Sunday, October 11, 2009

Women in Hollywood

I've been seeing a lot of Women in Hollywood lists lately, in Forbes about their marketability, November's issue of Elle having several covers to celebrate different working actresses hint: they're not the same women pictured in Vogue's November issue on iconic women, Variety's Women's Impact report-- which honors women of a certain stature in the entertainment business for their philanthropy... and well, it shows some disparity when you look at asexual lists honoring the same thing, women just don't make it into the top 10 positions, or even in many cases, the top 20.Women seem to be getting into more positions of power in Hollywood beyond the movie star; which is fantastic, it really is, but they're still a minority, they still make less than male counterparts, and are still considered a novelty. It's still a big deal that the first female Brit was hired to run a major studio, people still say "well she must have been sleeping with him" for a female writer to rise quickly from production assistant to Emmy-Award Winning Writer. That's why it's still important to talk about women and girls in the context I try to here. I would absolutely love it if there were enough women writing, producing, direction and overseeing intellectual property that I could start venting my spleen exclusively about not taking characters, primary or secondary with enough thought and respect, that would be amazing.
As it stands now, women still are under-represented as creators and implementers, and as characters are often relegated to subordinate positions in narrative that do not get fully considered and are two-dimensional. These decisions often lead to narrower story lines and narrower perspectives that make stories less interesting, not just to me, not just to women, but to everyone. If you have a guy ask why he doesn't understand women, ask how many women were depicted seriously in the stories he was exposed to from infancy to adulthood.

Let's hope that with a larger number of women in positions to talk about stories and the characters in them, people will take these characters more seriously and in turn, we can all learn more from our entertainment.

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