In their research, the Geena Davis Institute found that films with more than one woman working as directors resulted in significantly more women in speaking roles than films with a heavy male production quota. Of the thirteen senior crew working on Tangled—the directors, the writers, the producers, the music composer and the film editor—only one was a woman: Aimee Scribner, an associate producer. And the impact of that is startingly clear. Tangled, one of the few films across any target bracket that featured a female protagonist (in 2010, women accounted for only 11 percent of lead protagonists in mainstream cinema—down 5 percent from a decade earlier), has a cast of thirty-six speaking characters. Only 30 percent of them are women. Of the ten speaking characters with names, 80 percent are men—the other two are Rapunzel (the princess) and Gothel (the evil witch).
And yet Disney was so concerned that this film not appear too fucking girly that they changed the title and repackaged the marketing to assure boys that there would be something in it for them. Because everyone knows that all the main pirates are boys.
Yeah, yeah—but what about Frozen, hmm?
It’s true that Frozen marked a significant departure from Disney’s previous princess vehicles. For a start, there were two women in it. Not only were neither of them evil, one of them didn’t even have to end up with a man to be considered worthwhile (feminazis in Hollywood strike again). Frozen subverted numerous tropes associated with the princess tale, most notably that true love’s kiss is unlikely to occur between two strangers who barely know each other and people probably shouldn’t get engaged only a few hours after they’ve met. Kids bloody loved it—Frozen quickly became the highest grossing animated film in history, taking $1.2 billion in global box office sales. It’s widely held up as an example of feminism making its way (finally) into Disney’s headquarters. At last!
Oh, except that Frozen still only has two female characters of any importance in it (by which I mean they speak and they have names) compared with five prominent male characters, one of whom is a snowman and one of whom is a reindeer. This ground-breaking, trend-bucking, animated feminist celebration conforms exactly to the already known statistics of women’s representation on-screen: in it, women account for a third of major characters and speak for less than half the time. (Frozen was also criticised following its release for the severe whitewashing of the Sami people, who are presented in the movie as blond and white—a far cry from the Asiatic, brown-skinned features of the real-life Indigenous group.)
The stats on Frozen were presented in 2016 by linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer, who conducted research analysing all the language used by male and female characters in Disney princess films, from Snow White (1937) to Frozen (2013). What they discovered contradicts a generally held view that ‘feistiness’ and a can-do attitude in our female heroes necessarily equates to social progress.
Few (if any) of Disney’s early animated films could be said to have passed the Bechdel test, created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. (To pass the test a movie must have: 1) more than one woman in it, who 2) speak to each other 3) about something other than a man.) But despite this, they were still more likely than not to let women speak. In fact, women speak the same number of lines as men in Snow White and significantly more than men in both Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). While Disney’s versions of these classic fairy tales could not reasonably be viewed as feminist, at least we were allowed to listen to the female characters we were being conditioned to propel into married drudgery. We must take our victories as we find them, I guess.
The arrival of The Little Mermaid in 1989 shifted things. Ariel, we were told, was an independent and adventurous heroine, meant to channel the values of the girl power movement that was already beginning to set down roots. Yet a major plot point in The Little Mermaid has Ariel sacrificing her voice in order to grow legs and inspire Prince Eric, a walking jawline with a body attached, to fall in love with her. As a result, this supposedly female-centred story has women speaking for only 32 percent of the time.
Even if you set The Little Mermaid aside out of deference to its ‘lost voice’ narrative, Fought and Eisenhauer show the disparity still holds up across later titles. Beauty and the Beast (1991) has Belle, another Strong Female Character, trapped in the castle of a beast who refuses to let her leave. Naturally, she falls in love with him, because all girls love a bad boy and it’s apparently our job to save him from himself. In Beauty and the Beast, men are responsible for 71 percent of the dialogue.
Aladdin (1992): 90 percent.
Mulan (1998)—is about a woman saving China from the motherfreaking HUNS, but men still get to speak 77 percent of the lines. If that doesn’t stoke your rage, consider this: Mulan’s helper dragon (voiced by Eddie Murphy) speaks 50 percent more than the character for which the movie is named.
The findings were a touch better for the aforementioned Tangled (2010), with women slightly edging out men at 52 percent, and Brave (2012) blew out at a whopping 74 percent of dialogue spoken by women. Then along came Frozen in 2013 and we were right back to eating a smaller portion again. (I couldn’t find any stats related to Moana (2016), but it’s without a doubt the best princess movie offering Disney has put up yet.)
This issue of representation is insidious and industry-wide, and it absolutely has an effect on how people view the space women are allowed take up in the world, not to mention a weird insecurity about what that means for men’s importance. Another comprehensive 2015 study from the Geena Davis Institute found that, much like the reasoning behind Flynn Rider’s role being plumped up in Tangled, creators are just really fucking antsy about giving women or female characters too much airtime in general. In a study of the 200 top-grossing (non-animated) films of 2014 and 2015, they found that movies with a male lead featured male characters on-screen nearly three times more often than female characters, and they also spoke roughly three times as much. But the opposite was not true for movies with a female lead—then, men and women appear for roughly the same amount of time and are given roughly the same number of lines. Where a movie has a male and a female co-lead, men were back to receiving way more screen time and lines than the women they were supposedly starring alongside.
Well, fuck me sideways, we wouldn’t want people to see women acting like they deserved equal rights and equal attention. They might think it was a movie for girls.
Can this gender gap on-screen be considered partly the fault of the gender gap off-screen? PROBABLY! Women are also underrepresented behind the camera. The Celluloid Ceiling, a 2017 report published by the US-based Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film, showed that women comprised only 18 percent of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers who had worked on that season’s top 250 films—the exact same percentage of women who had been working behind the scenes back in 1998.
It can be frustrating to put forward arguments like this, because there’s a not insignificant number of people who bend over backwards to make it the fault of anyone but the people fiercely protecting their territory. It isn’t that men choose to work with men (whether consciously or unconsciously)—it’s that women don’t try hard enough. It’s not that studios (overwhelmingly run by men) insist on having men direct their blockbuster movies because of unconscious bias—it’s that women aren’t good enough. No one defers to a male perspective as writers—they just think women are boring.
Or . . . maybe it’s that opportunities for women are stifled by the people around them who have more power than they do? Maybe it’s that women’s hands are tied when it comes to performing in roles that are inherently detrimental to their own identities, because they have to deal with producers, directors and industry players who sexually harass and bully them? The fallout from #MeToo and its revelations, first of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse and then the abuse perpetrated by numerous other powerful men in Hollywood, can’t be viewed separately from the space in which women i
n La La Land have been allowed to move in for decades, especially not when there’s evidence that opportunites were so often conditional on compliance. Mira Sorvino, Annabella Sciorra, Rose McGowan—these are just a handful of women whose work prospects dried up the moment they either refused or called out Weinstein himself.
In 2008, Jennifer Kessler (founder of The Hathor Legacy, a website focused on women in print and film) wrote about her experience with screenwriting professors at UCLA who, she says, taught her not to write scripts and stories that passed the Bechdel test. The path to success, she was told, was to write scripts with white, straight, male leads. These would function as the platter on which she could offer up more diverse characters—as long as she never allowed their stories to overshadow those whom the audience ‘really paid their money to see’.
And yet, she continues, ‘There was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than a man. That, they explained nervously, was not okay.’ They were reluctant to tell her why.
She finally persuaded an industry professional to tell her what her professors would not. (Warning: his answer may cause your blood to turn into rivers of lava. I would take a seat.) He said, ‘The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.’
As Kessler put it:
According to Hollywood, if two women came on screen and started talking, the target male audience’s brain would glaze over and assume the women were talking about nail polish or shoes or something that didn’t pertain to the story. Only if they heard the name of a man in the story would they tune back in. By having women talk to each other about something other than men, I was “losing the audience”.*
Call me crazy, but I don’t think women should be punished because men are egocentric dickheads.
From a gender perspective, the most conclusive evidence we have for the success of movies concerned with stories about women are the box office figures. In 2015, an average of US$90 million was grossed by that year’s top 100 non-animated films. And according to the Geena Davis Institute, ‘Films with female leads made considerably more on average than films with male leads . . . [grossing] 15.8 percent more on average than films led by men.’ Films with male and female co-leads were the big winners, earning approximately US$108 million each, an average of 23.5 percent more than films with separate male or female leads.
But sure, women are just soooooooooooo fucking boring and pointless.
Again, it’s not just on screen that women are being short-changed. Negative assumptions are still made about the ability of women to handle big projects. Despite breaking the opening weekend box office record for female filmmakers, Catherine Hardwicke’s opportunities didn’t explode after directing Twilight. In 2011 (three years after Twilight’s release) she revealed she couldn’t even get an interview to be considered as the director for The Fighter (ultimately helmed by David O. Russell) because the studio insisted that the director had to be a man. As Hardwicke noted wryly at the time, ‘It’s about action, it’s about boxing, so a man has to direct it . . . But they’ll let a man direct Sex and the City or any girly movie you’ve ever heard of.’
These things matter. They matter for the world’s population of girls and women. They also matter for the world’s population of boys and men, all of whom are being conditioned to view themselves as far more important than they are. That isn’t to say that boys and men aren’t important, or their stories aren’t also meaningful. Of course they are! But pop culture and entertainment should broadly try to reflect the world in which we live (if a more polished and generically more attractive version of it), and it is causing untold harm to us all to have such an imbalance of power represented as normal. If we raise girls to be grateful for what they’re given, any attempts to ask for more will be met with abuse and punishment. If we raise boys to believe they are the rightful rulers of narrative and adventure, any attempts to redress the balance will be treated as an assault on their liberties and all too many will choose to respond in exactly the ways they’ve been taught how—by fighting back in an attempt to defeat ‘the enemy’.
In You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Princesses, Trainwrecks & Other Man-Made Women, the film critic Carina Chocano explores how the idea of girlhood is shaped by stories so often constructed by men. Chocano writes about her first foray into film criticism, when her work required her to spend hour after hour watching films in the dark, consuming ‘toxic doses of superhero movies, wedding-themed romantic comedies, cryptofascist paeans to war, and bromances about unattractive, immature young men and the gorgeous women desperate to marry them’. She observes that hardly any of these movies had what could adequately be described as a female protagonist. Instead, women were cast in the role of ‘the girl’:
‘The girl’ was the adult version of ‘the princess’. As a kid, I’d believed the princess was the protagonist, because she’d seemed the most central to the story. The word protagonist comes from the Greek for ‘the leading actor in a contest or cause,’ and a protagonist is a person who wants something and does something to get it. ‘The girl’ doesn’t act, though—she behaves. She has no cause, but a plight. She doesn’t want anything, she is wanted. She isn’t a winner, she’s won. She doesn’t self-actualize but aids the hero in self-actualization.
Most people don’t watch movies and TV and consciously consider the myriad ways in which the voices and stories of men outnumber women’s (or see the way in which stories about white people silence the narratives of people of colour.) They think that what they’re seeing is an even and equal portrayal, which means they believe that women participating at less than our equal share is balanced. The flip side of this is that when women take up more space in both the visual and audible landscapes, we are thought to be dominating. Consider this. The Geena Davis Institute found that women comprise around 17 percent of any crowd scene. But Davis told NPR, ‘If there’s 17 percent women, [men surveyed] think it’s fifty-fifty. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.’
Women can participate, but we can’t dominate. We must be kept at a distance, told what to say and when to say it, and are expected to smile for being invited along at all.
And if we don’t? Oh, my friends. The rage.
It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.
In 2014, the director Paul Feig announced that all systems were go for a reboot of Ghostbusters. Feig would be directing and co-writing the script with Katie Dippold, whose writing credits include Parks and Recreation and The Heat. In contrast to the original films of the 1980s, this new Ghostbusters team would be made up exclusively of women.
You know where this is going.
Some people reacted with abundant enthusiasm, me included. Who wouldn’t want to see a new team of ghostbusters taking care of New York? And why shouldn’t they be women? When Feig later announced a cast that included Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon as the ghostbusters, I felt a rush of excitement. Four hilarious women, giving a fresh spin on a movie I had watched numerous times when I was a kid—a movie I still quoted religiously with my brother and sister. I couldn’t wait.
To say that others were less than supportive would be an understatement. As if having to watch four women at once wasn’t bad enough, Jones was also black, and it is a truth maniversally acknowledged that anything other than wall-to-wall white dudes is ‘unrealistic’ and ‘pandering to the Social Justice Warriors’. Wait, let me just get my tinfoil hat.
While Feig’s Twitter announcement of the cast gained plenty of positive comments, aggrieved man-babies came out in force to let it be known just how much this movie was gonna suck haaaaaaaard. One wrote: ‘awful just awful. It’s like you’re trying to make the worst movie possible while spitting in the faces of ghostbusters fans.’ Another observed pithily: ‘I didn’t realise
there was a quota of vagina for every film to fill.’ (Oh no, women are taking over Hollywood!) Someone replied with a simple and straightforward ‘FLOP!!!!!!!!!!’, while another warned: ‘Stop you don’t know what your [sic] doing stop production NOW! YOU KNOW YOU’VE MADE A MISTAKE! FANS DONT [sic] WANT TO SEE AN ALL FEMALE TEAM!’
Hmmm. As a fan of the originals, I guess I must have missed the official poll on that one.
But my favourite response came from @patrickmoffatt1, who wrote: ‘I now know how Star Wars fans felt after Phantom Menace. You have SHAT on Mr. Ramis’ grave, and I hope this kills your career.’
Feelings, be in them.
The consensus from the Angry Man Squad seemed to be that Feig (along with the fat, ugly, unfunny and unfuckable bitches he’d chosen to be in his disgrace of a movie) was engaged in a systematic attack on the memories of men who had grown up believing that ‘ghostbuster’ was actually a real job.
How very dare he.
The toxic backlash got worse, reaching a crescendo with the release of the movie’s first trailer on YouTube. The announcement of a movie starring four women that more than thirty years ago starred four men had been bad enough, but having to watch evidence that they were actually going through with it (imagine having your concerns as a fan just ignored like that!) was experienced as such an aggressive assault on the very essence of masculinity that men around the world not only down-voted the trailer on YouTube more than one million times (making it YouTube’s tenth most disliked video at one point, although at the time of writing it had dropped back to the twenty-second spot), they also started numerous petitions to try to stop Sony Pictures from giving it a theatrical release.
The 2016 release of Ghostbusters continued to trigger many raging rivers of tears from millions of whiny childhood defenders all around the world, because watching women perform on-screen in a way that gives zero respect to the integrity of cis-het male erections is just one of the many oppressions men are being forced to endure under the new Matriarchal Order. Ghosts taking over a city is fine (and so too is a space opera where there are more characters with bodies made up of either fur or mechanical parts than actual women), but wanting a movie to pass the Bechdel test is apparently asking too much of an audience’s already stretched suspension of disbelief. Even now, men still flock to the comments section of the YouTube trailer to revel in the number of dislikes the video has attracted and share their sophisticated jokes about feminism (‘Q: What do you call a feminist with half a brain? A: Gifted!’)
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