Day Thirteen - Arts and Entertainment
Four years ago rageprufrock began the first 14 Valentines and she spoke of how women are praised in song, worshiped in poetry, and derided in culture. She spoke beautifully and elegantly of women, comparing our bodies to luminous flowers. She spoke of the state of women, and the need to remember what we go through, what women throughout the world suffer through.
We are daughters, sisters, mothers, and lovers. If we choose, we can bring life into world with our blood and nourish it with our bodies, but the world that we helped create, that women have bled for and fought for and cried for, doesn't recognize us. Our history is one of abuse. We are not safe.
Women suffer from domestic violence and rape. We are devalued. We are taught that we are lesser. There is still so much work to do, so much for us to accomplish.
Women are being killed the world over, suffering from infanticide, dying from lack of medical care, killing themselves in the fight to be what society tells them they must. One in three women will still experience sexual assault in her lifetime. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.
Forty years ago we declared that Sisterhood is Powerful, and it still is. We must remember that, must continue moving forward.
It's 2010 and we've come so far, but there is still more work to be done. We deserve better, and we can do more. We're strong. The next fourteen days is meant to remind us of that. It's our time to take back our bodies.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
Arts and Entertainment
When we think about entertainment and the arts, we think about the glamor, the flash and glitter, and the drama. We think about music, theater, movies - and we think about the stars. It's only natural, they're the ones who are the most in the public eye, after all. We talk about who they date, what they wear, how they eat, everything under the sun. We love them, we hate them, and that's, as the saying goes, entertainment.
We don't think about the other people in the entertainment industry nearly as much. The producers, directors, writers, editors and technicians fly under our radar. We don't gossip about them at the water cooler on Monday mornings; frankly, we frequently don't know their names. But maybe we should consider them more closely. Maybe we should, in our fascination with all things glamorous, consider the people who create the vehicles for our favorite stars.
The situation in Hollywood in regards to women is bleak. In 2008, six of the fifty top grossing films starred or were focused on women. That's barely ten percent, and it gets worse from there. That same year, less than ten percent of all directors were women, less than fifteen percent of all scripts were written by women, and less than twenty five percent of all producers were women, and the numbers get worse the lower down the status ladder you climb. The numbers, except for directors, are slightly better in the world of television, but not by much. This discrepancy in representation isn't limited to those making media either, as only twenty three percent of film critics.
Women Making Movies would like to change that. It was founded in 1972 to address the under representation and misrepresentation of women in the media industry, and is a multicultural, multiracial, non-profit organization. They facilitate the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women, with a special emphasis on supporting work by women of color. In a world where the people making movies and telling us which movies to watch are overwhelmingly male, their work is invaluable, with films from their collection taking home top prizes at prestigious film festivals such as Cannes and Sundance. Projects that WMM has supported and distributed have won prestigious media awards including Academy Awards, Emmy Awards and Peabody Awards, and over the last four years their Fiscal Sponsorship Program has funded over two hundred films. As a woman who spends much of her free time focusing on entertainment media, I salute them and devoutly hope that their impact continues to grow.