UPDATED: Chris Buchanan’s opinion on Firefly’s cancellation.
I’ve talked before about the film/tv industry’s standard rhetoric for why they can’t make shows and movies women want to see: that women are hard to influence through commercials, so why waste your advertising dollar chasing them when young men will buy anything? Sounds sensible, if it’s true. But is it? Let’s look at this alternative view offered by a 1999 article from the Village Voice, on the spending habits of ad agencies buying TV spots:
All that cash buys “eyeballs”"”or viewers. But not all eyes are equal, at least not to the mavens of the marketing game. Networks charge far more for men’s eyeballs than for women’s, especially when it comes to prime-time shows. “This year, you could reach a thousand guys, 18 to 34, on a minute of network prime time, for 60 bucks,” says Erwin Effron, a leading ad-industry researcher. “Women of the same age group would cost you $47.”
This gender gap may seem unfair to women who were raised to believe “You’ve come a long way, baby.” But it stems from the conventional ad-agency wisdom that women are easy. “More women watch television, and more are available in prime time,” says Peter Chrisanthopoulos, president of broadcasting and programming at Ogilvy & Mather, “and that impacts on the cost to reach them.”
“Conventional ad-agency widsom.” Isn’t “conventional wisdom” a term for ideas that have been handed down from generation to generation for so long no one knows the logic behind them anymore? And the bottom line from the Village Voice article:
“TV is, after all, a group activity,” says James Webster, a professor of communications at Northwestern University, “and along the lines that girls will play with GI Joes but boys don’t play with Barbie, you find that women will watch what men want to watch.”
It’s not hard to read between the lines: if we don’t watch male programming, our tastes won’t be allowed to influence those shows. But if we do watch male programming, our tastes still won’t be allowed to influence those shows. The industry blindly accepts “conventional wisdom” as fact, and since no properly interpreted data can indicate something which contradicts fact, they find ways to interpret the data that fit these “facts”. But that’s where they’ve gone off the rails. Gravity is a fact. “Women don’t like sci-fi, but will watch it for their boyfriends” is not a fact. It’s a supposition, and one I think you’d be hard-pressed to prove with anything resembling a well-constructed study.
Here are some examples of the phenomenon that I’ve thought of. If you can think of other shows that were canceled for suspicious-sounding reasons, or movies that supposedly didn’t appeal to one gender but were beloved by every member of that gender you know, please add them in the comments. I want to see how many we can come up with.
- When women dropped over half a billion to see Titanic, frequently citing Kate Winslet and/or her character as their reason (and the special effects in more than a few cases), it was dismissed as a fluke. The biggest gross-earner of all time, and we’re not allowed to learn anything from its success because it was just a fluke. And why was it a fluke? Uh, something about when it was released, and what else was out, and er, stuff. Conventional wisdom. Don’t question it.
- When huge numbers of women attended the Matrix movies, the industry refused to accept this as proof that women liked action movies, sci-fi, a kick-ass female lead who sometimes rescues the guys, or lots of guns. Or even gawking at Keanu Reeves. Nope, it had to be that we were attending with boyfriends, husbands and male friends – thus proving once more that only men determine the success of a movie, and women’s tastes can safely be ignored without anyone being accused of prejudice.
- When Firefly proved more popular with women than men, that should’ve helped industry pros alerted by the appeal to women of Titanic and the Matrix movies narrow down just what it was we were digging: that we love special effects and action as much as men, if you just give us at least one relatable female character. Instead, it was recognized as “proof” that Firefly wasn’t cutting it as an action series and needed to be axed.
- When Buffy the Vampire Slayer drew plenty of male viewers (7 men to every 10 women), it should’ve proven that guys will indeed watch female action heroes. But instead, the fact that the show targeted female viewers put it right out of the running for any consideration about male viewing habits. Which is kind of like saying if a non-Christian kid chooses to go to a private Christian school because it’s providing a better education than the public schools in his area, his choice and its results don’t merit consideration because the school was targeting Christians.
Got any others?
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Ikkin, if you follow the links at the bottom of this post:
http://thehathorlegacy.com/getting-started-with-the-hathor-legacy/
You’ll find that the Wall Street Journal and Business Week both believe that women of all ages are involved in 80% of all purchases in the US. If they’re not spending their own money, they’re managing the family budget. Or both. And they have input into how their families spend, etc. They question what the hell marketers are thinking in assuming men of any age are where the dollars are.
Re: the discussion about whether girls are pressured to like what boys like, or it’s just about the establishment’s preference. It’s more that we are all trained to see white straight men as the default human being, and the rest of ourselves as “niches” – and therefore the white straight man’s preferences are central to our culture, while everyone else’s are fringe. Once you accept that, it’s not offensive to hear commercials clearly addressing white straight men rather than you. You don’t wonder why The Grapes of Wrath is considered more important in mainstream literature than The Color Purple – you intuitively get that it’s closer to the white straight male experience, and that’s why. And -perhaps the most interesting example of all, in my mind – you get why it’s always women who are naked on camera instead of men. Men might feel threatened by some actor’s hot bod, and men aren’t supposed to feel threatened. Women are, which is why it’s okay that we see actresses naked on screen and compare our bodies to theirs and come up wanting, and feel people are justified in thinking less of us for how we look.
That’s how we’re all trained to see the world: as something by, for and about white straight men, in which the rest of us are just along for the ride, and lucky to be allowed in their world. I’m not sure whether this translates so much to “making girls like what boys like” as “making girls accept that what girls like doesn’t matter, but everyone should be fluent in what boys like so as to impress them” – and it’s a very fine distinction either way. But it makes for great discussion.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Is it really so much what guys prefer, or what the literary establishment prefers? I suppose I’m assuming that we’re talking about English classes and not something else, but I’d be surprised if boys react more favorably to the books chosen for classes than girls. Plus, there’s the fact that assignment tends to breed contempt, which makes it almost impossible to train tastes (how many people come out of school with an appreciation for the classics, really?).
First of all, the literary establishment is still dominated by white men–some of whom actually liked to read when they were young. But perhaps I should have used the terms “women” and “men” instead of “girls” and “guys,” because I can look at my own life and admit that if I had worried about what the guys I went to high school with liked, I wouldn’t have read a damn thing.
But I remember very clearly getting a list as a junior in high school of the books I needed to read before I got to college–and almost all of them were by white men.
And one point of my education up to that time had been to make me understand why those great books were necessary to my education.
The fact that something is an assignment does not necessarily mean that contempt is bred for it. The trick is learning to pick books students might actually like. Teachers who really care about that get good at it. It’s really rewarding to have students tell you that they love a book you assigned them–and that does happen, even with freshman in high school. I have taught literature courses at a variety of schools, including a few universities as well as a high school on a remote Apache Indian reservation where 99.9% of the students were Apache.
To illustrate the point I was making about the presumed–and reinforced–”universality” and “superiority” of works by white men, I’ll tell you that in a senior English class I taught at that high school on the rez, I assigned three books: “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” by Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur D’Alene Indian; “Ceremony” by Leslie Marmon Silko, who’s Laguna Pueblo; and “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, a white guy and Vietnam vet who writes a lot about VN.
And what did the students like best? That’s right: “The Things They Carried,” by the white guy. It was edgy and about war and made the most sense in terms of the movies they watched. They liked Alexie OK, but his work wasn’t as edgy as O’Brien’s. They were kind of bored by Silko, despite the fact that of all the writers, culturally her background was closest to theirs. But her work wasn’t what was reinforced by the larger culture (movies and tv and everything else) of the society they lived in.
I will say that I think TTTC is a great book, but so is Ceremony. I was disappointed that my students didn’t like it more, but it wasn’t the fact that it was assigned that turned them off–it was that it worked really hard to repudiate and challenge white hegemony.
Holly(Quote) (Reply)
I suppose I’m assuming that we’re talking about English classes and not something else,
I also want to clarify this: I’m talking about pretty much the entirety of an education, including science classes stressing the achievements of male scientists, music classes where students learn to play primarily works written by male musicians, and history classes where the actions and ideas and concerns of men get most of the attention–but women are supposed to read it anyway. In “Northanger Abbey,” the heroine Catherine Morland demonstrates her immaturity (and Jane Austen’s wicked sense of humor) by telling the hero that when it comes to “history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in… I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.”
And let’s not forget extra-curricular activities. The whole reason Title IX was necessary was because men’s and boys sports at colleges and high schools got all the funding, and women’s sports got diddly squat. I like “Friday Night Lights”–the characters are interesting, the narrative compelling–but it still sickens to me see how everyone just accepts that football is so much more important than anything girls could ever do. Those players are fawned over by the cheerleaders and the rally girls (or whatever they’re called) who bake for them and do their homework and (in some cases) provide them sexual gratification–and the male athletes accept all the favors adoration from girls as their due.
It’s pretty explicit: boys do things that earn them glory, and girls cheer them on and serve them as they do it.
No sensible girl would accept that as the status quo if there weren’t so much pressure brought to bear to ensure that she and all other girls accept it. That’s what I mean when I say that “one point of a standard education in the US [is] to teach girls to watch (or read, or listen to) and appreciate whatever guys prefer.”
Maybe I’m jaded, but it seems a pretty obvious proposition to me.
I’m just glad that from time to time, the education fails, and the occasional subversive idea–like the notion that girls have better things to do with their time than make cupcakes for football players–gets into circulation.
Holly(Quote) (Reply)
I can relate so much to what’s been said here, I was a tomboy growing up and I was always too embarrassed to admit I liked something that was “for girls”. I remember getting really mad once when my family teased me for watching Charmed, and my mum said to my brother it was “just a girl’s show and must be boring for him” or something like that. I felt demeaned just for being associated with a so-called “girls’ show”, though I never felt that way back when I watched it with my dad, because his watching it made it automatically “right” for me to watch too.
I also found when I didn’t like something in a movie or book because of its assumptions about gender or complete lack of interest to women, I would shut up and /try/ to appreciate the work as wholeheartedly as my brother or other guys did, and always had this feeling that if I didn’t, I was somehow wrong, couldn’t appreciate complex works of art, or a raging bitter feminist.
Karakuri(Quote) (Reply)
Ooh.. you know what, I don’t agree. It’s not about “men watch X, women watch Y”. It’s about “Movie X is targeted at men, but women might also like it – and it’s okay for them to do so” but “Movie Y is targeted at women, and there is NO WAY men will want to go see that unless they’re being dragged there by their girlfriends or something”.
The point is, male-oriented themes are often considered “neutral” in our society. What’s okay for men to like is okay for women, but not vice versa. Therefore when a studio releases an explicitly female-oriented film, they lose HALF of their potential viewership. It’s the same reason studios try to have lower ratings (e.g. PG-13 rather than R) – in order to keep the potential pool of “eyeballs” as wide as possible.
Alice(Quote) (Reply)
What precisely are you disagreeing with? The article doesn’t say it’s about “men watch X, women watch Y”.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
We went shopping yesterday, and my 3 year old son was allowed to pick out a couple toys. He picked himself out a barbie doll and a matchbox car. Both were brightly colored and had sparkles. And perhaps the major deciding factor was – neither his father or myself gave any indications of disapproval of his choice.
Now, had his father gone to pick up a toy for him, he probably would have picked out the GI Joe, or the cowboy outfit, or something suitably ‘masculine’. I’d have gotten him Legos, because, um… LEGOS!
But when allowed to choose on his own, he chose purely based on the fact that his favorite colors are red and orange. He plays just as happily with barbie as he does with his stuffed bear dressed in army fatigues. Barbie is currently tooling around the house in a model John Deere tractor while wearing her red ball gown, with a T-Rex riding with her. They seem to be fleeing the triceratops and Curious George doll whenever they aren’t retrieving alphabet magnets. I’m not sure where the matchbox car went, I’ll probably step on it at some point.
Kids are kids.
GardenGoblin(Quote) (Reply)
My little cousin is much the same, GardenGoblin. When given the chance to pick his own toys he chose a Polly Pocket. The Polly Pocket is now named Princess because he liked the film ‘The Little Princess’ and thought that Princess was the character’s name. It goes around the house with three fairies named Cherla, Strawla and Flowerla in a big armyesque jeep, and I’m fairly sure there’s a decent amount of terrorising going on.
It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen (and he’s the dotiest little boy I’ve ever met), but everyone keeps making jokes about it, that he’s got ‘a touch of the fey about him’ and that he’ll soon give it up when he goes to school.
SarahSyna(Quote) (Reply)
And he probably will because at school, a boy liking princesses will be relentlessly confronted with behavior that suggests he is wrong or freakish.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
My nephew Tristan was overjoyed at getting an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas last year. He was glad that we found one that didn’t have sparkles or hearts all over it, but said that was because real ovens don’t have sparkles.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
…and when given the chance to pick my own toys, I wanted toy guns and toy jewelry.
I think kids are pretty androgynous, and attracted to things that sparkle or go boom. I never really grew out of that, actually – I was labeled a “freak” for so many reasons, it wouldn’t have helped my social standing to be more girly, so I didn’t bother.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
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