{"id":273102,"date":"2013-06-15T15:44:31","date_gmt":"2013-06-15T15:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/06\/15\/at-the-movies-the-women-are-gone-npr\/"},"modified":"2013-06-15T15:44:31","modified_gmt":"2013-06-15T15:44:31","slug":"at-the-movies-the-women-are-gone-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/06\/15\/at-the-movies-the-women-are-gone-npr\/","title":{"rendered":"At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"

At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : NPR<\/a><\/p>\n

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eschergirls<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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dresdencodak<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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eschergirls<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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With theaters \u00e2\u0080\u0094 particularly larger theaters \u00e2\u0080\u0094 chock full of men\u2019s stories, where did the women go?<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

An interesting piece on NPR about this writer noting that the vast majority of movies out right now are about men or ensembles of men with women in a supporting role.<\/p>\n

I also thought this was of note:<\/p>\n

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They put up Bridesmaids<\/em>, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect<\/em>, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada<\/em>, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by \u201cwe,\u201d I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans<\/em>), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says \u201cwin some, lose some\u201d and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every \u201csurprise success\u201d about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Part of the problem with the \u201cthey\u2019re just doing what sells\u201d argument is the assumption that comics\/movie\/gaming industries are all made of purely objective beings of energy and thought rather than human beings who come with their own biases, and who can also tend to prefer the safe status quo that are affected by those biases.\u00a0 If a Catwoman or Elektra flops, it\u2019s chalked up to people not wanting to watch movies with women in them, but if a Jonah Hex or Green Lantern do poorly, that\u2019s not assumed to be the fault of those movies having male leads.\u00a0 As the piece says for men, a movie failing can be seen as the cost of doing business, rather than an indictment of the movie having a lead of a certain gender.\u00a0 If the \u201ccommon knowledge\u201d in Hollywood is that movies with women don\u2019t sell, it can lead to confirmation bias, where ones that do are flukes (or not about having a female lead), and ones that don\u2019t are proof that people don\u2019t want to see women in lead roles (and not about the promotion of the movie, or the writing, or the acting, or etc).<\/p>\n

Anyway, I wanted to share this because I thought some people might find it of interest. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A couple years ago I was in talks to option a Dresden Codak film, and was politely told that \u201cfemale leads are a hard sell,\u201d and asked how married I was to the fact that my protagonist is a woman. Suffice it to say, I ended up not wanting to make a Dresden Codak film.<\/p>\n

What bugs me about \u201cwomen don\u2019t sell\u201d is that not only is demonstrably not true, even if it\u00a0were<\/em> true, that\u2019s not a valid excuse! If filmmakers discovered that the best selling movie concept was just 90 minutes of a puppy being beaten, I\u2019d hope they\u2019d at least give a pause.<\/p>\n

Once again, women are subjected to a double-standard. If a male-led film fails, it\u2019s because the film is bad. If a female-led film fails, it\u2019s because \u201cwomen don\u2019t sell.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, screw you, Hollywood, my lady-hero comic is successful, and it\u2019s hardly the only one!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sharing this too, because I did not know this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : NPR eschergirls: dresdencodak: eschergirls: With theaters \u00e2\u0080\u0094 particularly larger theaters \u00e2\u0080\u0094 chock full of men\u2019s stories, where did the women go? An interesting piece on NPR about this writer noting that the vast majority of movies out right now are about men or ensembles of men with … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : NPR”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[5658,25973,1281],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}