Yay women!
There is a Tumblr I found recently that I wish I had had on hand a few years ago, when I was having an argument about why feminism is necessary with an old classmate.
Shit People Say to Women Directors & Other Women in Film
See, I had it pretty decent, on a personal level, at Tisch, where I studied with this guy. I had a lot of female classmates, a good number of female teachers (two sound teachers, three writing teachers including a comedy teacher, a few teachers of general film terminology, criticism, and concepts, et cetera), and supportive male classmates who never reduced my abilities to my gender. Which is great! It really is! I never had anyone tell me I couldn't do this or that in film because it was a man's job, even when I did poorly at comedy or couldn't lift something. I even had one teacher take a moment to celebrate a female director's success as a notable step for women in film, and in that same class I had classmates examining gender roles in their works and not being questioned on it. Even my own sloppy role reversal work never got criticised for the role reversal part.
But I knew that was a good space. I knew, even then, that in the professional world things were different. Women are vastly under-represented in a lot of areas of film, particularly in writing, directing, and producing - and that's behind the scenes.
The problem was that without my own easy-to-identify experiences, it was hard to get people to take me seriously when I brought up things like this. Hell, it probably would have been plenty hard even with my own experiences, since it's easy for people to dismiss an individual woman's stories of misogyny as overreacting or some other bullshit.
So this blog, even though it is a depressing window into what many women in the industry face, is awesome. It gives MANY women a voice and holds a mirror up to the world of film. It's harder for people to deny this many experiences, and it can chase away that "but maybe I AM overreacting" feeling.
It's weirdly heartening, and it could have been so easy to point to it and go, THIS. This thing, right here, is why we need feminism, even just in our own field.
But successes! They exist. Orphan Black continues to be awesome and feminist even with the addition of more male characters; Pitch Perfect 2 was a great low-impact, feel-good comedy all about women (sometimes explicitly about women in the context if feminism, sometimes just about women as people), directed by Elizabeth Banks, whose website is pretty great and feminist itself; iZombie features a great female lead with her femaleness affecting but not defining her story; female motherfucking Ghostbusters and even the men involved in them mocking the assholes who have a problem with the very concept of that.
There are good things happening. I have to hope for more.
Shit People Say to Women Directors & Other Women in Film
See, I had it pretty decent, on a personal level, at Tisch, where I studied with this guy. I had a lot of female classmates, a good number of female teachers (two sound teachers, three writing teachers including a comedy teacher, a few teachers of general film terminology, criticism, and concepts, et cetera), and supportive male classmates who never reduced my abilities to my gender. Which is great! It really is! I never had anyone tell me I couldn't do this or that in film because it was a man's job, even when I did poorly at comedy or couldn't lift something. I even had one teacher take a moment to celebrate a female director's success as a notable step for women in film, and in that same class I had classmates examining gender roles in their works and not being questioned on it. Even my own sloppy role reversal work never got criticised for the role reversal part.
But I knew that was a good space. I knew, even then, that in the professional world things were different. Women are vastly under-represented in a lot of areas of film, particularly in writing, directing, and producing - and that's behind the scenes.
The problem was that without my own easy-to-identify experiences, it was hard to get people to take me seriously when I brought up things like this. Hell, it probably would have been plenty hard even with my own experiences, since it's easy for people to dismiss an individual woman's stories of misogyny as overreacting or some other bullshit.
So this blog, even though it is a depressing window into what many women in the industry face, is awesome. It gives MANY women a voice and holds a mirror up to the world of film. It's harder for people to deny this many experiences, and it can chase away that "but maybe I AM overreacting" feeling.
It's weirdly heartening, and it could have been so easy to point to it and go, THIS. This thing, right here, is why we need feminism, even just in our own field.
But successes! They exist. Orphan Black continues to be awesome and feminist even with the addition of more male characters; Pitch Perfect 2 was a great low-impact, feel-good comedy all about women (sometimes explicitly about women in the context if feminism, sometimes just about women as people), directed by Elizabeth Banks, whose website is pretty great and feminist itself; iZombie features a great female lead with her femaleness affecting but not defining her story; female motherfucking Ghostbusters and even the men involved in them mocking the assholes who have a problem with the very concept of that.
There are good things happening. I have to hope for more.