A great post on female characters in the MSM from
overthinking.com. (Hat tip to LJS for sending it to me.) I have been insisting that the problems of female happiness declining over the past thirty years has a lot to do with the lack of stories that help us think about ourselves and our lives. This is why we tell stories. But today's pop culture stories are so lacking in anything resembling a real woman that we might as well be as invisible as certain races and ethnic groups were in the heyday of Hollywood. Oh sure, there are lots of women on screen. I've been saying for a long time that all we get are anima projections instead of three-dimensional true females. This chart shows just how flat - like a projection - these women are.
Wondering about your statement that women are "as invisible as certain races and ethnic groups were in the heyday of Hollywood". What races and ethnic groups are now more visible in Hollywood? And of those that are more visible, are their women as visible as their men? Would love to know what others think about this, because I don't think anything's changed much, and my memory of the Writers Guild of America (West) diversity reports is that those reports also show that nothing's changed much.
ReplyDeleteThings may not be good, but there certainly is a wider range of color on the tube and in films than there was when I was a kid. Where almost all the African Americans I saw until the late 60s were variations on servants, now I see at least SOME variety of social role and class. However, women have gotten less varied in that same time period, with a corresponding impoverishment of our culture. So no, I'm not saying things are peachy for any minorities; some groups are still completely invisible. But to say nothing has changed is to negate my own memory of the absolute Caucasian hegemony of the entertainment and news biz.
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