The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[DanaC]

As a spin-off from women in film more generally, here's an interesting piece about female super heroes. It's a really positive article, about the changing scene. But it also frames the problems well. What stifles development of female characters is often the way in which they have previously been depicted. Films with leading female characters have been made and bombed, and the lesson executives and male film makers have taken from that is not that they were bad films with badly drawn and shallow characters, but that people don't want to see female leads - yet plenty of male-led films bomb and nobody suggests that making a film with a male lead is a risk. Male-led films are judged, and succeed or fail, as films. Female-led films are judged, and succeed or fail as ambassadors for the concept of female-led films. And, as the article Lamp posted points out, films that succeed with a female lead, instead of acting as a proof of that concept are set aside as flukes and forgotten, whilst the next flop gets included in the proof that female-led films are a risk, and remembered as such for decades.

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-ra...male-superhero

Currently, men outnumber women five to one production roles; in 2014 women made up just 13% of directors and writers. But the problem isn’t just men writing fewer female superheroes, Rosenberg says, it’s that they write them badly. “A white man is never defined by his whiteness and maleness,” continues Rosenberg, “whereas being female is treated as a defining facet.” Writers and producers treating women like “The Other”, she says, results in the same stereotypes again and again: femme fatales, coy virgins, stern battleaxes.

That right there is pretty much 100% my problem with the way female super heroes have generally been depicted.

In fact, a dictionary-worth of terms exists to describe how unfairly women are treated in the superhero genre. There’s Women in Refrigerators Syndrome, where female characters are killed off in a gruesome way – say, stuffed in a fridge – as a plot device to motivate male characters. There’s the Smurfette Principle: that there will always be only one woman on a team of men. And there’s the wonderfully named Sexy Lamp Test. Coined by comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, it states that “If you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft.”

Nicely put ;p

With the varied, more dimensional women that we’re starting to see, though, it finally feels as if the genre is recognising and reacting to these disparities. In 20 years, when we’re watching the 11th Avengers sequel, will we look back and laugh at how we once wrote films where cape-wearing journalists spun the world backwards to reverse time, but we couldn’t write a female character who wasn’t someone’s wife or mother?