Tired of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

Great series by Bitch Magazine called Tropes vs. Women.  Here's the takedown of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy by Feminist Frequency.

Perhaps it's time the Broads did some parodies.  I have a few title suggestions - perhaps you have more.

Manic Pixie Dream Grill
Manic-Depressive Pixie Dream Pill
Manic Pixie Death Girl

Oh, dear. Now I've started, I don't think I can stop.

The Girlie-in-Sports Problem

I was just watching Gnarly in Pink and enjoyed watching the little 6-year-old girls skateboarding in their tu-tus.  They were definitely little girls but also definitely athletes. Then they put up the statistic:

By the age of 14, girls are twice as likely to drop out of sports as boys.

My immediate thought was that by the age of 14, girls' bodies have gone through a huge metamorphosis that boys do not have to deal with for a few years.  Things like your center of gravity moving lower. Widening hips putting strain on the knees. Depth perception according to female tennis players who lament about how water retention before their period altering their ability to track the ball. I don't say that this proves that girls can't do sports after puberty, only that we need to recognize it and openly look capitalize on the strengths of women's bodies rather than pushing activities that only can be done by androgynous or amenorrhea-induced bodies.

I speak from experience, not as an athletic girl who lost her prowess to puberty, but one who found the pleasure in physical activity once her body changed.  I had always been the last on chosen for team sports. I had little upper body strength and short legs that made running races a loser's game for me. My dad taught me tennis at 9 and I tried my best, but was weak, lacking the long limbs and robust body type of the more tomboy-ish girls.  That's why I will never forget the day in seventh grade when I suddenly could do something effortlessly in gym class that all the other physically fit girls struggled with.  

We were learning how to jump on a trampoline.  Once we all got the basics, the teacher demonstrated something called "swivel hips."  You were supposed to bounce sitting, twisted in the air, and come down sitting facing the opposite direction. It was good-natured fun watching the girls try to find the coordination for that mid-air twist.  When my turn came, I sat, swung my broadening 13-year-old hips in a circle, and landed effortlessly facing the opposite direction.  Admiration and praise for doing something in GYM!  Never happened before.

A world opened up to me.  I had always been placed in the last row in ballet class. But at 14 I took jazz, and suddenly I was in the front row.  My twisty, sinuous, hippy body put me in the middle of my own, private, ugly duckling story.  I even got better at tennis, learning to use my spine to snap a whipping backhand.  I have ever since been a physically active person, a person who has spent a lifetime practicing dance and mime, was a clown in the circus, and who has taught movement, yoga, and dance to others.  All this was the gift of my changing body. 

The above statistic doesn't mention  how many girls take up dance.  How many start yoga. (Nor how many of the boys who quit sports, too, end up practicing these healthy, physical activities.)  Maybe girls do leave "sports" but then many "sports" are designed with the architecture of the male body in mind.  Once I realized I had a perfectly capable female body, I stopped wishing to be accepted for being able to do things privileged by the form and strengths of the male.   I offer no criticism of women whose body type lets them continue with the sports they enjoyed as girls, only that there should be activities that reveal what was revealed to me in a jazz dance class in France once. 

It was a dance class associated with the university during my junior year abroad. I was paying for three classes a week at this studio and taking the dance class that came with my enrollment for a fourth. Three young men from Iran had come to study at the university and decided to take the class for their physical education credit.  They entered the class confidently, seeing the little, lithe female instructor and short-legged, hippy me. She started what for me and for her was a slow, basic warm-up and set of moves.  The muscled trio struggled with all the core work, the fluid stretching, and the loose dynamics of the moves. After 45 minutes they were incapacitated, and the instructor ended the class early.  I had barely gotten warmed up, but understood.  This class for them was what gym class had been for me in 6th grade; all rope climbing and pushups. The three students never came back, and I wonder some times if the number of guys who say they don't dance is a reflection of their inability to take what was dished out to me almost daily until puberty.  I propose that moving with grace, that flexibility and core strength should be as privileged in elementary schools so that boys learn to respect "girlie" abilities such as "princess" poise and "ballerina" flexibility.

Make Your Resume an Infographic!

Great site where you can make a chart resume for free.  If you send a link rather than a graphic file, the resume will be interactive with more details in the rollovers. Great for us artist types who do many jobs at the same time.  Here's what I was able to do pretty quickly by copying and pasting from my resume.  Click on it and you can see the resume on the site, plus you'll get the fun background image instead of the plain white you see here...

Great Indiewire Article on Gender Bias

From Indiewire: Jane Campion and her female Cannes jury members

Great article on Indiewire about gender bias, with data and info for women filmmakers.

I know, I know.  I'm just as tired as you are of complaints that women don't get a fair shake in the film biz. We have to get over that fatigue, in my opinion, just like marathon runners have to get over being tired halfway through a race. The inequity is real.  It's entrenched.  Changes are happening at a glacial pace, if at all.  But I like to think that maybe Stephen Jay Gould's concept of "punctuated equilibrium" for evolution applies to social change as well. The system, unfair though it may be, is trying to maintain its identity in equilibrium.  So it will resist change that threatens to radically alter its identity.  A few random "mutations" may survive or breed out in a generation without shifting the species, like the few lucky women who catch a break.

(NOTE: I don't call them "lucky' because they succeeded entirely on luck.  I know they are all incredibly talented and hard-working.  Their luck is in having their hard work get suddenly rewarded, while other equally hard-working and talented women get bupkiss.)

When external pressure creates situation where the old attributes no longer fit the environment,  survival suddenly encourages mutations that fill the niches of opportunity.  At these times, species evolve very quickly and dramatically until they settle into a new equilibrium that fits the new environment.

Look at how gay marriage initiatives, stalled and thwarted for so many years, suddenly reached critical mass and state after state has been passing marriage equality legislation.  If we keep the pressure up with our "complaining" and keep making films on whatever platform we can, these may turn out to be good times to be a female filmmaker.  After all, we're already in the middle of a flux period in the entertainment business. Technology is putting on some pressure.  Changing social norms are putting on more pressure.

(Hat tip for the Indiewire article to Judy Chaikin and the Alliance for Women Directors.)

Genetic Differences vs. Societal Influences: A Personal Story by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Hat tip to Upworthy.com for posting a video from 2009 that highlights a story by Neil DeGrasse Tyson that was in response to a question about genetic differences in women possibly accounting for why so few women enter scientific fields.  His story about his journey to becoming a scientist illustrates his final point, which is that BEFORE scientists - and the rest of us - talk about genetic differences, we have to come up with a system where there's equal opportunity.

The Upworthy video doesn't play.  Here's a YouTube link that should start just before his comments, which begin in answer to a question at 1:01:48. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEeBPSvcNZQ#t=3690

2014 Broad Humor Short Film Challenge

Every year, Broad Humor issues a challenge to all past participants to make a short film with the guarantee that if they stick to the rules, it will get screened. For past participants in this category, there is no submission fee if they submit directly to the festival rather than using a submission service like withoutabox. It's our way of offering continuing support to women aiming for the funny bone.  If you build it, it will screen.

Last year, we decided to open the challenge up to all female filmmakers. So any short film submitted that fits the Invitational Challenge rules will automatically be entered in competition for this category as well.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
2014 INVITATIONAL SHORT FILM CHALLENGE

The 2014 competition invites filmmakers to submit short films where someone finds herself/himself in what is clearly an impossible situation and somehow manages to triumph. The payoff should take the viewer by surprise. Think of the delight you've experienced when that happens in a movie you're watching. So see if you can do it in five minutes or less. Here are the rules you must follow...

1. The film must deliver a character out of an impossible situation in a surpise that the viewer never saw coming.
2. The film must include the following line of dialogue: "I use Q-tips for that."
3. Some kind of baked goods must find its way into the story.

By the way, we're sticklers for the five-minute maximum, so please honor it. 

More Women in Films Means More Profit--the Numbers Say It All

Last year our Invitational asked the Broads to make a short that passed the Bechdel test.  Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight blog, known best for predicting election results based on statistical analysis, looked at the bias against women in Hollywood and came up with a great column on how women's movies are a better investment overall.

If you dig down into the numbers with him, it seems to be that the more women in the film the lower the budget.  However, in terms of return on investment, the aggregate of films that pass the Bechdel test do much better than the aggregate of films that don't, even accounting for blockbusters.

As Meryl Streep asked at the 2012 Women in Film Crystal Lucy Awards, " Don't they want the money?" (Great article in the Guardian about that here.)

What Walt Hickey did in FiveThirtyEight's article is break all films into 4 categories: passing and the three conditions that make a film fail.

• Passing: two named female characters, who talk to each other, about something other than men.
• Women only talk about men
• Women do not talk to each other
• Fewer than 2 women

As the presence of women in a film goes up, the budget goes down.  The biggest average budget size was in films where there were at least 2 women, but they never talked to each other.  I mean, ladies, really?  Can you imagine life where you only got to talk to men??? 

When 538 interviewed Hollywood players, there were four reasons for the dearth of females in films, first and foremost being the  "scant numbers of women in writing, directing, producing and financing roles in Hollywood."  How's that for circular?

They also point to two other big reasons wrapped around a general assumption about what people will pay to see.

... the fact that foreign pre-sales are crucial in paying for the vast majority of films and the belief, among investors, that movies featuring women do not “travel” well internationally; and the persistent assumption that American audiences are more likely to prefer male-anchored films, especially in the lucrative action genre.
...
 This assumption is up for debate; we found that films that pass the Bechdel test tend to do better dollar for dollar than those that don’t — even internationally.

So go read the article.  Post it, tweet it, and keep hammering the reality home.  More women=more money.

(Hat tip for this link goes to Julie Janata at the Alliance for Women Directors.)