Miss Representation Page #7

---

An issue which I am frankly surprised

to hear people suddenly care about.

[laughter]

Reporters and commentators,

stop using words that diminish us,

like "pretty,"

"attractive," "beautiful."

"Harpy," "shrew"...

[laughter]

"Boner-shrinker."

[ laughter, applause]

My worry is now that

there were millions of people

watching Sarah Palin,

Hillary Clinton.

I could talk about a lot of women

that are in New Jersey politics.

There were millions

of young women watching this,

and the messages that they're getting

are just not conducive

to encouraging them

to put up with this kind of abuse.

When you're not treated the same,

you are dehumanized.

When you're not given

the same opportunity,

you're dehumanized.

When people look at you differently

because you happen to be a woman

and you happen to be

in a position of some influence

that someone who is a man

would naturally be in

based on tradition or history

and people question

your qualifications,

that's dehumanizing.

Empowered women in general

threaten men

because they feel

that an empowered woman

is just putting down a man

as opposed to trying to

sort of raise herself.

As women have been challenging

man's power in business,

in the professions,

in education, in politics,

and other areas of social life,

the images of women that have

been flooding the culture

have been showing women

as taking up less space.

They're less threatening,

they're highly sexualized,

and, therefore,

a certain kind of power

has been taken away from them,

which is the power

of being a whole person.

And I don't think

those things are coincidental.

I think that the way that the

symbolic realm has been acting

is to take power away from women

while women have been

challenging man's power

in the concrete realm.

Siebel Newsom:

It seems we've become numb

to the insidious ways

the media holds women back

when it misrepresents them.

I can't help but wonder...

who are the people behind the scenes,

making these crucial decisions

about what we see'?

And what are the consequences

for my daughter and her generation'?

The media has always been

overwhelmingly in the hands of men.

Pozner:

As you go up the ranks in media,

fewer and fewer women

and people of colour exist

at every rung of the ladder.

Jenkins:
That means that 97%

of everything you know

about yourself and about

your country and your world

comes from the male perspective.

It doesn't mean that it's wrong.

It just means that in a democracy

where you talk about equality

and full participation,

you've got half of the population...

more than half of the population...

not participating.

Many years ago, I said,

"Why don't we just create

our ovvn network

"rather than continuing to

try and get our stories told

by other people's networks?"

So we put together an idea.

We went to various distributors,

including the broadcast networks,

the cable companies, et cetera,

pitched the idea.

And one person said to me,

"Why do we need

another woman's network'?

We already have one.

We have Lifetime."

There's a fairly pervasive

sense of denial

about the status of women

working in both television and film.

Peter Bart wrote a column in Variety,

talking about the glass ceiling

and how it no longer exists.

Putting that kind of information

out there is really troublesome.

For so long, it has been an industry

dominated by men

who just don't leave.

People who employ other people

tend to hire people who are

a reflection of themselves.

This impacts hiring.

It impacts the news directors,

the journalists,

the people

who are gonna cover the news

and, of course, who reports the news

very much is the factor in

what kind of news is reported.

When any group

is not featured in the media,

they have to wonder,

"Well, what part do I play

in this culture?"

There's actually

an academic term for that.

It's called

"symbolic annihilation."

All of Hollywood is run

on one assumption...

that women will watch stories

about men,

but men won't watch stories

about women.

And all the decisions are made

based on this concrete fact,

and nobody's ever really proved

that that's true.

I think it's a horrible

indictment of our society

if we assume that

one half of the population

is just not interested

in the other half.

The first couple of scripts

that I wrote,

of course, had a female,

you know, as the lead character.

And people were like,

"Well, there's hardly

any bankable actresses,

"so they can't carry a film,

"so it has to be

super low-budget

"or we wouldn't bankroll it.

And no one's gonna show up

in the theaters."

And I finally wrote

the lowest-budget movie

I could ever write.

I co-wrote "Thirteen"

with a 13-year-old girl,

and it was about

people of lower income.

They could wear my clothes.

We could shoot in my house.

We could use my car.

We made the movie,

and it went on to Sundance,

and it went on to win awards

and get international distribution.

And I think it was

the same with "Twilight."

Two major studios turned it down.

Finally, a new upstart company

showed me the project,

and it turned into,

obviously, a phenomenon,

making over half a billion

dollars so far.

So it disproved the theory

that girls and women

wouldn't go to see a movie.

That they did go see the movie

in droves

and over and over and over

and bought the DVD

and even bought pillow cases.

But there's a flip side to that,

which is kind of astonishing to me.

On the next two "Twilights,"

they've hired guys.

They did not seek out

a female director.

And on the same side,

I've gone after some jobs

that I've been told flat-out

to myself and my agent,

"Oh, no. We think a guy

should direct this."

And to me, I think, "Okay."

Why can a man direct

"Sex And The City,"

"Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants,"

a Miley Cyrus movie.

Nobody ever questions that.

But I, a very successful

female director,

cannot direct a movie that

"should be done by a man."

Nobody says, I'm not gonna hire

a female director."

They just... on their list,

there's just 25 names,

and none of them are women.

What happens is these studio chiefs

or people like myself, you know...

writer/predueere or directors...

we see the world in a certain way,

and we don't really challenge

that often.

And so we just replicate

the world that we grew up in

without really asking

why we're doing it.

What is the first thing

that they tell people

when they're, you know

in screenwriting class'?

"Create what you know."

When you have greater diversity

behind the scenes,

not only do you get more

female characters on screen,

but you get a different kind

of female character.

You get a more powerful

and multidimensional

female character.

You should have seen the way

those men looked at me.

But then they discovered

I was fearless!

Dawson:
That's why

it's extremely important

for women to be writing

their own stories,

Rate this script:2.5 / 4 votes