — that's just today, Friday — within 10 miles of my house.

Of those 617 showings, 561 of them — 90 percent — are stories about men or groups of men, where women play supporting roles or fill out ensembles primarily focused on men. (...)

I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn't a documentary or a cartoon — you can't. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.

There are not any.

By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that's at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (at 891 theaters) so I hope you like it. Because it's pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.

Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.

...the Saudi government approved the project, in part because a woman making a feature-length film in the country was so staggeringly unprecedented that there simply wasn't a rule against it. {...}

Al Mansour was sometimes forced to direct the cast and crew over the phone due to Saudi restrictions on men and women mingling and working together in public space. Using a walkie-talkie, she directed certain scenes while sequestered in the back of a van so she wouldn't be seen giving orders to her male crew members.

Our first 10 guests for our first 5 shows were all men. And frankly, they were all good guests to have. But it made me realize we shouldn't simply be asking, "Is this person interesting enough to bring on our air?" Rather, a longer question was required: "Is this person interesting enough to bring on our air, knowing that if the person is a man, he'll be taking a woman's place?"

Grumblings that Hollywood is a man’s world have percolated for decades and are borne out in studies that show how few women are hired to direct top-grossing films: only 4 percent over the last dozen years. Now this apparent truism is being challenged as a violation of civil rights.

On Tuesday the American Civil Liberties Union will ask state and federal agencies to investigate the hiring practices of Hollywood’s major studios, networks and talent agencies, and possibly bring charges against them, for what the organization described as rampant and intentional gender discrimination in recruiting and hiring female directors.

“There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time,” she said. “I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh.”

Furiosa isn’t the female action hero we’re used to. Furiosa doesn’t have a dad who taught her boxing or five brothers who taught her how to fix cars. Furiosa wasn’t a tomboy growing up, who preferred to play with the boys. Furiosa isn’t avenging the murder of her husband/brother/father or hunting down a rapist.

Furiosa comes from a community of women. She was raised by women. She works her way up through enemy ranks until she’s in a position to rescue women. Furiosa is here for women, she is here with women, and she is here because of women. Her rage, her ruthlessness, her courage – these are all things she learned from women, and from being a woman.

"I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women--our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even out moods --into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as beind on my side -- people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination -- are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.

That's the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.

People who haven't lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn't get to define us. That's something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman."

Jan Morris (very bravely) announced her transition to the world, but her comments at the time ranged from how wonderful it was to now have men hold doors for her, choose the wine, etc. to "I'm 47. I think most women of my age, if they're honest, really accept the idea of helping men, and of being cherished by them. I've always had that feeling. If I could have my life over I suppose I would have been happiest being someone's second-in-command. Lieutenant to a really great man--that's my idea of happiness." I still remember the anger I felt that her ideals of being a woman were so weak, trivial and cliche'd and that, newly born as a woman, she could presume to speak for all women. Only a man, I thought, would have such presumption. Jan Morris has gone on to live an exciting and interesting life and I like to imagine that her ideas matured as she lived longer as a woman.

“For the first time in history, three female composers have written a musical score in a single Broadway season: Lucy Simon (“Doctor Zhivago”), who is returning to Broadway after almost 25 years; Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home”), a Broadway regular; and Barbara Anselmi (“It Shoulda Been You”), making her Broadway debut.

Kevin Adler, a marketing expert, suggested there is a double standard for male and female athletes. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a popular male athlete who doesn’t also have physicality and sex appeal. But that comes second to winning for guys, whereas for female athletes, looks come first,” Adler told Women’s Wear Daily in 2013.

Writing for Rolling Stone in 2013, Stephen Roderick observed, "Sharapova is tall, white and blond, and, because of that, makes more money in endorsements than Serena, who is black, beautiful and built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at sports arenas."

Later in the story, Wonder Woman is locked in a cell. Straining to overhear a conversation in the next room, through the amplification of “bone conduction,” she takes her chain in her teeth: “Closeup of WW’s head shoulders. She holds her neck chain between her teeth. The chain runs taut between her teeth and the wall, where it is locked to a steel ring bolt.”

Gaines forwarded Frank’s letter of complaint to Marston. Marston shrugged it off. But then Dorothy Roubicek, who helped edit Wonder Woman—the first woman editor at DC Comics—objected to Wonder Woman’s torture, too.

“Of course I wouldn’t expect Miss Roubicek to understand all this,” Marston wrote Gaines. “After all I have devoted my entire life to working out psychological principles. Miss R. has been in comics only 6 months or so, hasn’t she? And never in psychology.” But “the secret of woman’s allure,” he told Gaines, is that “women enjoy submission—being bound.”

Publicising her Disney film Saving Mr Banks two years ago, she said there was a period in her 30s when she was offered “a whole string of roles that basically involved saying to a man: ‘Please don’t go and do that brave thing. Don’t! No, no, no!’

“That’s a trope, the stock woman who says: ‘Don’t do the brave thing.’ I said no to all of them. I’m so proud.”

Not only do you assume that since uptalk and vocal fry are used by young women they must be expressions of female powerlessness, you go on to argue that these speech patterns are actually causing women’s powerlessness, and urge women to reclaim their power by changing the way they speak. That’s back-to-front logic: it’s a bit like saying that if only African Americans would stop speaking African American English the police would be less likely to shoot them. It misses the point that negative attitudes to the language of subordinate groups are just manifestations of a more general prejudice against the groups themselves. People may claim that their judgments are purely about the speech, but really they’re judgments of the speakers.

(...) Part of the problem is... also the fact that men are genuinely unaccustomed to seeing women in films. In a 2013 interview with NPR, Geena Davis discussed how the under-representation of women both onscreen and off leads men to have a skewed sense of what gender parity looks like.

Davis cited a recent study that examined the ratio of men and women in groups, explaining that researchers “found that if there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50. And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.” (...)

Australian feminist Dale Spender theorizes that this happens because men aren't comparing how frequently women speak to how frequently men speak; they're comparing how much women speak to how much they think women should speak. “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence,” she explains. “Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.”

I get annoyed about applications of the word ‘feminine’ as a particular kind of cultural judgment. Mostly, as far as my work is concerned, I hear that word used as an umbrella term for elements of it that are often described as ‘fragile’, ‘ephemeral’, ‘pale’, ‘impermanent’. What a massive insult. The fact that anyone might think that I would set forth such connotations is an affront to me. I wonder if anyone ever thinks that the massive scale of a lot of the works, the weight of them, the tonnage of materials involved, the physical labour and the endurance inherent within them are 'feminine’?
Does anyone ever describe the works of Franz West as 'feminine’? He uses a lot of pinks and powder blues. Or Richard Tuttle? A lot of his works are very small and fragile and light. Or Jeff Koons, with all his bows and rosettes and cuddly toys? Obviously there’s some sort of wilful blindness going on, and it makes me wonder whether to label a work 'feminine’ is a veiled insult. Still, in the contemporary art world, only women’s work is gendered. The work of a male artist is always an acceptable norm and anything else is 'other’, even though in reality it’s all exactly the same. Female and male artists both have aspects of 'femininity’ and 'masculinity'—for want of better descriptions, since those categories are completely made up anyway—in all of their works.

"I really hate the word 'diversity,' it suggests something…other. As if it is something…special. Or rare," Rhimes said. "As if there is something unusual about telling stories involving women and people of color and LGBTQ characters on TV."

"I have a different word: NORMALIZING. I’m normalizing TV."

Next comes the interview’s best moment of all, when the interviewer asks, “And this time you’ve gone one better, showing 007 succumbing to the charms of an older woman.” Craig responds: I think you mean the charms of a woman his own age.

It’s ridiculous that we get these old guys with young women draped round them. (...) Of course it’s sexist. Most of my peers have partners their age, so if we have a dinner party with a bunch of actors, the wives or partners are largely the same age. Then you see your friends on screen and they are suddenly with some extraordinary young lady who wouldn’t be at the dinner party. It’s ridiculous.

“It is true that women reach a certain age when people decide that they’re not useful anymore as actors. There are a few significant theatrical roles that they might be viable for. That’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not a proper reflection of what goes on in life.”

Prof. Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University reports that in 2014, 95 percent of cinematographers, 89 percent of screenwriters, 82 percent of editors, 81 percent of executive producers and 77 percent of producers were men.

‘‘It’s kind of like the church,’’ notes the actress Anjelica Huston, whose father, John Huston, helped set the template for macho directors. ‘‘They don’t want us to be priests. They want us to be obedient nuns.’’

Female writers in Hollywood told me they are used to hearing things like ‘‘Can you insert a rape scene here?’’

They trade stories about how a schlubby male studio head mutters that he doesn’t want to look at ‘‘ugly actresses,’’ and how schlubby male directors, caught up in their fantasy world, choose one beautiful actress over another simply because she has a hair color that fits their customized sexual daydream. ‘‘I still see storytelling for men by men that is always reinforcing the male gaze,’’ says Jill Soloway...

Boys are never encouraged to imagine what it is like to be female.

But if only 1.9 percent of the top 100 films are helmed by women, there is virtually no trickle-down effect. ‘‘

We don’t get the benefit of the doubt, particularly black women. We’re presumed incompetent, whereas a white male is assumed competent until proven otherwise. They just think the guy in the ball hat and the T-shirt over the thermal has got it, whether he’s got it or not.

On her ‘‘Suffragette’’ tour, Meryl Streep counted the number of male critics versus female critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and found a ratio of 760 to 168 on the Tomatometer.

why should their voices be louder in my head than that of Karen Russell, a beyond generous certified genius and, with any luck, my future sister-wife?

What Watkins has done, however, is introduced a new vocabulary for something that previously went unnamed, and consequently unrecognized even by those it affects most. And as writers know, vocabulary is a starting point, one to be expanded and applied in new contexts.

The cultural commentator Fran Lebowitz makes an unlikely Miss May, smoking a cigarette in a man’s oversized pinstriped jacket.

Campbell reportedly told his students that "women don't need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realise that she's the place that people are trying to get to".

I definitely think about what I’m going to say before I say it, because I do feel that I’m more likely to offend just by being female and having a strong opinion on something.(...)

I have a huge social responsibility. I have to stay on budget and be on time to make great entertainment and make profit, because that’s my job. But I also know if one of us were to screw up — and we don’t, because that’s the thing, right — it does cause {a response of}, “Well, it’s a woman.”(...)

My role is not just artist. It’s also activist because of the way I look. On so many shows and movies, race was a gesture, and in mine it’s the premise. I can’t ignore that what a lot of people see is an Indian woman who doesn’t look like a Bollywood star. It piques their interest, and they’re not bad for wanting me to tell stories about it, and I’m not wrong for not wanting to. I want to fill my desire to write vibrant, flawed characters, but then also be a role model to young people. It’s stuff that I think about all the time. Some people don’t have to think about this at all.(...)

(...) By the time we went to camera, my dead old lady had turned into a thirtysomething adultress who gets her head bashed in, and my old lady in the attic had turned into a beautiful blond teenager in a basement being held captive by the world’s most adorable predator, Rossif Sutherland.

And I had just co-written a rape episode.

Over the next year, I went from feeling indefinably icky about that episode to rage over how much female rape there is on TV in general. The most notorious example is Game of Thrones, winner of nine Creative Arts Emmys last weekend and the most nominated show going into the Primetime Emmy Awards tomorrow. After the violent rape of Sansa Stark in Season 5, “geek girl” blogger Tafkar produced a “Statistical Analysis of Rape in Game of Thrones”: rape acts in Game of Thrones the TV series: 50; rape victims in Game of Thrones: 29; rape acts in the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George Martin: 214; rape victims in ASOIAF: 117.

GoT toned things down in Season 6, but there’s always a new show to pick up the slack, and this season, it looks as if it might be the new HBO series Westworld (premiering Oct. 2). In the first episode, set at a resort where humans can interact with lifelike robots, an android played by Evan Rachel Wood is dragged off by her hair to fulfill an older man’s rape fantasy.

Elsewhere, the female rape trope is a staple of shows such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, CSI and Criminal Minds, and sprinkled throughout other procedurals such as NCIS, Hawaii Five-O, Bones and The Mentalist.

It’s used as a back story (usually with graphic flashbacks) for characters such as Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans, raped by her Soviet trainer; Norma Bates in Bates Motel, raped in the pilot by a previous owner of the motel, after (we later learn) being raped by her brother as a teen; the gang-raped girlfriend Lumen on Season 5 of Dexter; Claire Underwood in House of Cards still traumatized by a college rape; Jessica Jones’s lead raped by her abductor/keeper; Mellie Grant on Scandal raped by her father-in-law.

Rape is also used as a device to motivate male heroes, from Tony’s anguish and need for revenge after the rape of his psychiatrist in The Sopranos to Ray Velcoro’s anguish and need for revenge – and also a paternity test for his son – after the rape of his wife in Season 2 of True Detective.

Even “quality” shows have rape aplenty: Anna Bates raped on Downton Abbey; police sergeant Catherine Cawood driven by the rape of her daughter, who died by suicide, in Happy Valley; Gillian recovering from years of marital rape on Last Tango in Halifax; Joan Holloway raped by her fiancé in Mad Men; Queen Mary raped by Protestant soldiers in Reign; Detective Robin Griffin dealing with fallout from her own prom-night gang rape while solving a child-rape case in Top of the Lake.

The current avalanche of female rape on TV has even become something of a joke. As in: “I joke, morbidly,” Sonia Saraiya wrote in Salon, “that my job title has changed from television critic to ‘senior rape correspondent.’” Meanwhile, Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller made headlines last season for not using rape, telling Entertainment Weekly, “It’s so overexploited, it becomes callous … You’re reduced to using shorthand, and I don’t think there can be a shorthand for that violation.”

The second, bigger problem is with how the crime is aestheticized for the camera. Massive amounts of time and money are spent on hair, makeup and lighting to sexualize rape victims. Look at the first scene of the first episode of the lauded French series Spiral, which shows a dead, naked girl covered in blood on a garbage heap. I’m willing to bet many minutes, if not hours, were spent lighting her and positioning the camera in order to capture the silhouette of the erect nipple of her right breast against a background of black tires. The only onscreen rape I’ve seen that was presented in a believable – i.e., unsexy – manner was in the movie Deliverance. I’m not saying we need more scenes such as Ned Beatty in his underwear scrabbling in the mud while being treated like a pig, but at least it didn’t prettify the crime. (...)

My point is that the images TV uses to tell rape stories always, without exception, trump the dialogue or supposedly worthy aims of us, the writers. It doesn’t matter how much rationalization or feminist rhetoric we cram into our actors’ mouths. When rape is lyricized as something that happens to attractive young women, it becomes conflated with sex, which reinforces rape culture.

But old habits are hard to break. One writer told me a funny story about network executives who always want them to justify why a character is gay, or in a wheelchair, or trans, or female or aboriginal – i.e., why isn’t this character “normal”? Ha-ha, dumb network executives – except, damn, I’ve thought that way, too. Patted myself on the back for adding “diverse” characters to a script as if they were ornaments on a Christmas tree, instead of seeing that my experience is not the default.