Tag: Women in Hollywood

The Bechdel Rule, aka Ripley’s Rule

It seems there should be a test to evaluate the role of women in any given movie.

A comic, from 1985, lays out a simple set of criteria for its characters to choose a movie to see:

1. There must be two female characters (some say two named female characters)
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something other than men.

Check out the original comic below and click on it to visit Alison Bechdel’s blog and learn about the original source of the comic and idea. NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story on the Bechdel Rule and posted an entry on their pop-culture blog, Monkey See, about new Bechdel-like rules.

How many movies actually pass the test?

Thanks to Unapologetically Female for cuing us in!

Feminism 3.0?

Julia Barry writes of her experience with feminism in the media, and the ways some women have adopted tactics of the patriarchy to compete against other women. Not only is feminism the new “f-word,” but women have favored individual accomplishment over group activism. She claims that this isn’t simply a Hollywood problem:

Independent media supposedly eschews this world of profit values in order to communicate in a more free, honest, and genuine manner. But, as a female indie filmmaker/feminist activist, I have experienced sexism, aversion to “the f-word” – usually predicated on assumptions that feminists are either mean-spirited men-haters or naïve pot-smokers – and bureaucratic coldness like that found within the commercial film industry amongst colleagues and independent media makers. And what upsets me most is that the majority of these experiences have happened with other women. Why?

Read Barry’s article, posted on the MediaRights website, here.

NYT Recognizes a Problem

Manohla Dargis, New York Times film critic, writes about the lack of women in this summer’s blockbuster fare, and the way new Hollywood has become a post-female Hollywood.

All you have to do is look at the movies themselves — at the decorative blondes and brunettes smiling and simpering at the edge of the frame — to see just how irrelevant we have become.

Read the full article, titled “Come Summer, Is There a Real Woman in This Multiplex?” here.