Analysis

Growing up, it never occurred to me that there was anything in the world a woman couldn't do if she wanted. I was aware of the oppression suffered by women in the past, but I thought it was just that, a thing of the past. Like so many misinformed people in the world I believed that having won the right to vote and to work any where we pleased meant that women's battles had all been won.

During my time at Carolina, I have come to realize that this is just not true. Despite huge steps forward in the past century, women are still at a disadvantage in society. Feminism is needed now as much as ever to combat the more insidious problems women face such as the male to female income gap, the objectification and infantilization of women by popular media, unrealistic and unattainable ideals of beauty, and a rape culture in which female victims are blamed for their own assault. All of these and others are issues which I have only learned about since coming to college.

My awareness of these issues first began during my internship at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival after my sophomore year. I was one of eleven Production Interns, seven were women, four were men, working in a very technical, hands on position that required more heavy lifting than intellectual theorizing. The staff were great and made it an excellent learning experience, but two of the male interns were very condescending. They would not take me, or the other female interns seriously, even though we outnumbered them. It quickly became apparent that they were under the impression that we were “just girls” and therefore didn't know anything. The realization was shocking to me and made me extremely angry and frustrated. I couldn't believe that anyone, particularly not someone my own age, could seriously believe such a thing. This situation brought my attention to the challenges women still face because it was the first time I had ever encountered such problems first hand.

Since then, as a Theatre and Media Arts double major I have come to believe that the portrayals of women, or any other minority, on the stage, in films, and in popular media have a huge impact on how they are treated in real life. Many members of the general public dismiss discussion of this issue on the grounds that media doesn't have any bearing on the real world. But that is simply not true.

For one of my theatre history classes, I wrote a research paper discussing how the portrayals of women in a particular popular theatre tradition reflected that society's prevailing opinions on women and then perpetuated those opinions through subtle indoctrination of viewers (“La Mujer Varonil in Spanish Golden Age Theatre”). The same is equally true now in our own forms of popular entertainment. The messages a person hears and sees every day are the ones they come to believe. If the message is that women are sex objects to be desired, manipulated, and dominated by men or that women are only desirable when they conform to the unattainable standards of beauty depicted in heavily photoshoped advertisements, then those are the ideas that society will believe and act on.

But, just as media can be a cause of the problem, it has the equal potential to become part of the solution. If approached with conscious effort, entertainment can become a powerful vehicle for political discussion and change. In my second theatre history course, I wrote another research paper which provides an example by exploring the impact Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll House had on the women's movement in China in the 1920's (“A Doll House in China”). Entertainment can also be used to bring attention to cultural assumptions and practices so common as to be taken for granted, as in Susan Glaspell's play Trifles, from which I am directing a scene in my Directing class this semester (see a short pitch here). Current uses of this principle that popular media can be used to combat the same issues it perpetuates include initiatives such as Amy Poehler's Smart Girls and the Always “Like a Girl” ad that caused such a stir during the 2015 Super Bowl.

This semester I am taking a class on Women Playwrights that has helped solidify my thinking on the topic. In the class we discuss women's role in theatre from several different perspectives, including several forms of feminism. One issue in common across these discussions is the simple lack of presence of women onstage. Most plays are heavily gender unbalanced in favor of men; a common example might be a cast with three female roles and twelve male. In class we have talked about how even in the roles available to women they are not represented as an active participant, rather they become either the object of a man's pursuit or a minor helper towards his goal. The woman is the one acted upon, the one things happen to, never in a position to make significant choices or pursue her own goals.

Thinking in retrospect, I have observed this in my experience as a student employee working on Theatre department productions, over sixteen in all over my four years. From King Lear, in which the beloved daughter Cordelia is shuffled from father to husband to death in prison, to the comedy Boeing, Boeing, in which most of the humor results from the antics of one man attempting to hide his three girlfriends from each other. One good example comes from The 39 Steps because it is a comedy based on Alfred Hitchcock's movies. It provides a glimpse of the representation of women not only in theatre, but in cinema as well. The play has a cast of four actors, three men and one woman, who together play a total of more than 150 characters. The actress plays three different roles over the course of the play, the first, Annabella, a femme fatal from the Film Noir genre, the second, Margaret, a young wife dominated by her controlling husband, and the third, Pamela, an uptight woman who unwillingly gets dragged into the male protagonist's madcap adventure. All three characters serve as romantic entanglements and helpers for the leading man. All three women are types, not developed characters, who end the play in solidly traditional roles for women (ie. married or dead). All three become objects rather than subjects of the dramatic action.

Outside of my class on Women Playwrights, the representation of women onstage is a topic that is discussed infrequently, if at all, in classes or during the production process. But when such discussions do occur, they can quickly become a point of contention. Any of Shakespeare's plays make a good example. To the general public, Shakespeare is nearly synonymous with live theatre and so his works are discussed and performed frequently. But, do Shakespeare's female characters truly represent real women? Many scholars don't think they do. These characters were created by a male author, intended to be performed by male actors, and to be viewed by a male audience, all in a society in which women's status was little better than that of a horse. Nowhere in that equation is there room for a truly female perspective, something that many modern actresses struggle with when performing his plays. Similar disparities can be found in many plays and even in current day movies.

The lack of discussion of this important issue in the theatre world is mirrored by my experiences in the field of movie making as well. Women's issues rarely come up in Media Arts classes or production processes unless that is the specific focus of the class or project. As a result, I have pursued my own independent research into the subject of women's roles and representations in movies and the media. One interesting thing I discovered is called the Bechdel Test which is used as a general indication of female representation in films. In order to pass the test, the movie only has to have two named female characters who have at least one conversation about anything other than a man. Obviously the test is so general that it has limitations, but it's important because far more movies fail the test than pass it. In that way it becomes an obvious demonstration of how few women are represented in a majority of movies. Even such hugely popular franchises as Star Wars and the Marvel cinematic universe, which do have prominent female characters, still fail the test because those strong female characters are often the only named woman in the entire movie.

The topics discussed here are just a few ways in which popular entertainment can be both a barometer for the status of women in society as well as an important vehicle for improving that status. The fact that the issues of women's presence, representation, and objectification are rarely discussed by many of the people responsible for creating that entertainment is in itself both proof of and a contributing factor to the overall problem.

Outside links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIxA3o84syY – Always #LikeAGirl ad

http://amysmartgirls.com/