Why discriminate if it doesn’t profit?
There’s a question that comes up every time I tell my story about how I slowly realized that Hollywood didn’t want movies/shows for, by or about women to profit. To sum up that story, what tipped me off was that whenever film students pointed out how movies/shows for, by or about women had indeed profited, film professionals wouldn’t hear it. Those movies/shows were exceptions! Or it was really the alien/Terminator/Hannibal Lechter people wanted to see, not Ripley, Connor or Starling. Etc. It couldn’t be that people were actually happy to see movies/shows for, by or about women, because that was impossible - end of argument.
The question this brings to mind is: why would they discriminate against a group when there’s more profit to be made by doing the right thing? That’s a good question, and one that deserves an answer.
In comments on the above-linked entry, I explained that I think it boils down to the ego. Even greed is fueled by the ego - it’s the ego that wants more than enough so it feels safe or better than its neighbors. It’s the ego that wants to feel important, unique, successful. Eliminating entire clumps of humanity from the “race” your ego thinks it’s in is a quick way to get rid of competition. It’s the same question you have to ask about store owners and restaurateurs who refused to serve African-American patrons whose money was as green as everyone else’s. They sacrificed profit, and for what? Ego.
But that’s not necessarily the only answer. Laziness is also a factor.
Pardon the topic switch (it’ll all make sense in a paragraph or two), but I have naturally curly hair. As Lorraine Massey’s book Curly Girl explains (and most curly-haired women can tell you from personal experience), stylists are trained to cut “against the curl”, which explains why until recently no stylist at any price ever gave me a good cut unless I was straightening. They also give you precisely the wrong advice for your hair, which is emphatically not “just like straight hair.” In fact it’s so different, Massey says many curlies should never shampoo - there are better ways to get your hair and scalp clean that don’t damage your hair.
Why would stylists ignore the curly market? You wouldn’t know it from looking at the media, but we are probably a majority - or close enough. Why not cater to us? (I finally found a curly-haired stylist who can cut my hair properly, and I’m paying her handsomely for her work, and I’m glad to do it. No one else wanted my business.)
As Massey points out, it is a side effect of Western racism. Curly hair belongs to Africans, whom we once saw fit to enslave. It belongs to the Irish (that’s me), who were fit only for unsafe cheap labor, and loathed for “taking jobs from” the good, straight-haired white people. It belongs to Jews, resented because they keep thriving no matter what people do to them. There’s a longterm association of curly hair with groups of people Anglos want to exploit or “keep down”, who make trouble if you don’t make sure they know their place. Ignoring their differences from you can be as effective as highlighting them.
Curly-haired women are often made to feel unfashionable, weird, unwanted. We think we have bad hair when in fact we just have bad information on hair care. And straightening isn’t as simple a solution as you think. It’s expensive, damaging, time-consuming, and always, always, always the curl lurks just around the corner, waiting for the slightest humidity (or whatever your hair’s trigger is) to revert to its true nature.
So ego is part of it - part of the industry’s belief it’s we curlies who are wrong, not the industry. That we should change by straightening, not the industry that should change by accepting the facts and adapting to the customer.
But ego’s not all of it. I really don’t believe stylists understand that they don’t understand what curly hair needs. Not so many years ago, people learned trades through apprenticeships; mere decades ago, X years of experience on the job could equal a college degree in a field. Now we’re all so dependent on school and certificates, even vocational school, which causes us to skip the thinking process, as if stuff we learn at school represents the whole of human knowledge and all we need to do is memorize it. If it didn’t come up in your Vidal Sassoon class, it can’t exist. Even though it seems to exist right in front of you, you know it can’t, or Vidal would’ve mentioned it.
Despite Massey’s book, the hair care industry still largely fails to get it. If they suddenly acknowledge curly hair really is different (duh!) then holy shit, suddenly everyone needs remedial classes. Vidal Sassoon’s training starts to look pretty stupid. What a pain in the ass! Can’t we just pretend there’s nothing new to learn, no matter who it hurts, and sit back and feel good about ourselves? Ego and laziness - the intrepid supervillain team!
That laziness factors into TV and film because in the case of TV advertisers don’t seem to want to know that women are worth pitching products to because it would mean learning something new (look at the shortcuts they take when pressed: “make it pink, mention shoes”), like what types of ads women respond to. In the case of movies, it would mean… well, nothing. Honestly, you write women pretty much like you write men. But they think it would mean learning something new, and to be fair, for many of them it would mean learning to write credible voices belonging to a group of people they associate with little more than high school rejection, being told to clean up their room, divorce and child support checks. It would also, for many of them, mean noticing someone who has never before existed to their eyes: women who don’t fit the “hot chick” profile. Women who, like so many of our favorite male movie icons, are more fascinating than modelesque, who are sexy because they’re made of awesome, instead of just looking awesome.
Even more frightening is the prospect of letting into the industry people who don’t have a beef against women. Because you know what other traits non-bigots tend to share? Intelligence and self-confidence. That’s why they’re able to come to grips with their own shortcomings without making scapegoats out of huge classes of people. If you’re not - if you only think you look good because you’re standing on top of millions of people you and your friends have discredited out of existence - your antiperspirant fails at the very thought of smart, secure people flooding into the job market you depend on.
Is it laziness or ego that holds you back from overcoming your desire to blame entire groups for your own shortcomings? Maybe in the end, it’s the ego that fuels laziness too. Whatever the case, it’s not that hard to explain why people who claim to worship profit above all else sometimes actually worship what they want to believe is profitable.
Posted in Industry Buzz, Mini-Reviews, The Think Box 
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22 comments
Holy shit, I didn’t actually expect you to do it…but you just explained the WHY (that I was looking for from last post) remarkably well.
(and that is not meant to imply I had low expectations of you…I didn’t know if ANYONE could do it. Kudos! And thanks.)
Any luck on my other request?
That was the silly thing about the F&SF / Eclipse claims - you’d think that symphony orchestras would want to have the best performers regardless of their gender, too, in order to attract more audiences…but that wasn’t how it worked. Funny enough. (You’d also think people would not drink and drive, or smoke a pack a day, or lie down in the middle of the road on a dare, or strike up romances with known killers, or leave a gun on the stove while frying bacon in the presence of a cat, or any number of things, on account of wanting to stay alive/maintain quality thereof, but they do every day. Odd how logic doesn’t rule human decisionamaking in all areas, innit?)
Spartakos, by “other request, I assume you mean this?
I don’t think you can make them think differently. I think if enough of us got into position, we could force them into acting as if they think differently. I mean, that’s how culture works. There was a time when people felt comfortable being overtly racist in public - they knew the culture supported them in this. Now, even though there are still plenty of racists around, it’s less common for people to be overt about it, because they’re not so sure the culture will support them on it.
Industries and markets are subcultures, and the same rules apply. It’s the “got into position” part of what I said that’s tough because the hatches are battened down. Bigots instinctively, unconsciously understand how this stuff works. You’d almost need a covert operation culminating in a coup: inserting line-toeing spies into the industry until there are enough of them with enough power to take over.
Because that would be such a challenge, a better hope might be a very big earthquake.
Bellatrys, that’s very true. There’s a very fine line between being rational and rationalizing, and our emotions cause us to cross it all the time. The film industry is hardly unique in this.
So once again, I find myself wondering why it was that none of my friends (male or female) wanted to see Terminator 3 upon learning for sure that Sarah Connor would not be in it. An Alien without Ripley I can get - it forms a “villain franchise” where the monster is a draw - but Ripley is still held by everyone I know as the standard the human lead must live up to. Oh, and none of them watched Hannibal either.
That’s a small sample set, but it’s a pattern I see reported over and over.
Which makes me suspect, in the reasons you suggest, ego over leaziness. Because it must take a heck of an effort to maintain the mythology that fans only want to men, white men, straight white men, tremendously macho straight white men in lead roles.
Another facet to ego might be a desire to believe that they “get” people - after all, they tell stories about people don’t they, they must understand them, mustn’t they? If their models about what types of film audiences want are wrong, it calls into question the validity of what’s inside the films as well - the most basic part of their jobs.
Cowardice too: people frequently fear trying new things, and rarely want to be the first to do so. So they shy away from rethinking their models, because they don’t want to be the first to take the risk - and rationalise away any evidence that the risk may not actually be very great.
Case in point: I ask you; who the hell goes to see a film called Titanic without the expectation of watching a ship get smashed with an iceberg, the people aboard it trying to survive, and many of them suffering icy death? I can’t help but suspect that if women flocked to it in such greater numbers than they do to other romance films, something besides the romance was a draw - and could it have perhaps been the one thing we’re guaranteed to get in a film called Titanic?
“I think if enough of us got into position, we could force them into acting as if they think differently.”
Yes. This.
Kinda like how most book bestseller lists had to suddenly pretend as if they all thought that kid lit was actually worthy of being noticed, or else Harry Potter was going to constantly shove the “real lit” off the lists. Although, obviously, that still results in a lot of marginalization, it’s better that not being noticed at all.
The other, more remote option, is that the industry gets seriously hit by the recession and that makes room for some people to take chances and try (suposedly) new things.
Kinda like how most comic book store people still look down on manga - but they still sell it to survive.
(although the earthquake’s a pretty funny idea. maybe we could make it the subplot of the next made for TV disaster movie)
Alas, I think this will just bring out more “reality” TV. Like “Greatest American Dog” on CBS, a reality show with the goal of finding the perfect canine pet.
Er. I suppose that might be an example of the industry focusing on an underused demographic?
sbg
yuck. and you are probably right.
(sigh)
I shall thank the goddess daily for my Buffy, Criminal Minds, Cagney and Lacey, and Veronica Mars dvds. (and many more, of course, but I didn’t want to take up half the page)
You mention greed coming from ego, but I wonder if greed itself might not (as well) be a powerful factor in and of itself. After all, on a large scale, it is profitable, since anything that helps to perpetuate the system ensures that privileged white men still have the best shot at the top jobs. So…lose money on the short term to ensure that the money that is made is always made by privileged white men.
Nick, they seem to take a lot of pride in the idea that they (smugly) understand how mentally deficient the audience is. Writers in HW seem to think they’re so sophisticated that no mass audience could understand the Truly Artistic Movies they would write, if only they were allowed. I was scoffed at for saying I suspected most of the audience was smarter than they thought, and the rest was too indiscriminate to mind watching “smart” movies as long as they still had the rip-roarin’ special effects and other stock “formula” stuff (which in time you could wean them off of).
And good point: you can’t say Titanic did so well because of the romance, because 50 billion other romances came out that same year and didn’t do so well. Which, I imagine, is why they claim it’s Leo (but is anybody buying that? Nothing against him, but I don’t know anyone who thinks that highly of him).
Mickle, yes, but where’s the second season of C&L? When’s that coming out? When they decide the first season sold enough to make it worthwhile. Wonder if that’ll happen? Sorry, I’m pissed that it’s not out already.
S.A. Bonasi, you’re exactly right - job security is just as important to profiteers as profit. Maybe more so. Probably a bit of a balancing act.
After a point with “ego”, it gets down to semantics. Someone on LJ brought up (in response to this article) some great points about economics: “Those businessmen who discriminated against black people were not just doing it because they wanted to feel better or safer than anyone else. It was also because if they went ahead and served the 10% of the population they were screwing over, they could potentially lose 50% of their customers. That was their fear.”
Good point. But I choose to trace back to motivations of the customers - why did they want to frequent places that excluded certain people? Because it made them exclusive and special, that they could get served. Why did they want to feel exclusive and special? Ego.
Why does anyone want more than they need (the beginning of greed)? Security, but again that’s an ego thing. The body knows when it’s full and warm. It doesn’t think ahead to the future and freak out about the possibility of Not Having. That’s not the animal brain at work - that’s the ego. And then greed - the ability to hurt others to get more than you need until your ego feels safe - is something *I* would define as purely ego-driven.
That’s just how I see the words and perceive things working. I’m not trying to prove my view right, just clarifying how I use the terms.
I’ll tell you what’s made of awesome. This post. Right here.
The digression about curly hair made me want to stand up and cheer and it wasn’t even the main point.
Greed/ego/laziness - whatever the combination of traits/life philosophies, the effect is that of pretense. A pretense that we all too often internalize, so that those most represented on screen are normalized. A white dude is normal - needs no description - he is the ‘default setting’ for human. If you’re not a white dude and you’ve got that mess in your head, it’ll do a number on ya.
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I believe you are correct about ‘not wanting business’ and ‘keeping people in their [perceived] place’. Now, the question is, how to remedy and restore the damage done to the blessed by the afflicted-and-insecure who don’t really like business as much as they like the privilege of pretending like they’re the only people whose humanity is of material worth?
That’s always the tough question, skywardprodigal, and I don’t claim to have the answer. For the purpose of longterm change, I’ve always believed it’s more important to change our culture and the messages we’re sending than to change laws, but I think a combination of the two can set the stage for reducing future problems and raising awareness.
But to fix what’s already been damaged? I personally am of the belief that Affirmative Action was a pretty damn good idea and we may have ended it too soon. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it did help to normalize diversity in what used to be almost exclusively white male spaces. Normalization is a big step toward creating generations that can’t even imagine all-white/male spaces, and that’s a big push in the right direction. As are laws that attempt to nudge employers toward hiring other groups who’ve been discriminated against. Maybe the momentum started from those will carry us through until these attitudes are so unpopular that they don’t cause problems anymore (I’d like to see them eliminated, but am not holding my breath).
This is why I started this site. TV and film have tremendous power to normalize things in our minds. Right now, they’re still mostly still normalizing the idea that only white men have interesting stories and everyone else is a satellite orbiting them, or a burden they have to carry. I just want to break that up and show all different sorts of people in all different sorts of roles, and then at least they’d stop reinforcing bad messages.
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I’ve been thinking about this particular subject at great length and just recently stumbled on this article and I have my own hypothesis on this subject.
I believe what you’ve been describing in the two articles can also be described as effective marketing through the entertainment industry by the consumer goods industry and from a psychological point of view what could essentially be called brainwashing.
I’ve noticed in nearly all parts of the entertainment industry (television, movies and popular music) there’s a constant subconscious reinforcing of stereotypes. Now you could say that that’s what people want to see, that that’s all the general public would be comfortable with but I have another possible explanation.
There’s a very good reason for reinforcing stereotypes to a mass consumer audience. The consumer audience will subconsciously base their taboos and expectations of other individuals and themselves on those stereotypes. The strongest undercurrent of this is the reinforcing of masculine and feminine ideals, as it applies to the entire audience.
Now the most obvious proponent of subconscious stereotype reinforcment is the consumer goods industry. This is relatively easy to illustrate by looking at current subcultures. Hip hop culture, for instance is subconsciously encouraged through mainstream music and television to wear certain styles of clothes, use certain fragrances (almost all of which are marketed by members of the mainstream music industry) and idolize a misogynist masculine ideal and a promiscuous feminine ideal. Now my personal belief is that the main reason for this is to change the focus of a culture that in America’s past has been deeply spiritual to a culture that is primarily focused on materialism and self image, which is far more profitable.
Now I’m getting a little off topic but I feel it must be said, but what bothers me most of all about the stereotypes presented to the hip hop community through the music industry (the CEOs of which are all white males) is the encouragement of a low income minority to deal and use illegal substances and idolize individuals that have served time in prison. Recently I’m becoming more and more sure the drug war is almost entirely for the profit of privatized prisons and recently I discovered a well researched article that shocked me because it almost explicitly states that this is correct.
Back to what I was originally saying, what all of this suggests to me is that far more profit can be generated from sponsors (which in turn get some say in who the entertainment’s target audience is) than from viewers, especially with the rise in pirating of copyright materials and every episode of nearly every popular tv show being accessible as internet video.
Now before now there was no doubt in my mind the strong influence the pharmaceutical industry, the automotive industry, the oil industry and the consumer goods industry were having on popular entertainment, but now, after reading your original post I have to wonder if there’s some other stronger influence on the entertainment industry. There’s nothing that would suggest that the subliminal stereotyping of women as only ever talking about men would be profitable which makes me believe there’s some other reason for it. But what, then?
The only thing I can think of is subliminally encouraged sexism, but that seems too much like conspiracy for me to believe…
Anyway, some things I’ve been thinking about recently, any input or criticism would be appreciated.
Paul W., that makes a ton of sense.
I would argue that there IS a consumer goods marketing benefit to the way women are portrayed on TV: we are constantly being made to feel not good enough, too ugly, diminished. Our bodies are never right. Our hair is never good enough. We rarely see women breaking the glass ceilling without getting punished somehow for it; we see women being victimized over and over, but rarely see a woman kick a would-be rapist in the balls or pop his eyes out and get away.
What does this sell? Cosmetics, fashion, anti-depressants, cosmetic surgery, etc. All the “solutions” women are offered for “fixing” ourselves, when it’s our lives and the society we live in that needs fixing.
Jennifer, I can’t believe that didn’t occur to me. Especially since all I can think about on the days I work in the cosmetic section of the large, soul crushing corporation that is my employer is how infuriating it is that the oil and pharmaceutical companies have found a way to make a profit off of insecurities reinforced by the media, ESPECIALLY since they seem to be marketing to younger and younger female audiences (Bratz? Barbie? What the hell is wrong with this culture?). The fact that so much of it contains toxins just makes it worse!
I guess, thinking about it a bit more, I realize the reason I most likely didn’t catch on to that is that it wasn’t as blatant as what I’m used to seeing that really pisses me off. I’m used to seeing commercials for shampoos and body washes presented by what I think of as “photoshopped women” that are obviously attacking feminine self image, where as what you’re talking about is much subtler and far more insidious. Things like women getting into a bad relationship in a sitcom and not trying to change things or women being presented as not knowing what they want is almost worse, I think, because subconsciously encouraging women to follow what they see on TV as their role models could, in some cases, actually be destructive to their psychological or physical health, depending on their respective situations.
This makes me wonder if it’s healthy to show relationships on television at all. How can one develop a personal sense of what love is if one’s force fed an insincere emotion packaged by industry?
I guess I feel the same way about beauty and most of all God. Those words need to have personal meaning based on the individual, not meaning given them by corporation or religion.
Yes, seeing a character you admire get into an inadvisable relationship is maddening. It could indeed be damaging to anyone who’s looking for answers about relationships - i.e., a young person or an adult who’s realized her current approach to relationships isn’t working and she needs new ideas.
The subtle and insidious stuff is kind of what this site’s all about, which is why it occurred to me quickly. I don’t actually think there are boardrooms where people say things like, “No, don’t show her becoming CEO without something bad happening to her to balance it out - that’ll give women hope and lower Paxil sales.” I think it’s more a result of the default story being one that’s about men, and any story about a woman (or a black man, or a disabled person, etc.) being seen as an “issue” story, a story not about a woman, but about being a woman. And the part of womanhood it has to be about, being an “issue” movie, is the bad stuff. And from that theory, people take stock stereotypes and tropes, figuring it worked before and therefore will convince their bosses it’ll work again.
But I do think there may be boardrooms in the cosmetics and pharma industries where people discuss which shows they should buy air time on, and confident women who behave like adults are not their target audience, and not where they want to spend their money. And in turn the industry notices where the dollars are going and gives the advertisers what they’re looking for. Vicious circle.
My theories, anyway.
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