Many of us know that sexism is still alive and well today. It’s on the television, in magazines, even on billboards. You name it, and it will most likely have something sexist within it. But, the main industry that has the most gender inequality, the main place most of the mass media feeds off of, is the film industry. If you asked somebody to name one film that hasn’t in some way been demeaning or stereotypical to women, it wouldn’t be as easy an answer to come up with as one would think. Nowadays, you really get your money’s worth at a trip to the movies, seeing as with every ticket you buy, you get a free two-hour helping of misogyny. I’m looking at you, Michael Bay.
According to an article published on The Huffington Post website, the American Civil Liberties union cited that less than two percent of the 100 top grossing films of 2013 and 2014 were directed by women. Which means that those films, of course, were much more sexist than if those films were directed by women. Even worse is the television department of the film industry. The ACLU also cited that out of the 3,500 episodes of television made in that time, women directed only fourteen percent of those. One of the most telling stories comes from an anonymous woman that interviewed for a directing job on a show, where the producer told her that they had “already hired a woman this season”. That is a very troubling thing to hear, seeing as most would think that gender inequality in the workplace was a thing of the past that is only shown on episodes of Mad Men.
As perfect as the world would be if that were true, it is not. In my opinion, there is only one truth and that is that sexism is still prevalent today. It has been for a while and it won’t just die quickly. Society would reap a great benefit from the quality of their entertainment if the film industry didn’t discriminate. Other industries would possibly treat their female coworkers, employees, and bosses better. The film studios and producers must look past the makeup, painted fingernails, and feminine clothing and see the person and their experiences, so they can see that, female or male, the film they are producing will be great work of art regardless.
According to Jane Campion, the 2014 president of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, “inherent sexism” was “one reason there were so few female film directors”. Campion is the only female recipient of the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor (and arguably the highest honor in the film industry), the Palme d’Or for her 1993 film, The Piano. The first Palme d’Or was awarded to the film, Union Pacific, in 1939. That means that out of 79 years of this prestigious award, only one woman was awarded it, and that wasn’t until 62 years into the award's reign. “Last year, there were 1,800 films submitted to Cannes”, according to Campion, “only twenty percent of those films were directed by women”.
The website Reuters stated that last year, out of 18 films in the running for the Palme d’Or, women directed only two. Which means that there was only a two to sixteen chance that there could have been a second female winner of the prestigious award in its 79-year running But the Palme d’Or was awarded to the film Winter Sleep, which was, no surprise here, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a man.
In 2012, there was a letter published by the influential French daily Le Monde, signed by varying actresses and female film directors that put it better than I had ever heard or read it said before. The letter simply said, “At Cannes, women show their breasts, men show their films”. One of the women that signed that letter was, of course, Jane Campion. Campion said then and still says today, that today cinema is lacking stories that women tell.
The lack of marginalized individuals in Hollywood is very troubling. According to an article on The Huffington Post website, most television shows’ writing staff is mostly white straight men. Even Empire, Fox’s new show whose cast’s majority is African American, has only white people in their writing staff. To see that a show whose story’s backdrop is the modern world of the hip hop industry, with a long list of women in the cast, doesn’t have one woman, let alone an African American woman, in its production team is troubling at best. Lee Daniels, the creator and executive producer of the newly raved show, asked several other show runners if they had a strong diversity in their writers room when it came to the race and sex of their writers. The most telling response came from Beau Willimon, the House of Cards creator, said “Just, it’s a weird question, but we have zero African Americans in a writers room of six”. I can understand how shows want writers that would fit best for the job, with the group, and whose experiences coincide with good material to put into the show they are writing. But, to me, it is very hard to see how the only best-fitting people in the writers room of shows with such powerful female roles has only men.
Hollywood must give women a chance, or at least more chances. We should be mature enough as a society to be able to move past pretentious misogyny and treat each other as equals. The industry shouldn’t be what people point to as one of the main problems in the world today. People should be able to be entertained without being brainwashed with stereotypes and demeaning material. The art of filmmaking was to bring us, as artists, together to look past our differences and make something beautiful together for the world to enjoy.
