From the earliest days of Hollywood, women were stage managed and manipulated by older men in powerful positions.
And it remains clear that, although Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, John Lasseter, Luc Besson and James Toback, among a host of other male predatory Hollywood executives have been outed, little has changed.
In the Hollywood dream factory, trauma surfaces as light entertainment.
In 2013, introducing the list of Best Supporting Actress nominees during the Oscar ceremony, comedian Seth MacFarlane quipped: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” What was chilling in that moment was that no one got the joke.
The idea that female stars and aspiring actresses are required to accept the attentions, at the very least, of older male studio executives, producers and prominent male stars, is as old as the Hollywood hills.
Given the profile that the #MeToo movement has brought to sex discrimination, why does sexism continue to prevail in Hollywood?
According to San Diego’s State’s Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women made up only 7% of directors on the top 250 films of 2019, which was actually a 2% decline from 2018.
The San Diego State study found that while women made up higher percentages of other fields in the industry – 24% of producers, or 17% of editors, for example – they only accounted for 17% of the workforce of all the jobs surveyed. And that too, was a 2% decline from the year before.
The University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) revealed how sexism is embodied by characters on the silver screen. If female characters are taken out of the plot, it often makes no difference to the story the study found.
Men’s language was linked with achievement, while their conversations contained more coarse language and was associated with sex and death. “Writers consciously or subconsciously agree to established norms about gender that are built into their word choices,” Anil Ramakrishna, one of the San Diego study’s researchers, said in a Los Angeles Times report.
Upon analysis of 1000 scripts, the study found that there were 7x more male than female writers and 12x more male directors than women.
The biggest impact in counteracting the gender imbalance was if female writers were present at script meetings. If this was the case, female characters on screen was around 50 per cent greater, the study found.
Inherent in these observations of the film industry are powerful messages about what it means to be female.
In our “post-feminist” era, where we are frequently told the problems of girls are yesterday’s news — that girls are awash in the largesse of civil rights, and it is boys who really require our attention — it is worthwhile to consider the conduct of male Hollywood writers and executives.
Actress Geena Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
The problem is so glaring that in 2005 actress Geena Davis, who would go on to start her own gender institute, commissioned researcher Stacy Smith, from the University of Southern California, to study the issue and help push the studios beyond the staid male-centred film industry. From 2007 through 2019, according to Smith’s ongoing research, women made up only 30.2% of speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films.
The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media reports that films featuring women are financially profitable. “Guess what, Hollywood? Female-led films consistently make more money, year over year,” reported Madeline Di Nonno, the Institute’s chief executive, in a 2021 interview with Variety.
Hollywood actor Charlize Theron has criticized the movie industry for gender bias. Promoting her film Atomic Blonde, she told feminist Bustle magazine: “Fifteen, ten years ago, it was almost impossible to produce female-driven films, in any genre, just because nobody wanted to make it.”
A quiz that was designed to find out how sexist a film might be was developed by Alison Bechdel and Liz Wallace in 1985.
To pass what has become more commonly known as the Bechdel test, the film needed three positive answers to these questions: Does it have more than two named female characters? Do those two women talk with one other? Is that conversation about something other than a man?
The Hollywood Reporter applied the Bechdel test to the top-selling films in 2019, finding that only around half of the films passed the test.
The sheer scale of Hollywood sexism is daunting, the stories of what actresses have to put up with disturbing, the tales of pay inequity and pushing for more female-led stories instructive.
Actress Zoe Kazan (‘The Big Sick’) told IndieWire reporter, Kate Erbland, “There’s so much sexual harassment on set. And there’s no HR department, right? We don’t have a redress. We have our union, but no one ever resorts to that, because you don’t want to get a reputation for being difficult.”
In the lead up to this year’s Oscar ceremony, actress Emmy Rossum sounded off during a Hollywood Reporter roundtable about her experience with overt sexism in the industry.
“I’ve never been in a situation where somebody asked me to do something really obviously physical in exchange for a job, but even as recently as a year ago, my agent called me and was like, ‘I’m so embarrassed to make this call, but there’s a big movie and they’re going to offer it to you. They really love your work on Shameless. But the director wants you to come into his office in a bikini. There’s no audition. That’s all you have to do.'”
If the dynamic of older men and younger, submissive women greases the wheels of Hollywood production offices repeats itself on screen, it is not an accident, but the desires of the producers and directors who create these films played out on the biggest stage of all: Hollywood cinema, the world’s most effective propaganda machine.
