This was published 6 years ago

Opinion

The real problem with women in film

Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling as they appear in the Wrinkle in Time poster. Disney

Tinseltown’s biggest night has been and gone for another year. And although much has changed in the last 12 months, it seems that all too many things have remained the same. Women in the industry may be claiming more space and volume in which to make themselves heard, but it may be some time yet before social attitudes catch up - even from the people we assume are supposed to "get it".

A week or so ago, the poster for Ava Duvernay’s highly anticipated A Wrinkle In Time was released. It’s a stunning image, with the profile of protagonist Meg Murray (Storm Reid) overlayed by a prism of the other characters’ faces awash in a haze of purple, orange and acid green. I first saw the poster when it was tweeted out by Grace Randolph, creator and presenter of the immensely popular YouTube series, Beyond The Trailer.

“This is a GREAT poster,” she wrote. “But don’t they want little boys to see this too…?”

Uh….say what?

Randolph expanded in her replies to the (thankfully) gobsmacked responses to her tweet. “I’m talking more about the all female cast - as it seems on the poster - and pastel colours.” When someone pointed out that the wildly successful movie Hidden Figures featured three women of colour and nobody else, Randolph argued, “Yes, but that poster has a space rocket on it - and the NASA logo. HUGE difference. (And loved that movie too!)”

Randolph may just be one person, but her views are not all that uncommon. There is an assumption among many that stories that centre women are somehow ‘niche’. For women’s stories to be appealing to male viewers, they have to work hard to make boys and equal part of the story. Or, you know, put a giant phallus in the shape of a rocket on the poster.

This isn’t just reflected by anecdotal evidence; statistical data collected on movie production demonstrates time after time that women continue to be marginalised on screen. In 2015, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media released Gender Bias Without Borders, a report summarising the depiction of female characters in popular movies across 11 different continents. The investigation found that women featured as protagonists only 23 per cent of the time, and that they delivered only 21 per cent of the dialogue. The report also found that for every 1 visible woman on screen, there were 2.24 visible men (on average). But it was also instructive to discover the role women were assigned when they were allowed to be present; when women did feature in these movies, they were two times more likely to be depicted in revealing clothes, with teen girl characters the most likely to be sexualised in this manner.

Similar studies conducted by the research institute show that women in film reflect a dire workplace imbalance. Female characters in popular movies account for less than a quarter of all characters with jobs, which is a far cry from the 40 per cent of women that make up the global (paid) workforce (remembering of course that the vast, vast majority of the world’s unpaid labour is performed by women.) And while boys might have been encouraged to see Hidden Figures because of the rocket on the poster (excuse me while I jettison myself into space), it’s still one of the few films that shows women performing integral roles in the STEM, tech and science based industries with men in these fields outnumbering women on screen at a ratio of 7:1.

But as I said, Randolph’s view isn’t all that uncommon. In 2011, Disney Pixar announced it would be changing the title of their upcoming release, Rapunzel, to the more oblique Tangled. "We did not want to be put in a box,” explained Ed Catmull, president of Disney Animation Studios. “Some people might assume it's a fairy tale for girls when it's not. We make movies to be appreciated and loved by everybody."

In You Play The Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Princesses, Trainwrecks and Other Man-Made Women, the film critic Carina Chocano explores how the idea of girlhood is shaped by stories so often constructed by men. Chocano writes about her first foray into movie critique, when her work required her to spend hours upon hours watching movies in the dark, consuming, as she says, “toxic doses of superhero movies, wedding-themed romantic comedies, cryptofascist paeans to war, and bromances about unattractive, immature young men and the gorgeous women desperate to marry them.”

Isn’t it funny how movies that centre the stories (and voices, and jobs, and importance) of men are never tailored to appeal to women beyond including one or two of us (maybe) somewhere along the way as a plot device? And yet women still see these movies, and are equally able to appreciate the purpose of them?

This, despite the fact that it's always been made explicitly clear to us that our presence in, or outside of them is most properly defined by male storytellers who all too often seem to have never actually met a real life woman in the flesh.

What kind of statement does it make about the complexity of boys to suggest that images of girls and pastels immediately shut them down to a story’s breadth and beauty? We need to be challenging these ideas, not repeating them without question. If you build it, they will come.

So get building.

Clementine Ford is a best-selling author and feminist commentator. Her book, 'Boys Will Be Boys', is out now.

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