Let's talk about this. Because on the one hand, I've written eight screenplays and a novel and every single one of them pass the Bechdel Test. Three of them have women as the main protagonist. The rest of them have women with nearly as much dialogue as the men. I enjoy writing women; I find them to be a lot more interesting than men. At the same time, I don't write "strong" women for the simple reason that "strength", in my understanding of the Human Cosmos, is not a Prime Motivator for women. There is absolutely an imbalance between male and female characters in cinema. There are a number of valid and invalid reasons for this: - The magic market is 15-25yo, and that segment is heavily about BOYS asking out GIRLS (VALID) - 80% of screenwriters are men (INVALID) - Men are far more likely to get in fights, point guns at each other, and generally provide the materiel for an action/adventure movie (VALID) - The archetype of civilization still assigns men the role of instigator and women the role of nurturer (VALID) It really comes down to the fact that what sells right now is big stupid action/adventure films... and men tend to be big stupid action/adventure heroes far more often than women. THAT SAID: - Angelina Jolie. There's the Tomb Raider franchise, there's Wanted, and there's the fact that Salt was originally a script about a dude. - Milla Jovovich. Resident Evil. Ultraviolet. Fifth Element. For someone who sings like Tory Amos she kicks a fair amount of ass. - Natalie Portman. I mean, hell, her first role was as a waif whose family were gunned down by drug dealers who learns to be an assassin and then goes off to finishing school. (yes, I just enjoy linking to that video for the hell of it) "Strong female characters" to be sure... but in that genre of films, the men aren't exactly sensitive either. Tony Stark doesn't even shed a tear for the guy who saves his life in the Afghan cave. Sly Stallone famously would "kill you last" if he liked you. It's not exactly a genre for emotional depth. And sometimes you don't even know the switcheroo happened. Salt, as previously mentioned. Ripley from the Alien franchise was originally written as a man. I guess what I'm getting at is this: gender politics are complicated and blockbusters are not. If there is going to be ass-kicking (and in modern movies there's likely to be ass-kicking) there likely won't be a whole lot of room for exploring complexity. Combine that with the fact that if a woman has depth enough to not resort to violence, it's logically difficult to put her in a position where her only way out is violence. So what, exactly, are we supposed to do?
Agree. McDougall's argument seems to rest mainly on the absence of complex women characters in action films, where complex characters of either gender are hard to find. Sure, Sherlock Holmes is complex, but the novels from which his character germinated are far removed from action as we know it today. Reading this column I started to wonder whether McDougall actually read any novels or watched any movies outside of Warner Brothers or Pixar, herself. *Edit: I'd add that I found the author's comments and link about the "strong black woman" stereotype and the damage therefrom informative and enlightening.
And that method that you see in Salt and Alien is how things should be. I feel that for a lot of writers, sexism is internal and subconscious. They can set out to write a female as realistically as they possibly can, and will still fall into pitfalls unless they're well educated in gender studies. I feel the solution is-- if you can't write totally sexless characters and then arbitrarily assign gender after-- to write all your characters as men then. Have them be the people you intend them to be, and then just change the pronouns and such to make them female. If there isn't anything explicitly important about them being female or male, like the oppression they face as a woman or being a soldier in a period piece, then there's no reason to make the distinction, so why not just change 'he' to 'her' on half your characters?
But doesn't assuming a lack of gender take away one of most people's (and therefore most characters') main identity traits? There are differences in men and women; it just so happens that sometimes those differences are relevant and other times irrelevant.
I agree; very often the character's gender is important, because there very well are differences in the genders. I added the addendum "so long as there aren't relevant features" for this reason. I feel the problem aries that we (in media, at least) tend to focus on the fact that there are differences, when by and large they aren't important in the day to day. If we're watching a film like an action film in a situation where it would be rare for a woman to exist, perhaps the American Civil War, and a woman was a character, it would absolutely be important to have the women and men distinguished and discussed, but when every film that has a woman focuses on the fact that she's a woman, that she's different because she's a woman, or they make mention of something that only happens to women, or they shoehorn in a romantic subplot because she's a woman interacting with men, it's absolutely exhausting and irrelevant. It's akin to if you make a film and have an Asian character, and they have to make mention of it somewhere regardless of its relevance-- he's just a character with the same depth and doing the same things the rest of the characters are, but making a point to make a distinction for superficial reasons is distracting and takes away a level of sovereignty the character has from who he is. For example, if you take a work like Lord of the Rings and made Sam female instead, the work isn't affected. It remains identical and the he still has the depth of character, he's still just as much the protagonist. You could not change the gender of Eowyn, for example, because it's pivotal that she is a woman instead of a man. Or the same of Aragorn, because he is expressly the king of Gondor and a warrior in a time of male warriors (rightfully or not). The problem is, in these situations where someone is writing a female, they'll tend to fall into cliches. They'd have Sam fall in love with Frodo, or have her break down and question herself, or have her be flat and only have the characteristic of 'strong' and unchanging throughout. The dynamics of a person change dramatically when they are actively writing a female character, writing a woman™ instead of a person. To add a summary, I'd say about 80% of the time gender is irrelevant, but writers make it relevant because they feel they have to as they're writing a female, even if it flattens the character and removes depth. They make far less interesting people in their stories when they do this, subconsciously.