Representation of women in the media, stage back and front, 2

For the first time in 54 years, after 13 men in the role... the Doctor is a woman.

Doctor Who: Jodie Whittaker announced as 13th Doctor

To nobody's surprise...

Look Who’s Still Talking the Most in Movies: White Men

(...) A new study from the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering found that films were likely to contain fewer women and minority characters than white males, and when they did appear, these characters were portrayed in ways that reinforced stereotypes. And female characters, in particular, were generally less central to the plot.

The study, conducted by the school’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab, used artificial intelligence and machine learning to do a linguistic analysis of nearly 1,000 popular film scripts, mostly from the last several decades. Of the 7,000 characters studied, nearly 4,900 were men and just over 2,000 were women. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the male characters spoke far more than the female ones did, with 37,000 dialogues involving men and just 15,000 involving women. (...)

The researchers also looked at the “centrality” of each character by mapping his or her relationship to others in the film. They found that in most cases, when a female character was removed from the narrative, the plot was not significantly disrupted — except for in horror movies, in which women are often portrayed as victims. (...)

Of the films studied by Dr. Narayanan’s team, there were seven times more male writers than female writers, nearly 12 times more male directors, and over three times more male producers. When the writers were women, the number of female characters in a movie was 50 percent higher. (...)

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41108180

A couple of men want to film an all female version of Lord of the Flies

http://deadline.com/2017/08/black-rose-horror-anthology-series-written-directed-...

The CW has put in development "Black Rose Anthology", a one-hour horror anthology series written and directed entirely by women. It hails from Drew Barrymore and Nancy Juvonen’s Flower Films, Jill Blotevogel, and CBS TV Studios.

Blotevogel will write the pilot script for the Black Rose Anthology, which will explore some of humanity’s deepest fears from a woman’s unique perspective. Classic themes of terror will be tackled via vignettes about guilt, jealousy, repression, paranoia, insanity, sexual obsession and survival through a modern and distinctly feminine lens.

>3 MarthaJeanne:

I'd tell them OK--but ditch the tropical island for an ice floe. The girls are models for a photoshoot on a glacier melting due to climate change that breaks up just as they arrive. Swaddled up to their eyeballs in neon Gore-Tex and six layers of wool, nylon and fleece, they sumo-wrestle for the hoard of saltines until rescued. Wouldn't want this high-minded exploration of aggression in the human female distracted by sweaty teenage bodies in monokinis, now would we. ;)

>4 norabelle414:

Interesting. I absolutely loved the two woman-led shows I've seen, Scott & Bailey and Happy Valley. (And that without being particularly a fan of police drama.) I'm also not very brave when it comes to contemporary horror, but I'll remember to look out for this.

Somebody lent me the first season of Fargo, a TV show along the lines of the Coen brothers 1996 movie, when I mentioned how much I had liked the latter. I quit watching before the end of the first episode. I'm disgusted they gave Frances MacDormand's role to a man AND a pregnant wife who now is just that (as god ordains for pregnant wives on planet Patriarchy) and stays in bed while the hubby goes off to his manly duties and employment AND a subaltern cop who is a stupid woman and needs everything pointed out to her by her boss the Man. In the film MacDormand had a male colleague who was less perceptive than she was, and his stolid literalness was played for laughs, but he wasn't obviously dumb.

In fact everything is too obvious, from the relentless pressure on Freeman's schmoe from all sides (much subtler and funnier in the movie), to the Uber-Bully and his horrible uber-bully sons and Thornton's supernaturally capable and frightening psycho. It's all overdone and in your face.

But oh, the loss of Margie, that incandescently beautiful and unique female character... I don't know how anyone who liked the movie could bear to watch this travesty.

>6 LolaWalser: You are much tougher than I; I watched the first few minutes, when it started up, realized how trivialized everything would be, and hadn't even thought about until now, at your mention.

I really love the film. I'm happy to drop in on any part when it happens to be on, and the attention to detail, to how things would fit in, from the interplay of walk on characters, to the attention to dialect, is always an amazement.

>7 Lyndatrue:

Thanks so much for saying that, Lynda, I thought I'd be alone in feeling this way, I hadn't read anything about the TV series before but I had been aware that the buzz was positive. I didn't even know that McDormand's role went to a man and all that.

A few days ago I got the DVD of the movie (I hadn't seen it since it came out--wow, 21 years ago) and that's why we got to talking about it.

What a shame, really it's like a heavyhanded parody of everything that is cool about the movie, from the macho cop with preggers wife (how original and remarkable was the portrait of the couple Marge-Norm in contrast?!?!), the dumb woman cop who can't find her way around without help from her boss (Marge's colleague was treated with dignity, not a total fool), to Freeman's repellent nag of a wife--compare her to Macy's hapless wife, an ordinary woman we feel for from start to finish.

And the killers in the movie, grotesque as they are, are ordinary human beings, bumbling fools not masterminds, that's what makes their story so hair-raisingly compelling.

It's like someone just wanted a whole show about how people in Minnesota talk funny because it was part of the movie's charm. And saw nothing else or misunderstood everything they saw.

(duplicate)

Looking around for stuff, came across this... there have been other articles over the years on this phenomenon, this is from last year so it's still going on.

Discrimination, but it also skews representation:

Men Are Sabotaging The Online Reviews Of TV Shows Aimed At Women

Note that women aren't doing the same to men. Next time someone tells you women/teenage girls are the most vicious beings on earth and in response your mind goes to murder and rape statistics, remember these little things are measures of viciousness too.

Justice League: Laying bare the row over 'skimpy' costumes

Reporting while female:

three themes of reporting as a woman: First, you teach yourself to downplay whatever threat there might be. (“I didn’t feel like my life was in danger, necessarily,” she tells me.) Second, you tell people about the actual menace, so you have a record of your concern. And third, you realize your supervisors may or may not have the same level of concern, or first-hand exposure, to the threats you face. Whether such threats are viable matters less than their intent: to make women feel more vulnerable, and to use that vulnerability to make them question their work as journalists, a job that is itself under threat.

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/reporting-female-harassment-journalism.php

(The story of Kim Wall near the end of the piece is vomit-inducing.)

I'm not getting on a frikkin submarine with Captain Nemo and the Virgin herself.

Re: twitter abuse etc., I was just thinking the other day about those reactions Beauvoir got when The second sex came out, the content is identical, 1946/7 or 2018--u cunt, die bitch, nobody fucked you properly, ugly dyke, gunna rape yo--only in her time they had to pull up a chair, set out paper and pen, and, like, write sentences, put the paper in the envelope, buy a postage stamp, haul ass to the post office... I can't tell what's worse--the dedication to abuse it took back in her day, or the sheer avalanche of dreck keypad apes can churn out today with minimal effort.

I thought this was an interesting critique: 'I Feel Pretty' and the Rise of Beauty-Standard Denialism. Here's the sum-up:

I suspect it’s also simply too painful to address head-on. The amount of brainpower I spend every day thinking about how I look is a monumental waste. The sheer accumulation of images of celebrity bodies in my browser history feels psychopathic. I like to think of myself as a pretty smart person, but the truth is that I can’t seem to think my way out of this. The only way I’ve found to banish momentarily that shadow of the idealized self is to pay for it to go away — with a Sephora shopping spree or a spin class.

At last something a little positive... the Doctor is in and she's GLORIOUS! I adored every second of it. Whittaker surpassed all I hoped for--she's just IT! The genuine article!

Scenes from the first episode here--spoilery maybe, if you plan to watch later.

Regenerating Doctor Who | Doctor Who: Series 11