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.
Your discussion of how most hair stylists haven’t clue #1 about how to cut naturally curly hair is so true. And there might be similar reasons behind both issues (films and haircuts).
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.
It is just too much work and there aren’t large, apparent rewards to make it worth the extra effort.
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).
O also disagree with Paul W.’s position that the masses are equally at fault for “choosing” forms of entertainment, fashion styles, etc. that promote a Euro-centric fraudulent standard of beauty. What we “choose” are really the options on a finite and very limited menu. Our choices are restricted to those proffered to us by the media and the corporate elite. If something’s not on the menu, we can’t choose it now can we?
Jennifer: Yes, I think I understand. Are you speculating that there is an unconscious bias (per this Web site!) against women period, but perhaps these men’s conscious explanation of the actions that arise out of this bias is that “there isn’t a market”?
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.
Are you speculating that there is an unconscious bias (per this Web site!) against women period, but perhaps these men’s conscious explanation of the actions that arise out of this bias is that “there isn’t a 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.
O also disagree with Paul W.’s position that the masses are equally at fault for “choosing” forms of entertainment, fashion styles, etc. that promote a Euro-centric fraudulent standard of beauty. What we “choose” are really the options on a finite and very limited menu. Our choices are restricted to those proffered to us by the media and the corporate elite. If something’s not on the menu, we can’t choose it now can we?
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.
Sure, there’s no alternative currently, so why not create it? We are the consumers, we can have an effect on the market.
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.
What this also means is that there is tons of money to be made by being less prejudiced than everybody else. Your curly favorable stylist is probably cleaning up. A production studio that let women be more than objects would likely make tons of money. Back in the day, when Jews couldn’t get hired into banks in this country, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers cleaned up by hiring Jewish bankers for cheaper.
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.
Jorgen, I really agree with your assessment of what’s needed in the market place, so long as the “light regulatory” regulations are sensible. We have a tendency to regulate what doesn’t need regulating, IMO, while failing to regulate the stuff that can most hurt people who have no power to fight the system.
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.
This pisses me off. I really, really want to see a TV series adaptation of David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels, and this stupidity is a large part of why I probably never will. I want to watch a six-foot-tall, athletic, half-Caucasian-half-Chinese naval officer command starships in battle, and take down her (usually male) enemies in person with pistols and swords and her bare hands and feet. I want to see the flashback scene where Midshipman Lord Pavel Young surprises Honor in the acadamy showers, intent on rape — and she beats him into a bloody pulp. I want to see Dominica Santos sacrificing herself to save H.M.S. Fearless from destruction as her fusion reactor fails, and Gunnery Sergeant Iris Babcock leading her marines into battle, Michelle Henke serving as Honor’s XO and confidante before taking command of her own cruiser, and Elizabeth III shaping her government’s strategy in the war against Haven. (The latter two, incidentally, are black, making it all the more unlikely we’d ever see them in those roles in a TV series — although Dualla, on BSG, does give me some hope. Actually, now I think of it, Kandyse McClure would make a pretty good Elizabeth.)
I want to see Honor’s female foes, too: the worthy ones, like Genevieve Chin, Esther McQueen, and Shannon Foraker, and the not-so-worthy — Cordelia Ransom is one of the best sci-fi villains ever written. (Imagine Anne Coulter in charge of the Soviet Ministry of Information — the particular stripe of her politics, after all, matters far less than her shameless mendacity, gleeful cruelty, and knee-jerk authoritarianism.)
I wish I had enough funds to back such a film getting made. If I ever win the lotto, I’m going to back some indie films and get some of my favorites made.
Freaking seconded.
Companies like Fox and Sony own movie studios and have a vested interest in maintaining the Patriarchal meta-narrative. If women become fully human we may well be able to influence the economy and society toward a less military/industrial model. Sure there’s profit in having women in movies, but those profits threaten the power structure.
I love this discussion. I would further suggest to you that the current oligarchic structure is increasingly terrified of the open unstructured market for entertainment which the Inarwebz *could* provide. When I understood the potential there, I started expecting to see industry moves by various corporate and/or government agencies or quasi-for-profit boards of various kinds (folks like RIAA, say?) to control what you can access on the internet. Taking aside all the geekdom arguments about whether vidding corporate content is legitimate fair use or not, why is there such an effort to control content? Why aren’t they using the Japanese anime corporate model of celebrating the fans and encouraging home-grown content? Because it’s subversive over here. It defies the official lines. It emphasizes all the Wrong People, or it warps the characters in ways they are afraid to show people at church.
And it might even fail to make women feel inadequate enough to buy more household cleaning products, or clothes, or anti-aging creams, or diet pills.
Amazing! This is spot-on in every way. Pure bodacious badass-ery.
“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.”
So true! I’m 24, I’ve been to university, but since I started reading about feminism and racism a few months back I can’t stop thinking “Why didn’t I notice this before? Why did no-one mention it?”
SunlessNick,
Also, everyone I know likes Alien, Aliens, Alien III but not Resurrection. The alien was still awesome, but they changed Ripley and then it didn’t work.
Changed her into a sexist trope, too. (Joss is not always awesome.)
I lived in L.A. for 12 years, and I was always floored by the sexism I encountered among the older generation of male screenwriters. It really is straight out of the 1950’s. Bravo for telling it like it is. Your posts make so much sense.