Karen Ray Maharr Summary

Moreover, few women have leading roles in films especially in ones that are comic based, because the majority of the audience consists of heterosexual males that want to see women in passive roles. Portraying attractive women that abide by cultural norms satisfy most men’s desire for dominance and masculinity. Solomon and Maasik imply in “Heroes and Villains: Encoding Our Conflicts” that economically movie industries consider female lead movies as losses because the safest way to make money is by appealing to adults and children who have already approved of successful cartoon series and books (444). Movie industries are more concerned about making money, so their agenda is to go with what already works and maintain the safest profile. However

According to the statistics founded by New York Film Academy, out of the top 500 films to date “30.8% of speaking characters are women, 28.8% of women wore sexually revealing clothes as opposed to 7% of men, and the average ratio of male actors to female actors is 2.25:1.” This shows the disproportions in regards to gender equality in the film industry as male directors are dominating the scenes and adding to the statistics. Only a tenth percentage of movies featured a balanced cast where half of the characters were female. From 2007 to 2012, the percentage of teenage females who were depicted with some nudity in shots has increased 32.5% and interestingly enough there’s a 5:1 ratio of men working on films to women. In regards to salary with a collective of the top 10 highest paid actresses in 2013, female actresses made $181 Million versus the top 10 paid male actors as a collective which totaled to $465 Million. There’s also inequality in regards to awarding the actresses and actors as well, in Academy Award history, four female filmmakers have been nominated for best director, but only one has won. In 2013, during the 85th Academy Awards, across nineteen categories we have 140 men who were nominated and only 35 women who were nominated. In 85 years, only seven female producers have ever won

Recently there has been a lot of controversy on social media over gender roles in America’s society. Since many have worked to change the way men and women are stereotyped in day to day life, it is almost expected to see the flexibility of women and men’s roles in films. Meaning there should be no defined role to one’s gender, or having one’s gender constrict them from having particular roles. And in many cases hollywood has changed their casts from a strong male heroine to a strong female heroine. Movies like Ghostbusters(2016 edition) and Kahaani become perfect examples of this. Yet the reality is that many hollywood film directors have not changed the traditional gender roles in their films. I viewed four of Quentin Tarantino films (Reservoir Dogs, Django Unchained, Pulp Fiction, and Planet Terror) since many of his most critically acclaimed movies have also been heavily criticized for having male characters that are depicted as ‘too’ masculine and macho. From what I have seen Tarantino often depicts masculinity as violent, derogatory towards women, and is derisive to anything “weak” making the characters impenetrable to their feelings.

Many of these filmmakers, through the feminist movement, have taken Hollywood by storm. There are many individuals that believe the feminist movement is a woman’s movement — to further the female agenda — and while, it is true

Women have a small place in the film industry. Well, let me clarify, a VERY small place in the industry. The biggest role they have is in producing, which is getting a script, director, and team (this is the job for the people with enough money to sponsor a big part of the creation). It has little to do in the actual creation of the movie. They make up only twenty-five percent in film. That means that men, make up seventy-five percent, but that’s only the beginning. five men work in the industry for every one woman, and women only make up fifteen percent of all the writing done for movies. Even worse, for the job of directing, women make up a miniscule nine percent in comparison to the ninety-one that men take up, but one more thing. Cinematographers, the people that film the movie and make it immersive for us, is the worst place for women. They make, only two percent in the entire industry, meaning that the rest is made up of men. this stereotype of men being better than women at their jobs, whether it be directing, editing, filming is based on no true information but rather a stigma of women in the workplace. The public is less able to recognize this discrimination because they're exposed to it every day. But to have such discrimination even in the background and off-stage, without the attention of the public eye, is disgusting and an insult to

By looking at the data we can clearly see that the stereotypical “women” jobs are filled by actresses and the “men” jobs are filled by actors. Directors don’t have to cast the actors and actresses this way but by not doing it this way they would be going against the norms of society. What’s shocking is that the movies are

America is often called the land of freedom and opportunities, but many Americans argue that there is racial, gender and social bias occurring all the time. Recently, many people have been pointing out the social problems occurring around the country. Some of the issues happening include the Hollywood sexual and economic exploitations. In the article “Why Is Hollywood So Liberal?” Neil Gross discusses the desire for fairness and the public fight against sexism and harassment against women in the entertainment industry and in the USA.

Over the years, women in Hollywood have endured sexist work environments, lack of character roles in front of the camera and wage inequality. The representation of women in early Hollywood cinema during the 1940s and 1960s were more dependent on the notion of ‘The Male-Gaze’. Women were represented as sex objects and an illusion and desire for men, by e.g. idealizing female bodies. Still in contemporary world, women are facing similar injustices. The conversation about how women are treated in Hollywood is amidst the key concerns on feminist issues, addressed by presidential candidates like Hilary Clinton and Carly Fiorina in America, and as well by the author Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘’Lean In’’ Campaign.

The cinema conveys representations of race, gender, and class that indicate the development and cultural ideologies of society. Motion pictures illustrate and are depicted from real life settings, and it is for this reason that the cinema plays a vital role in shaping and sustaining cultural normalcies. Socialization of gender and identity are mirrored through sexist media depictions that convey the relative positions of women and men in modern western democracies. There are substantial quantities of motion pictures that ascribe traditional gender roles to both men and women that continue to perpetuate social constructs of inequality. Contemporary media places men and women in defined categories, and

Male dominance in Hollywood cinema was still very clear in films, but at the same time, many films with women in the lead roles started to emerge most noticeably in the 20th century. These roles were of real lead characters who represented real women. With contemporary films like Twilight, Hunger Games, Gone Girl, Maleficent and Divergent, it’s evident that female protagonist films are successful in today’s era. Box Office Mojo compared the box office gross from top 25 films from 2006 to 2015, showed that films with women in casting grossed $126.1 million and films with men in casting grossed $80.6 million. However, this does not necessarily mean that the roles of women are of protagonists: In 2014, only 12 percent of leading roles were female

The movie I went to go see was cinéastes: les homes. It was about a woman giving an interview to male French filmmakers. The woman asks the males the same question she had asked the females in the previous movie. She had asked them if cinema have a gender most of them answered that they really didn’t know if it did. But most of the men spoke more about the feminism of movies and how females make better actors then men, because they show more emotion then male actors. Most men also asked female director for help writing the female part of the script, because they don’t know how women think. They also feel female directors are better directors because they think like a woman and can have a better perspective on things. Also, most of the men directors focused their films on female audiences because they feel that the females would remember their films more than men. I had chosen to watch this particular film because it was free and the group I went with wanted to see it.

Second, films tap into more conserved roles for women because the film industry is not subject to much scrutiny. Feminism may have gained more legal rights for women and placed women on more equal footing with men, but there is no regulation on the content and depiction of women in the media. It is still arguable whether media has a significant impact on women’s lives and their perception in the workplace.

The first time I went to college, I was a film major. I took a course that revolved around the evolution of movies from the first film ever made to the most recent. The instructor did little to hide her views on misogyny dominating the film industry. Since that class, I have been unable to shake her voice from my head while I watch even the most seemingly harmless of movies. If I had stayed in the film industry, I would have tried to change what I inevitably see in mainstream Hollywood movies time and time again- films that fail the Bechdel test, a gross underrepresentation of women both in front of and behind the camera, and the blatant use of women as mere sexual objects in so many blockbuster movies. Looking at some popular films in the last few years provides a rollercoaster of waxing and waning hope for whether or not women are finding success in meaningful roles or continuing to serve as objects to be ogled.

There’s a saying, Hollywood is a man world, but the problem goes beyond just Hollywood. The lack of women representation in films, televisions, and general media is a decade-old problem. It’s becoming increasingly apparent as more and more women are shying away from being stay-at-home moms and accepting the role of breadwinners for their households. According to the 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, women only claimed 29 percent of lead roles in top films in 2015. The underrepresentation of women in media creates inequality in workplaces and difficulties in day to day lives as well as maintains negative and old gender

Cinema provides anthropomorphic stories for audiences to escape from their own realities and immerse themselves in a fictional world where everything is controlled by the director, who structures the film around a main controlling figure. The way that the cinema displays the space, surroundings, and the human forms in the film allows the director of the film, like Hitchcock, to use camera techniques that create an oppressive male gaze towards female characters in the movie. Most mainstream films pay extra attention to how the human form is presented to the audience. Women in film are continuously used solely as part of the landscape in films. The gaze the director focuses on the female form turns them (females) into objects, whose appearance is used to deliver a strong visual and erotic impact that provokes the male desire. I support Mulvey’s argument that, “woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look,” (Mulvey 28). Mulvey is saying that film directors are using techniques, like camera angle or movement, to further enforce the idea of a woman’s body being a sexual object. The creation of an active male gaze in film is used to derive pleasure from being able to look at an oversexualized female form tailored to the desires of the men. Consequently, making the female no longer an actual living person, they are now just part of the landscape of a bigger work of art. Therefore, reinforcing the societal standard representation of the perfect and powerful ideal ego of the male character, and the image of the passive and powerless female character. In his article “Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey,” Clifford Manlove reaffirms Mulvey’s claim by stating that, “Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in “pleasure”; that is to say, “the pleasure in looking…” (Manlove 84). Manlove’s point reinforces the scopophilia tendencies that Mulvey says are present in films. Additionally, it also adds evidence to the claim that the cinema is influenced by the societal norms surrounding everyday life.