The thing about a competitive market is: there’s more to it than just “not too many rules and regs.” In the past 10 years, there have been periods where a monkey could make a fortune in housing, film, banking, etc. It didn’t have to know squat because the mechanisms were in place. The monkey just walked in, spouted some gibberish that people didn’t want to admit they couldn’t understand and so instead applauded as genius (I’m thinking of credit default swaps, among others), and collected its ungodly bonus check.

And businesses thought it made damn good sense to write contracts which specified that the monkey got his small-national-economy-sized bonus regardless of whether he benefited the company or ran it into Chapter 11.

With that level of stupid, of course you get fail. Because the market isn’t competitive anymore – a few huge companies have it all sewn up. When they can hire monkeys and still profit – at least up to the point where the entire economy tanks and everybody is in trouble – you know some manipulation has taken place that is preventing smaller, more innovative firms (fresh blood) from getting into the market and stirring things up for the better.

It’s a lot like personal inheritance, actually – when a kid’s whole life is paved in gold with trust funds and introductions to anyone who can help him from the moment she leaves the womb, she’s likely to follow the path set for her instead of trying anything new. Meanwhile, the kid who’s had to find her own way will likely have more to offer, but go undiscovered because she’s been shut out.

The problem is, every time that you have a cohesive industry, with a small number of schools that give credentials needed for entry, you make it easier for the bigots to hold everybody else out. This is why I think the best tool to fight bigotry and discrimination are open access to markets, antitrust and a light regulatory touch, particularly on small firms. In a competitive market, leaving money on the table because of ego problems results in bankruptcy.

That’s exactly what I would do… if someone would hand me the necessary start-up capital. So there’s your answer – the people who care about this don’t typically have enough money to make a movie on their own, and the financiers are mostly all just looking for a sure thing, not something new and untried. Getting the right people together is a challenge.

I agree that at this point there’s very little alternative to mainstream entertainment presented to a broad audience. All of the entertainment that’s widely distributed to consumers is produced by corporations and sold through corporations.

Up until now there was little to nothing anyone could do to present alternatives to mainstream entertainment, particularly to a broad audience. Before the internet alternatives had to be distributed locally but as the internet becomes more widely distributed it’s becoming easier and easier to produce and freely distribute “locally grown” entertainment.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, perhaps the internet is the perfect opportunity to create an alternative to mainstream entertainment and if there were a website dedicated to distributing alt-entertainment perhaps it could be successful, since there IS a demand for authentic, sincere entertainment. If something like that were to succeed perhaps it could change the products being produced by the corporate entertainment industry.

Sure, there’s no alternative currently, so why not create it? We are the consumers, we can have an effect on the market.

If I understand you correctly, yes. Even successful corporations and industries tend to operate on a number of bad assumptions. I mean, sub-prime mortgages: anyone who ever managed a small household knows you can’t have that as a standard. But the banks and financial industry managed to convince themselves, probably because it made them, the realtors and the home buyers they worked with feel good. I believe we humans are hopelessly emotion-centered – even the desire to be logical is still a desire, and the possibilities that occur to us as logical solutions are colored by our emotional outlooks.

In the case of the belief there isn’t a market for mainstream films featuring women, I’d say a lot of people in the industry believe it simply because they’ve been told it’s true so often, and unlike me, they have no emotional reason to question it and see the holes in the logic. I’m sure there are also those who just hate women and tend to see women as useless in every part of their lives, but I think most prejudices involve a small percentage of serious haters backed up by a lot of people who have just swallowed their mullarky without thinking about it critically.

So, power of choice, yes, but KNOWLEDGE of that power of choice, less so.

This is good. I agree with Jacqueline that the way choices are PRESENTED can be very problematic. An analogy I used on this site a few times: if you offer me apples or oranges, and the apples are all rotten, of course I’m going to pick the oranges. If you conclude from that that I prefer oranges generally, you’re so wrong. A more familiar example is opinion-polling, in which questions are phrased to get the answer the pollers, or the people paying them, want to hear.

And, yes, people do have the ability to see through this, but unless they have a strong emotional incentive – like, say, frustration from personal experiences with bias – it’s unlikely they will think about it critically.

Interesting comment on narcissists and narcissism. I hadn’t pinned down why it was that the movie portrayals of narcissistic women always seemed off to me, but you nailed it: They are females portraying a male version of that syndrome.

Jacqueline: The issue of choice is something that I have gnawed on a lot, without a strong conclusion one way or the other. I do believe that we all have choices, and I also believe that the information we need to make informed choices is available in so many ways, and yet there are so many people who are unaware of how they have choices, or of the fact even that there is an alternate way of looking at things. So, power of choice, yes, but KNOWLEDGE of that power of choice, less so. I have great hopes for the Internet as a solution to the latter as more and more people come online.

Yes, but I think even *that* is a deliberate perception of which they’re convincing themselves. There are lots of very successful movies that featured women and/or appealed to women as an audience, but somehow these guys keep turning a blind eye without even realizing it.

As for writing women… women are a huge and varied group, just like men. We can be as wildly different from each other as any man and woman can be. The only problem is when a writer perceives a whole gender as a collective: “men are like this, and women are like that.” It’s just not true. You can find examples of every human psychological and personality trait in both genders. Writers may perform better with certain traits than others, but there’s no reason to assign those traits strictly to one gender or the other.

On an interesting and ironic note, I notice male writers have NO problem writing women characters as narcissists of supreme degree. In reality, extreme narcissists (where it’s actually a personality disorder) are male 75% of the time, and even when women are narcissists they tend to manifest it very differently than these entitled TV and movie women do. It intrigues me that male writers claim they can’t write women because they don’t understand them, but have absolutely no difficulty transposing an actually male-trending personality disorder onto female characters (who I’m guessing represent “that bitch that turned me down for the prom” or some similar ego bruise, as many of these women characters get their comeuppance from the male writers for not being humble and sweet).

I’ve thought about this issue a lot. Why do hair stylists all say they know how to cut naturally curly hair when they patently do not know how? I don’t want to think that every hairstylist that I’ve ever seen was deliberately lying, yet I could never come up with any other conclusion.

However, it recently struck me: Perhaps they think they can cut naturally curly hair because they think that permed hair behaves the same as naturally curly hair. Of course it doesn’t, but maybe they think it does and they just aren’t actually looking at the results of their cuts.

The only person who ever gave me a great hair cut was long ago in Arizona. He was the owner of two salons in Tucson; his wife was watching my young child every day while I worked. One day he took pity on me and offered to cut my hair. He did a fabulous job and it looked lovely for months. He even told me what he did, which was to individually cut strands longer and shorter all over, so that the shorter strands supported the longer strands with their extra curliness. After I moved back to California, I tried telling other stylists about the technique, but got nowhere. Only one stylist was honest enough to tell me that it was just too much work.

And perhaps that, in a nutshell, is the main problem with people not writing good roles for women and people not figuring out how to cut naturally curly hair: It is just too much work and there aren’t large, apparent rewards to make it worth the extra effort.