Here’s your daily reminder that even though female representation in Hollywood may be improving incrementally, we’ve got a long way to go.
Producer Ross Putnam, who’s worked on projects like First Girl I Loved and Bad Samaritans, has started a Twitter account (@femscriptintros) to chronicle the actual intros for female leads from actual scripts that he reads.
We’ve embedded some of the more grievous intros below (note that Putnam changes the name of all the female characters to JANE):
JANE, 28, athletic but sexy. A natural beauty. Most days she wears jeans, and she makes them look good.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
JANE pours her gorgeous figure into a tight dress, slips into her stiletto-heeled fuck-me shoes, and checks herself in the dresser mirror.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
JANE (late 20s) sits hunched over a microscope. She’s attractive, but too much of a professional to care about her appearance.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
@femscriptintros is a reminder of Hollywood and society’s obsession with women’s looks–even the intro for a character “too professional to care about her appearance” (whatever that means) still rushes to assure the reader that she’s attractive. This is the result of male as default bias: many creators unconsciously assume that the objective audience member is a man, and as a result write female characters to appeal to the male gaze; women that are sex objects first, and characters second.
Representation isn’t just about having women characters, it’s about writing women aren’t just wish-fulfillment fantasies or valued solely for their looks. Like the Bechdel-Wallace test, it really shouldn’t be hard to write an intro for a woman without mentioning her appearance, her figure, how ‘good’ she looks for her age, or her sex drive, but apparently it is (for more proof of that, the Some Lady Parts blog has been compiling sexist character descriptions and casting calls for years).
We’ve reached out to Putman for comment on @femscriptintros but have yet to hear back.
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