But besides that, the actual characters in Labyrinth count as well as the people pulling the strings. While 32 percent of the performers employed to run the animatronics might have been women, the characters portrayed on screen tell a different story to the audience watching. During her time in the labyrinth, Sarah encounters a number of characters who either help or hinder her on her quest. There’s Hoggle, the crotchety gnome-like creature sent by the Goblin King to lead her astray (but who ends up an ally); Ludo, a giant beast Sarah rescues from a dicey trap; Sir Didymus the brave terrier, who rides around on his steed Ambrosius, a shaggy English sheepdog; Firey, the leader of the Firey monsters; the Helping Hands, the Four Guards, the Left and Right Door Knockers, all of whom stand in Sarah’s way; the Junk Lady, a mean old behemoth of a scrap heap who tries to poison Sarah so she’ll give up; Wormy, the worm who invites Sarah inside to ‘meet the Missus ’n’ have a cuppa tea!’; and aaaaaaaaalllllll the goblins who live with Jareth/Spandex Nutsack in the castle, and whom we can probably assume are formerly kidnapped babies-turned-stooges.
Whichever way you cut it, this is a story about an adolescent girl making her way through a land that is, like, almost entirely populated by dudes, one of whom is literally preceded by the outline of his enormous dick. Had an analysis been done on the ethnicities represented, a similarly bleak story would have emerged—it might seem churlish to expect a movie primarily populated by puppets to have a cast of racially diverse actors, but the sad truth is that you’re still more likely to find mythical creatures than people of colour, especially women of colour, filling roles in Hollywood.
The same basic truth goes for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It might seem like a movie that showcases raw female strength and skills, but like so many other films it does so through the portrayal of a lone woman fighting to survive in a world dominated by men. Sarah Connor doesn’t exactly fit into the trope of the Strong Female Character (more on that later) because she’s flawed and frequently unlikeable, and this elevates her into something greater. But her existence complicates attempts to have frank discussions about the representation (both literally and figuratively) of women on screen precisely because she’s such a celebrated feminist icon. The men invested in shutting down conversations about sexism in entertainment think it’s some kind of trump card to point to characters like Sarah Connor (along with Ripley in the Alien franchise), as if the two of them negate decades of marginalisation in favour of men’s stories.
As I was writing the paragraph above, I asked my friend Karen if she could think of any other female roles as iconic as Sarah Connor and Ripley. She thought for a moment before saying, ‘They’re it, I think.’ Then she exclaimed, ‘No, wait! Uma Thurman in Kill Bill as The Bride.’
Always be prepared for your ideological opponent to produce a third example. Because if one extra example can be found to contradict your thesis then it stands to reason that there must be an infinite number of examples that can be used to prove you wrong.
Except that there isn’t. Kill Bill wasn’t released until 2003, twelve years after Terminator 2, which was in turn released twelve years after Alien. Compare this to the reams and reams of male counterparts churned out by Hollywood over the years: John McClane, Indiana Jones, Wolverine, Rambo, Rocky, Jason Bourne, James Bond, Neo, Clint Eastwood playing Clint Eastwood, John Wayne playing John Wayne, Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise . . . you get the picture.
But the difference between someone like Sarah Connor and, say, Neo is that Neo still gets to live in a fictional world inhabited by a shit-ton of people who look like him. Sarah Connor is one of only a few women in Terminator 2; men don’t just play her counterparts, they play most of the background humans as well.
On the one hand, there’s a certain narrative sense to creating lonely space around female heroines and directing them to fight their way to freedom. It’s a fairly good analogy for the frustration and isolation women feel in general. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is why it’s done; that this is why male screenwriters (who, like everyone else working in production and behind the scenes in Hollywood, outnumber their female counterparts) have traditionally chosen to fill the gaps around these women with as many men as they can. Nor is it accurate to say these writers always make a conscious choice to do so, to flood their story with as much testosterone as possible, to make sure that men’s integral relevance isn’t forgotten just because the camera is trained on a woman.
The answer lies somewhere in the middle. The uncritical man tells stories that he knows, the ones he grew up watching and learning from too. He knows the story of the princess in the tower, the one who is now allowed to fight her way out (but usually still requires the help and company of at least one man along the way). He can tell the story of that woman’s liberation in a reasonably compelling manner. But this is the only story he seems to know. He doesn’t know how to fill in the space around it with characters whose gender is incidental to the plot points. He doesn’t know how to do that because he doesn’t know how to write fully formed women beyond the trope of The Woman, around whom all the men orbit or work in conjunction to. And he doesn’t know how to write women because he never bothered to take the time to actually understand women or listen to them or, I don’t fucking know, employ a fucking woman to work with him in the writers’ room.
Under this gaze, female characters are crafted not so much as afterthoughts but as understudies. They help out when the story calls for a mother or a fuckbuddy or a tired waitress or a sex worker who apparently needs saving, but when they’ve served their purpose they disappear backstage to wait for their next curtain call.
For example, Terminator 2 features two other sort-of-prominent women in addition to Sarah Connor. One plays John Connor’s foster mother. The other plays the wife of Miles Dyson, the man responsible for inventing the neural-net processor that leads to the development of Skynet, the artificial intelligence system that eventually becomes self-aware and tries to kill all of humanity (not a bad idea, tbh). Pretty much all the rest of the speaking roles are assigned to men. The Lost Boys has only two women of any importance: Lucy, mother to vampire hunter Sam and fledgling vampire Michael; and Star, a love interest who wears lots of floaty skirts. Everyone else with a speaking role? Dudes. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has ONE woman in the entire movie (aside from some giggling students with the horn for Professor Jones), and she gets to be the love interest and the smarty pants and the eye candy and the baddie all at the same time! Women are so good at multitasking.
These things are not meaningless. Sure, girls can consume plenty of stories about boy heroes, boy gangs, boy villains, boy inventors and sometimes even anthropomorphised boy objects, like a car or a plane or, I dunno, a talking hamburger. We can enjoy these movies for what they are, which is generally meant to be light-hearted entertainment or diversion. But what we can’t do is view them as aspirational blueprints for life in the same way that the boys watching them can. We can’t project ourselves into the stories because the stories are so rarely about us. We don’t have enough of our own heroes to make it an irrelevant fact of life that boys get to have so very, very many. We didn’t grow up with fucking George Lucas telling us that we could be a Jedi Master—instead, we learned we could be the only woman in the galaxy but we wouldn’t be allowed to wear a bra in case it strangled us in the zero-gravity expanse of space.
(Interjection: Yes, I know there are technically other women in the original Star Wars trilogy, but their roles are so tiny as to be almost non-existent. Leia is arguably the only female character the trilogy bothers to feature or develop. Also, none of these women talk to each other. Consider this: the original trilogy runs at 386 minutes long. Women who aren’t Leia speak for 1.03 of those minutes. In fact, in each movie only one woman who isn’t Leia speaks in a language audience members can understand—Aunt Beru in A New Hope, an unnamed Rebel soldier in The Empire Strikes Back (she says four words) and Mon Mothma in The Return of the Jedi. Don’t email me about it, you’r
e wrong and I’m right.*)
But there’s the question again of relatability. Girls participate in mainstream pop culture because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do, which means we witness these stories about men and accept them as being reflective of a life that we can understand and in which we can find meaning.
Are boys conditioned to do the same with stories about girls? I think it’s patently clear that they’re not. Stories about girls are considered niche and peripheral, in the same way stories about people of colour or stories about disability or queerness are. They can be included by a sort of unspoken invitation (and are still most often told by men or white people or able bods or straighties etc.), but they don’t ever get to be the standard. Right from the start of childhood, boys are not expected to choose to watch stories about women and they certainly aren’t encouraged to do so by the mainstream, just as white people are not expected to care about stories featuring the lives of people of colour or to seek out content that champions them. Without anything to disrupt that insidious gender conditioning, these boys grow into men who think that stories about anything other than themselves are ‘unrealistic’ or ‘boring’ or, my fave, ‘another example of political correctness infecting the entertainment industry’.
Women don’t get a choice. We take what we can get and hold on tightly to even vaguely positive representations of people whose stories and lives are more like our own, because we have learned that if you gather enough crumbs you can sometimes put together a pretty good meal.
This stuff doesn’t just hit in adulthood, nor is it only present in the distant past of the boombox era. It continues to be instilled almost from birth, delivered to our kids in a stream of children’s books, movies and kids’ shows. It isn’t necessarily that there are no girls. That would be too obvious. It’s just that girls are few and far between, and they’re never allowed to overshadow the boys in case it starts to look like an ‘agenda’.
In a 2013 article for Fairfax titled ‘Girls on film’, the author Emily Maguire recalled some of the attitudes she encountered from children in the writing workshops she facilitates. One of her eight-year-old students—a girl—had written a story about a fierce but heroic pirate called Jessica.
‘Pirates aren’t girls!’ one of her classmates protested, and several others agreed.
‘What about Anamaria in Pirates of the Caribbean?’ the young writer shot back.
‘She’s not a main one,’ came the reply. ‘The main pirates are all boys.’
‘The main pirates are all boys,’ Emily noted. ‘So are the main robots, monsters, bugs, soldiers, toys, cars, trains, rats and lions.’
This is the lesson that mainstream culture teaches to all its young dreamers: you’re allowed to include a girl in your motley group of ragtag heroes, but she’ll never be one of the main ones. And there will rarely be more than one of her and certainly never an equal number of hers to hims.
I’m not lying about this, or even exaggerating. It is quantifiably true that the experiences and presence of women are considered peripheral to storytelling. In 2015, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media released Gender Bias Without Borders, an investigation into the depiction of female characters in popular movies across eleven different countries. The report found that women featured as protagonists only 23 percent of the time; that they accounted for only 21 percent of the dialogue; and that, on average, for every one visible woman there were 2.24 visible men. They were also twice as likely to be depicted in revealing clothes, with teen girl characters the most likely to be sexualised in this manner. You know, because if we gotta listen to women blathering on then they better give us something nice to look at while it’s happening.
And again, let’s remember that of the bare scrape of women allowed to appear on-screen, the overwhelming majority of them are still white, able-bodied and cisgender. A 2017 study of 900 films between 2007 and 2016 found that while women only occupy around 30 percent of screen time, a whopping 76 percent of them in the top 100 of those films were white (‘Inequality in 900 popular films’, Professor Stacy L. Smith with the Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative). In American cinema at the same time, only 14 percent of all female characters were black, 6 percent were Asian American and a paltry 3 percent were Latina. When we protest the marginalisation of women, it’s essential that we are also honest about how white supremacy elevates some of us over others, and work to dismantle that too. As the inimitable Audre Lorde once said, ‘I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.’ The idea that liberation will somehow trickle down is bullshit, and working towards this goal only serves to reinforce the systems of oppression from which we benefit.
So what are girls allowed to be, if it isn’t being allowed to wear practical clothes while driving a storyline?
How about a Strong Female Character!
Yeah, nah. The SFC is an easy way for storymakers to pretend they care about gender diversity, but it usually just acts as defence against any criticism about a story’s lack of diversity. ‘How can we be sexist?! We have such a strong female character!’
The problem with the SFC isn’t just that she’s a two-dimensional figure; it’s that her ‘strength’ is all too often about hitting the right notes to make male viewers desire her and female viewers feel validated by her. She’s described as being ‘feisty’ and ‘quick-witted’. She wields a gun just as well as she does a wisecrack, and can use both to take a man down. It’s clear that she can take care of herself . . . but at some point, she’ll probably need the hero to rescue her to remind her that it’s okay for other people (read: him) to take care of her too. Women are supposed to want to be her, men are supposed to want to fuck her.
This is a distraction, a ruse designed to stop us from realising that the women’s liberation we’re supposedly witnessing on screen is all smoke and mirrors. As author Sophia McDougall wrote in the 2013 New Statesman piece, ‘Why I hate strong female characters’:
Nowadays the princesses all know kung fu, and yet they’re still the same princesses. They’re still love interests, still the one girl in a team of five boys, and they’re all kind of the same. They march on screen, punch someone to show how they don’t take no shit, throw around a couple of one-liners or forcibly kiss someone because getting consent is for wimps, and then with ladylike discretion they back out of the narrative’s way . . . Their strength lets them, briefly, dominate bystanders but never dominate the plot. It’s an anodyne, a sop, a Trojan Horse—it’s there to distract and confuse you, so you forget to ask for more.
When women do remember to ask for more, we’re met with the same tedious, aggressive and occasionally frightening backlash that follows all of our ‘Please, sir’ moments. Reasons abound as to why we can’t have more, many of them contradicting each other. We can’t have more because nobody wants to watch women on screen, but also there are too many women dominating the movies now. Our shrill demands for more are the perfect example of why women are turning away from feminism in droves, and yet feminism has also taken over Hollywood with its politically correct, ball-breaking misandry. Your personal complaints about this imaginary issue show how easily triggered and sensitive you are, so here are a thousand completely rational men with a personalised rape threat for you. You’re welcome.
Okay, so things are fucked up for women on-screen. Surely things are better for little girls? I mean, we’re always telling girls they can be and do anything they want. We love little girls!
Yeah, sure we do. Right up until they hit puberty, then we slap ’em across the face and scream, ‘Welcome to hell, sweetheart! WHO’S SPECIAL NOW?’
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it turns out that the entertainment industry thinks little girls are pointless too—so pointless, in fact, that little boys have to be tricked into caring about them.
In 2010, Disney Pixar released a movie about a girl trapped in a tower for eighteen years with only twenty metres of golden hair to keep h
er company. Everyone knows this story. Everyone knows that it’s called Rapunzel. But Disney Pixar announced early on that it would be changing the widely recognised title of that story to the less female-centric Tangled. Why? Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, said at the time, ‘We did not want to be put in a box. Some people might assume it’s a fairy tale for girls when it’s not. We make movies to be appreciated and loved by everybody.’
Ah! I get it! If you make people think it’s a movie about a girl, they’ll think it’s a movie for girls. A movie about a girl can’t be for everyone, because why would boys be interested in watching a story that has nothing to do with them?
But Disney Pixar went a lot further than a simple re-brand, writing a love interest whose role was not only emphasised in the lead up to the film’s release but featured so prominently you’d be forgiven for thinking he was the movie’s sole protagonist. ‘In our film,’ wrote producer Roy Conli, ‘the infamous bandit Flynn Rider meets his match in the girl with the 70 feet of magical golden hair. We’re having a lot of fun pairing Flynn, who’s seen it all, with Rapunzel, who’s been locked away in a tower for 18 years.’
The first official trailer released for Tangled was two minutes and six seconds long and opens with an extended shot of Flynn Rider alongside the description, ‘He’s fearless’. As for Rapunzel, she doesn’t even appear until over halfway through and says only three words just before it finishes.
Boys Will Be Boys Page 8
