The silence of the not-men
The BBC shared a graph last year after the Oscars:
Pretty stunning, isn’t it. Chicago is the only one in which women speak more.
Just think how that seeps into all of our consciousnesses, without our even noticing it. Just think how it’s been seeping in our whole lives, and the implications for how absolutely everyone sees and understands and thinks about women. What does all that silence and absence suggest? That women are an afterthought, an oddity, an exception, a deviation from the normal; that women live in the shadows, doing their weird spooky womany thing, and emerge only occasionally, to say “thanks honey” or cuddle a baby or be raped or murdered or both. That women are helpless and incompetent and feeble.
Also, that men are the real people, that men do all the real work, that everything that matters in life is done by men and planned by men and talked about by men, that only what men do is interesting or important or heroic or effective.
I look forward to hearing more about the cis privilege women have.
Reminds me of the study where a class/group/gathering of people with 1/3 of them being women was deemed by participants (after the fact, upon exit interviews or something like it) to have even numbers of men and women, and groups split 50:50 to be made up of more women than men. Can’t remember the actual study/paper/whatever, or when it came out, unfortunately. I wish I could. Perhaps, if I haven’t messed up in my recollection the basic premis of the study, it will ring a bell with somebody here.The same (or a similar) study also looked at participation within groups, and where women spoke with equal frequency to men, they were recalled as having spoken more than the men. It’s like any female participation is “lots”, and parity is “dominating.”
Yes, but the graph showing dialogue balance between trans and cis women would be even more scewed, and would be used for exactly that claim of cis privilege.
@1 Deborah Tannen talks about this (if you’re really interested I’ll see if I can remember which book specifically). I remember when I read this that I had a similar experience–decades ago I was sitting in a large engineering meeting (maybe 30 people), and thinking smugly ‘how brilliant! look at all the women engineers here! we’re really making a lot of progress!’–then counting, and realising there were something like four of us.
Yes, and they had all murdered their husbands. And were sexy.
YNNB, I know of a case where a young man believed there were 3 females for every male professor in his college. It’s written up here: https://ofliberalintent.com/womens-writes/works/2018/3/7/day-7
Numbers don’t check out, but the men still perceive it the way they do because the moment a woman walks in the door, they feel invaded, violated, misused, no longer in charge.
guest, I was once in a playwriting workshop where I was the only woman. The man leading the workshop referred to me pointedly as “the woman in the room”. He was trying to be funny, but it wasn’t funny. It was sad. Why no women? Why were the women all over at the workshop that talks about energy fields and tapping into them in your writing, whilst I, and a group of men, were all sitting in a talk about how to actually get our plays produced, how to present them so they would stand out? What causes that division? A culture that tells us women are more into the soft things, and men the hard, logical things, I imagine.
Ha that reminds me of something that happened to me decades ago–I was one of the presenters at a very technical internal workshop (on options for overcoming a problem with a specific line of track) and the guy hosting the workshop made a big deal of making sure the entire workshop knew where the women’s room was, after doing the normal introduction saying where the men’s room was. This particular incident actually found its way into a play, through an interview with me and the playwright (who was writing a play about women engineers)–I had the surreal experience of seeing someone onstage playing me who was taller, younger, and better looking than I was.
Million Dollar Baby is surprising, since I thought it was primarily about a woman that is paralyzed from boxing. It must feature lots of men discussing her fate or something.
The overall stats are certainly damning, but the individual stats can certainly be misleading. I haven’t seen the aforementioned Million Dollar Baby, but my understanding is it features a strong, interesting female character. It gets a lower score than American Beauty, which racks up a lot of female dialogue time as the middle-aged male character flirts with and pursues his daughter’s teenaged friend.
The Silence of the Lambs gets a decent score, but I’m surprised it’s not better, as my recollection of it is practically the whole movie is Clarice talking to people during the course of her investigation. She must have talked almost exclusively to men and let them do much of the talking.
But, yeah, overall this is pathetic. As I’ve ranted about before, for a bunch of liberals, Hollywood is the worst: Sexist in its casting, racist in its casting, tolerant of sexual abuse by powerful people, uninterested in people with normal looks, dismissive of older women, exploitive of younger women, arrogant, elitist, etc., etc.
I was wondering what happened to 2012. Turns out that the winner that year was “The Artist”, which is mostly a silent movie until the very last scene. Then they turn the sound on, and the only voices you hear are men’s.
Skeletor, Broadway is no better. And on Broadway, there’s a problem that Hollywood has, only I think it might be more pronounced on Broadway – no middle aged women. I’m currently involved in a research project on middle-aged women in plays, and women practically disappear between the ages of 35 and 65. The few that do show are mothers or maids, and are mostly in plays written by black playwrights, or are from the early 20th century when women were mindless nothings in all plays.
Maybe I need to adjust my study to see how many lines by female characters. That might be an interesting addition to the study, how often women get to speak. Even in plays like Dancing at Lughnasa, which is about four (?three?) women, a man does a substantial amount of the talking, as he is the one who gets to tell the story of the women.
And a recent play I attended by David Hare had a strong female lead, and addressed the lack of women leaders in the Labour Party. My husband and I were discussing afterward how the conversation about the play would have gone if a woman had written it. Instead of insightful and brilliant, they would have called it shrill, preachy, propaganda, misandry, etc.
Live theatre people are even more liberal in many ways than Hollywood, and they still cannot get women right. In fact, I am planning on pulling one of my submitted plays from consideration for an upcoming festival because by the time they get done with it, this play about four strong, feisty women will be some sort of mockery of itself. They didn’t even understand what the play was doing when they read it.
Is this confined to Anglophone cultures, or does it run across them all?
@YNNB #1 – I seem to recall hearing about that study too. One facet of the result I remember being pointed out was how women were perceived to be present in higher numbers than in reality, by both men and women alike – lending extra rigor to the experience @iknklast’s mentions in #3.
What a Maroon, #7.
For a moment I thought you were referring to the movie of that name, voted the most scientifically inaccurate movie ever by NASA scientists.
Even I, a non-scientist, albeit one who does read a lot of science, started cringing about five minutes in when the explanation for the sudden heating-up of the Earth’s core was ‘It’s the neutrinos. The neutrinos are evolving!’
Not much famale dialogue in that movie, either, as I recall.
Because the ‘current’ miscellany room is not accepting new comments and there isn’t a recent relevant thread, I’ll leave this here. Cardinal Pell found guilty of sexual assault and is now a convicted pedophile. Now we know why he so assiduously protected other pedophile priests.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/26/cardinal-george-pell-vatican-treasurer-found-guilty-of-child-sexual-assault
Yeah. Granted all that.
But would we expect a sexually dimorphic species to be sexually monophonic?
Hens do not crow, because Nature has given them different drives from those of roosters. Hens establish pretty quickly a pecking-order hierarchy within the hen community, but apparently have no need to mark out a territory (with resident opposite-sex population) and challenge rivals over it with high-volume sound the way roosters do.
Though to give Hollywood its due, it did give the pre-WW2 world the legendary Mae West and Bette Davis.
Dustin Hoffman was once asked what he thought acting was all about. Answer: “Look at me!. Look at me!….” I think any rooster watching would have understood straight away.
Well, I suppose 2018’s The Shape of Water wouldn’t have done well, since its (female) protagonist is mute. But then, her love interest isn’t a talker, either…
Why not? None of us speak through our sexual organs, right? (Trust me on this, I’m a biologist). We are not hens, though women have been derisively referred to as hens, usually when they are speaking – ironically, since, as you point out, it is the rooster that makes the most noise.
Nor are we lobsters…
It’s time we stop trying to silence women or prevent women from succeeding using examples from other species.
You are an ecologist, which I have seen heavily implied elsewhere is even better on this subject.
#1 I seem to have a memory of Ophelia writing about that study here (or perhaps at FtB). Could easily be mistaken though.
iknklast:
At no time did I suggest you were.
Ditto.
In my experience, most women know what they want to be. Also, females of every species I know anything about are quite good at being what (they know) they can achieve and can be. But in those words ‘know’ and ‘want’ there is endless room for philosophical debate. How for example, does a female spider ‘know’ what she wants to do from one minute to the next?
I put it to you that other species can be a useful guide to ourselves. Students of humanity have been using and invoking them for centuries. Millennia even.
Nothing I have ever said on this site, thread, or anywhere else has been an attempt to put women down. Needless to add I cannot control the perceptions of others, nor do I intend to try.
AoS,
I’d totally forgotten that such a movie existed. Thanks for the reminder….
What a Maroon, do I need to apologise for reminding you of that unintentionally hilarious movie? If so, I apologise unreservedly.
AoS,
It’s ok, I never actually saw it.
Perhaps I should, but only if I take up toking again.
Omar, while it may be true that you have never tried to put women down, that comment had the flavor of “of course, I’m on your side, but…”
Also, a lot of women do not necessarily know what they want to do (that goes for men, too, of course). But for women, a lot of the messages we receive shift us from one path to another, thinking we are making that choice. I was brought up in such a way that it never occurred to me that I could be a scientist, and consequently, while I loved science, it never occurred to me that I wanted to be a scientist. A fortunate series of events brought me to that realization later in life, and I know a lot of women in the same boat, both my colleagues and students, who are unsure of what they want to be because they do not know what women can do. You might think that is ridiculous in this day and age, when we supposedly see women on the television, in the movies, in the news, etc, doing everything everywhere. But the messages are confusing and bewildering, because we also see a lot of women who are actually trying to do those things that are put down, derided, prevented, and are often the only woman we will see in a particular area, leading us to believe they are extraordinary outliers, and not like us.
As for using other species to learn about ourselves, yes, we do that. Remember, I said I’m a biologist. We typically use species that are closer to us in their form and function than chickens, and even then we approach any analysis with extreme caution, because, well, the other species are themselves and not us. We do not pick and choose a species that is doing what we want to make the point about, at least, not if we are good scientists.
When you get into such things as behavior, it becomes even trickier, especially with the type of culture human societies have laid over our instinctive behavior, and the intensity of training. Coupled with the amount of species who have had their behavior interpreted by studying mostly the males and extrapolating to the females, we should be doubly cautious when looking at gender behaviors. I, for one, have never pecked the ground, or another member of my species, in a way similar to any chicken, though I have heard many men who seem to strut and crow like roosters.
And this is a bad time to get me started about the role of male and female voice, since I am currently reading Vox, the novel by Christine Dalcher, and it has me in a bit of a mood.
Rob @ 12 – thanks. I re-opened comments at the Misc. Room.
Omar @ 18 – you say you at no time suggested that women are hens or lobsters. Come on. What was your point in telling us what hens do? Was it just a random observation unrelated to the post? Well no, it couldn’t be, could it, because it came after
You were making some sort of point, in an oblique fashion. Granted it was oblique, granted you weren’t literally saying women are hens, you still talked about hens
and lobstersin connection to women. Don’t play silly games.@Omar:
Well, I think we’d hypothesise and test rather than assume.
It’s dangerous to attribute to ‘drives’ and evolutionary psychology what could easily be the result of culture. Evolutionary psychology is frequently used to incorrectly justify the contempt and ill-treatment of women. That was iknklast’s point about lobsters, of course: Jordan Peterson’s ignorant comments about (his misunderstanding of) lobster physiology and behaviour is used by him and his acolytes to justify hierarchical social structures in humans with (purely coincidentally, I’m certain) white men being at the top.
There are countless other examples. One of the most popular is evolutionary psychology’s unevidenced claim that women are well suited to staying at home and making sandwiches because (it says) women evolved to be gatherers in stone age societies.
Analogies such as this can be harmful, especially when they are pure fiction, hence iknklast’s point that women don’t tend to peck in the dirt like hens. There’s no reason to expect women to talk less, especially given the frequent sexist complaint that women just won’t shut up.
I suspect you are trying to be flippant, but take care with that. We’ve seen so many harmful examples of harmful ideas from evo psyche that it’s hard to see the funny side.
OB:
At no time on this or any other thread have I introduced ‘lobsters’. (Apparently it comes somehow from the overblown and overhyped Jordan Peterson.) My browser’s search engine tells me the first mention was at #15, by iknklast. I know very little lobster biology.
I used to keep a dozen or so domestic fowls, so I know a bit more about them. Nature, for whatever reason, made them sexually dimorphic: obvious, even from a distance. So why? NOT so the females could play an inferior (on whatever basis) role, but arguably so they could play a different role from the male of the same species. The differing reproductive realities arguably call forth different and observable strategies, neatly summed up by that wonderful old proverb maternity is a matter of fact; paternity is a matter of opinion. (Wonderful, because it carries within itself a long ton of implications.)
I could have chosen a wide variety of mammals, including canines, felines, primates; also birds like peafowls, some reptiles; but not I think too many fish or amphibians. Again, interesting reasons for each and all. But I am sure it would not be too difficult for one or two around here to find reasons for the comparison being odious. (‘So you are saying that women, all of them/us, are like bitches. Or like fat and lazy tabby cats. Certainly not like tom-cats, out on the tiles all the time. Is that what you are saying?’)
I have regarded myself from an early age, as being a freethinker, and this site has been, over the God-knows-how-many years (30?) I have been visiting here, a manifestation in its own right of free thought. You have quite rightly and relentlessly attacked institutionalised privilege, and particularly of the male variety, which I was raised by 2 generations of strongly feminist women to avoid. Which I maintain, I do, and have.
BandW is also quite distinct from the other two sites I visit (under a different nom de blog in each case.) At one of them (Guardian Australia) there is commonly a lot of blood on the floor, and exchanges at times get pretty exothermic. But this one is just the opposite, and tends as many of them do, towards becoming an echo-chamber, in which nobody disagrees with anything said by anyone, and certainly not with anything said by you.
In other words, it tends away from free thought. As many of them do. As in:
I was not. I am not. I never was. But I remain a freethinker. It is my religion.
And I find it a very powerful weapon to use against the mediaeval theologians, wherever they make their second, third… nth coming.
Sorry about that stray “and lobsters.” Suggestibility moment.
Yes, sure, there’s a tendency toward agreement here, at least on certain value-laden subjects. Is that the same thing as “tending away from free thought”? Does thought have to be combative or self-consciously “provocative” to be free? If one avoids agreement on principle for fear of being in an echo-chamber, how free is that?
Apology accepted.
Is mine? As I see myself, I am neither a provocateur or a troll, disagreeing for disagreement’s sake. I try not to offend, but say what I genuinely think on each thread I visit when I think I have some contribution to make. Otherwise, I stay out of it. And I agree far more often than not, I think.
But as Tony Abbott, an ex-seminarian former Australian Prime Minister once said of himself: “I am not the suppository of all wisdom.” Well, he was dead right there.
But then again, neither is anyone. ;-)
Omar: I give you two separate points:
The notion that women talk constantly is deeply ingrained in our society–it’s one of the most consistent stereotypes out there.
At the same time, we have the top films over several years in which men are chatting away while the women smile winsomely. And almost all (if not all) of those films were written, directed and/or produced predominantly by men.
Whether or not humans are naturally ‘sexually monophonic’ or not is irrelevant to the actual discussion–namely, whether or not the portrayal of women in these films has an impact on how women are perceived in society.
Omar, I do not see it as a rejection of freethinking to express scientific caution about the drawing of conclusions between one species and another. Humans are not any of the animals you mention, and while there are certain patterns we see in sexually dimorphic species, there are also patterns of other sorts we see that do not necessarily show in humans (or in all of the sexually dimorphic species). At this point, our species is too overladen with a sexist culture that has delegitimized female speech for so long it would be difficult to know what the normal is for our species; and I suspect there isn’t any one normal. It also isn’t that normal among sexually dimorphic species for the female to hide her estrus, but human females do. The males do not see a sign of a red rump when human females are fertile, even if said human females are walking around with their clothes off (though, I suppose, a human female might by sheer coincidence happen to have sunburned her rump by nude sunbathing, and it could coincide with her fertile period – but I digress).
In short, we have evolved along a different pathway from other species. Each species evolves along their own pathway, and since we are the only known species to have developed the sort of speech patterns we have, it is very difficult to make any sort of comparison. Male speech is not like a rooster crowing; female speech is not like a hen…cheeping, or whatever that sound is called (and I grew up around chickens, so I know what it sounds like. I hate it.)
And as I pointed out earlier, much of our knowledge of other animal behavior has been overturned by the fact that we are finally actually doing some observations of the females, rather than just watching the males and assuming the females are doing what we think they are doing. There is still a lot we do not know about what other animals do and why they do it, and there is certainly no one particular way to be sexually dimorphic, so why should we assume that the making of sounds/speaking should all be loud, noisy males and quieter females? The world in which chicken females, and other species females, live is much different than that of the human female, and their behavior is often tied to what helps them survive in their world. That is what evolved. Our world is different, and the fact is, silencing women has not been a great survival technique for us, and many of us are speaking up about it and saying “no more!” Perhaps it is simply the next stage in our evolution, for there is no reason to assume that just because something has been that way for human history means it cannot evolve in a different direction.
Who knows, maybe someday female chickens will sit up and tell the male, “Hey, what about the Bechdel test? I want my turn, too, and by God, I’m gonna crow.” Only they’ll say it in chickenese, so how will we know? At least, not until the chickens start crowing.
Omar,
I’m not clear on what you’re even disagreeing with here. First you implied, but didn’t quite say, that sexual dimorphism in chickens could tell us something about male over-representation in movies. Then when others pointed out the flaws with that, you didn’t seem to agree with them, but nor did you really respond to their points either. So it’s not clear to me what point you’re making about women in films.
You did not. As I tried to point out in an earlier post, I suspect iknklast introduced lobsters as a reference to Jordan Peterson’s nonsense as an example of how analogies between human and animal physiology and behaviour should be made with care and are often just plain wrong. One of the things Peterson says about lobsters is that since their brains contain serotonin, they are similar to human brains, which contain it too. He uses this to make wild leaps of specious reasoning that are not justified by either logic or evidence. And he does this to justify things he and his supporters want to believe, which is inevitably about the ill treatment of women.
I don’t think you’re doing that, but speculations of that sort are widely and destructively misused, so we ought to be careful. If we are going to make such comparisons, we ought to either make it entirely clear that they are entirely speculative or show as definitively as we can that they are real. This is why I assumed you were being somewhat flippant (perhaps “humorous” would be a better word, I wasn’t intending a pejorative). I assumed you were saying that we shouldn’t automatically assume that humans don’t share that characteristic of chickens, and that in itself is a perfectly reasonable point.
I think you are missing the point (or at least my point). As others have said, your argument is a little difficult to work out, perhaps I’m missing a step. It seems to me that you’re saying that the reason that women talk less in films might be a consequence of human evolution. You make the analogy with chickens to show that vocalisations in other species differ with sex you and ask “maybe that’s the case with humans, too?” Is that a fair summary of your argument?
As an informal hypothesis, it stands up OK. The first problem is that without formalising the hypothesis and testing it, we’ve learned nothing. The second is that people create these just-so stories all the time to justify their personal beliefs and never go as far as to even care whether or not they are true. They tend to re-enforce negative and untrue stereotypes. Comparisons have baggage and as iknklast said behavioural studies are themselves not always as unbiased as the researchers might think.
For those reasons, people are right to be wary of arguments like this. It’s not that I’m saying your comparison is odious, I’m saying that you have chosen a characteristic of chickens that happens to match your point. There’s no other particular reason to choose this characteristic of chickens above others. That’s what I’m trying to point out when I say that women don’t peck in the dirt like chickens: not that the comparison is odious, but that it is specious unless there’s good reason to make it. That’s what I’m saying when I mention lobsters: Peterson’s bullshit is a very good example of why we have to be careful when making comparisons of this kind.
I think the chickens are just a distraction. If you’d phrased your argument without it, perhaps it would have been clearer. For example:
Hypothesis: The analysis of male to female speech ratio in those movies reflects the societies producing and consuming those movies, which has a genetic basis.
The way I’ve put it is hardly elegant, but you get the idea. Then we’d know what we’d need to do to prove or disprove this hypothesis and we’ve already learned something.
But as Freemage said, all of this is rather beside the point. Movies are things we create. They have an effect on societies as well as being influenced by them. What kind of effects would we prefer they have?
@iknklast:
I believe the technical term is the “cluck”.
iknklast @#30:
That of course, is Anthropology 101. The range of ‘normalities’ across the world is vast, even including the sections of it dominated by the 5 or so major religions. And plenty of cultural holdouts still exist. For example, Islam varies from extremely repressive of women (Saudi Arabia) to relatively more inclusive and benign (Indonesia.) Within Catholicism there is still room for accommodation of ancient practices such as ancestor worship. In the Philippines when I was there a few years back, All Souls Night was the biggest religious festival of all, far more important to them than Christmas or Easter. While here in Australia, All Souls Night is nothing.
Much of course has been written on cultural evolution, with matrilineal societies being seen by some as survivals from a matriarchal past. (I reserve judgement there.)
We also have a good idea why sexual dimorphism exists in various animal species. Like everything else, It has to be selected in, by the well known neo-Darwinian processes. In mammals it is nowhere near as pronounced as in the legendary spiders, presumably because it does not have to be. In spiders, the males are tiny beside the females and any given male is highly likely to get eaten by his lover after her sole lifetime sexual act. My guess is that larger male spiders have increased chances of finishing up on some female’s menu as compared to their more diminuitive rivals, with female aggression also being selected in.
Charles Darwin on spiders: “… The males search eagerly for the females, and have been seen by Canestrini and others to fight for possession of them. The same author says that the union of the two sexes has been observed in about twenty species; and he asserts positively that the female rejects some of the males who court her, threatens them with open mandibles, and at last after long hesitation accepts the chosen one.”
-Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Modern Library, NY, p 621. (Oddly enough, Darwin has hardly anything to say on spiders in The Origin of the Species cf The Descent of Man.)
In the mating contest between males of many mammalian species, bigger and more aggressive males tend to win against their rivals. The meek inherit the earth, in the sense that they are trampled into it. As you would know, males of many bird species compete for the favours of a female through display (fine feathers presumably = health). Australia’s male satin bower bird builds and decorates an elaborate bower, which presumably elevates his chances in the mating game, which may impress an inspecting female; and then again, may not.
Then again in line with that, there is the old saying “man proposes; woman disposes.” Which in my own experience, is spot on. And it applies right across the vertebrate spectrum.
Not a bad title for a book; except I am not the one to write it.
Omar @ 28 –
No, that wasn’t meant to describe you, but to try to pin down what you mean about the tendency to agree [on some core issues]. My point was that agreement on some core issues isn’t particularly surprising, because these things (internet groupings that last a long time) just do go that way: there has to be some reason people find one Facebook group or blog or [etc] worth sticking with, and similar views on some core issues seems high on the list of likely reasons. I asked about disagreeing for disagreement’s sake to try to tease out your reasoning, not to try to describe what you do.
(I do think you tend to be self-consciously “provocative,” partly by refraining from arguing but just delivering cryptic essays that we can construe however we like. But that’s not what I was saying in that comment.)
Don’t be so sure about that. Hyenas? And female lions bring home the bacon (hunt the mammoth, if you will). Making generalizations about vertebrate behavior is risky, because there are always counter examples. And yes, I know that the male lions roar; I do not need that piece of instruction, though I am sure you will probably point it out to me anyway.
And at this point, I am about as tired as I can be of men explaining biology to me. Perhaps if I go back to school and get another267 hours, I can be regarded as actually having half the knowledge of a man? And then another 700-800 to get up to somewhere near the knowledge of a man – even one who has never been in a biology class in his life? (Because some of the men explaining biology to me have no biology background at all; I am not implying you do not, because I do not know).
Oh, wait, I can’t have the knowledge of a man, can I, because there is some vertebrate species somewhere that demonstrates the impossibility, right?
Please review what I wrote above about the possibility that our species may have evolved in our own way, and that there is absolutely no one way to be a vertebrate. In some fish species (also vertebrates), the male is reduced down to a sack of sperm that rides around on the female as a parasite to be nearby when she is ready to be fertilized. This by no means says anything about human behavior, any more than roosters crowing says anything about human speech.
And there is another issue here – cultural evolution. This is going to drive human species in a different direction (many different directions) based on the society in which they find themselves. We have remade our environment to an extent that much of our evolution is probably culturally driven by now, but that does not mean that we need to behave like chickens, lobsters, fish, lions, or any other vertebrate (or invertebrate) species.
And I do not need biology lessons. I have a very expensive education that took me a long time to pay for, and I would like the opportunity to use it myself. Thanks.
Oh, and Omar? When you find a good example of what other species do when they make movies, be sure and let us know. That might help clarify things a bit.
OB @ #34: Noted.
Iknklast
Can I take that as:
?
If so, fair enough. Find some women then.
Can I take that as a put-down?
However, I have studied the movie industry perhaps a little more than the average moviegoer has. My paternal grandfather came from a business-oriented family, but he departed from family tradition and went into the theatre, where he had an interesting but somewhat financially unrewarding career. In Sydney, pre-WW1, his major rival was an outfit called JC Williamson Theatres, who believed in giving the public whatever it most wanted, which was vaudeville, chorus lines, etc. My grandfather on the other hand believed in giving the public what he thought it needed: avant-garde and ‘experimental’ plays. Guess who made the most money?
Forsaking Sydney, he went first to London, then on to New York, and he found in Greenwich Village an old barn, took a lease on it, opened it up as the Barn Theatre, and put on his avant-garde plays, with mixed success. But he did help a then young unknown playwright by the name of Eugene O’Neill get started in theatre.
Also, using his contacts, he managed to land a part for his photogenic son (my father) in a film being made in NY by Famous Players-Lasky. That was The Blue Bird, from the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, and it was according to my father their first full-length feature film. Mr Zukor, he said, would periodically come down the stairs from his office above the warehouse floor to check how it was all going. That film had a fair reception across the US.
Adolph Zukor afterwards re-incorporated Famous Players-Lasky, called it Paramount, and moved it from NY to a place called Hollywood, in California..
My grandfather collected his son’s performance fees and put that money towards paying for a passage back to Sydney for the family. Then, after a disappointing flop of his latest avant-garde production, the Barn Theatre mysteriously managed to catch fire and burn to the ground. My grandfather collected the insurance and used it to top up the fares back to Sydney.
That saga bears such an uncanny resemblance to the plot of The Producers (1967: Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder) that I suspect that it could be the traceable source of that film, down to my grandfather’s last career move: teaching elocution (vide Prof Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady) to whoever would pay him out of his home on the upper-middle-class North Shore of Sydney Harbour. Zero Mostel’s character in The Producers suffered exactly the same fate. For a thespian fond of declaiming to the Gods while treading the boards, a terrible outcome.
Having said that, I put it to you that movie producers make it their business to refine their audience-targeting. They make what they think will sell, for the audience who they hope will buy it, 50% of whom are women. If a James Bond or whatever fantasy is what they want, then that is what they will get, full bore, and with bells and whistles to suit. These days, it is all targeted marketing and infotainment, with a bit of lucrative product placement and underhand promotion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_Players-Lasky
People say the same thing about Broadway, too. But…
Plays written by women tend to sell more tickets and make more money than those written by men. And run for a shorter length of time.
We believe in the things we tell ourselves, that we are rational and making rational decisions. Studies suggest we often do not.
No, you may not, because that is not what I said, and that is not what I meant. You continued to explain biology to me, even as you ignore the points I am trying to make. So no, I don’t feel like “discussing” biology with you. I love discussing biology with people – men, women, and children – but I can’t “discuss” with someone who ignores half of what I say to repeat the point they already made that I tried to engage with. So, thanks, but no thanks.
If that is the case (and I have no reason to doubt you) then where are the women entrepreneurs and producers? At a guess, I would say some of them stand to do very well, but for whatever reason, are missing their chance.
And your contributions #35, #36 are noted.
I doubt this is the case. That is, I doubt that 50% of every target movie audience is women. Movies are targeted by sex just as they are targeted by age, interests, politics, and other characteristics. The James Bond target audience is young men, for instance.
Where are the women entrepreneurs and producers?
Barred?
Discouraged?
Harassed?
Driven out?
Denied the opportunities to make it into a position where they could take advantage of what chances there are or were?
“…whatever the reason…”
Like say sexism and misogyny? The continuation of business as usual boys clubs in huge swaths of human endeavour (theatre and cinema among them)? It’s not something that just happens like earthquakes or the weather, it’s something that’s done, decisions that are taken, choices that are made. These choices and decisions might be concsious or unconscious. They are not, however rational. They may be rationalized, but they are not providing human societies with anything like the meritocracy that “just world” fanbois who see nothing wrong with the status quo claim we are living in. When things are structured so that biases can be tempered or ruled out altogether, outcomes are different. When orchestras started having blind auditions, where the selection commitee could not actually see the musicians, more women started being hired. Removing the opportunity for bias changed the ability of women to participate at all. How many women in the past missed the chance to be hired and play professionally, not because they weren’t good enough, but because they were women?
Employment studies using resumes identical in every regard except for the name of the applicant, sent out for prospective jobs have shown racial bias when resumes with obviously “Black” names received fewer offers of employment responses than those having not obviously Black names. A similar study showed employers more willing to hire whites with criminal records over identically qualified blacks with no criminal record whatsoever. Choices and decisions, in which bias and prejudice were allowed to be part of the process. I have no doubt whatsoever that the same sort of resume study using male and female names would have similarly biased results; the above cited orchestra audition scenario is a very good indicator of anti-woman bias in that field at least. Ophelia has made mention over time of stereotype threat, https://www.edglossary.org/stereotype-threat/ which is also likely a factor in answering the question of “Where are all the women?”
YNNB:
From your link:
Yet it might not be as simple as that. With regard to ‘stem’: science, technology, engineering, and maths:
This is a personal interpretation:
“Some would say that the gender stem gap occurs not because girls can’t do science, but because they have other alternatives, based on their strengths in verbal skills,” she said. “In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less.”
Another way of interpreting the situation:
“Some would say that the gender stem gap occurs not because girls can’t do science, but because they have been consistently shown from birth, by everything in society, that they should only rely on their strengths in verbal skills,” she could have said. “In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less because they are also raised to think of themselves as being worth less than boys, who deserve higher wages for everything they do.”