Inaugural Post

I write this post a little over one week after the inauguration of Barack Obama. The year 2008 has been an interesting year for women (men too) in many respects.  Certainly as politics goes the ascension of Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin as contenders on the national political stage was a significant breakthrough for women in the mainstream. The Christian Science Monitor reports that modest gains in parity across the board were made so that Congress is now 17% women/83% men and in state legislatures the breakdown is 24% women/76% men. There’s some ways to go until we reach a sampling that reflects our society, but politics proves more promising than entertainment.

The Celluloid Ceiling Report from the University of San Diego confirmed that for 2007 (numbers for 2008 should be released in the next 1-2 weeks) women made up 15% directors, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the top 250 domestic-grossing films in 2007, with directors numbering a low 6%.  These statistics are deceptive – they don’t take into account independent media production or commercial television production, and they beg the question as to what’s the ratio of women trying to make it into these fields vis-à-vis men, which is necessary to know if we’re trying to examine and root out the discrimination we assume is at work.
Every year, there is some splashy piece in the New York Times or LA Times that bemoans the state of women in Hollywood, either on the screen as the creative force behind the story, and our attention is drawn to the issue for a brief moment. Then we settle back into the status quo until the next article. This column is a response to that ennui.
I think it’s time we focus a persistent gaze onto this issue and the broader issue of how women and men are creating, consuming, and appearing in the media manifestations of our technologically-driven culture. To be clear, I don’t advocate for some sort of cultural affirmative action for chicks. Rather this blog is a critical intervention by which I aim to pose questions to make us think about who we are and what we want. For example, regarding women as directors, I don’t think that a sort of token system whereby women are handed gigs makes sense to of a sense of correcting a wrong makes sense. I DO think that women and men are underestimated as consumers of good storytelling that involves either women in front of the screen or behind the camera. I DO think that we have a marketing and genre problem – the existence of the broad genre of “chick flicks” seems to leave no space for films featuring women and directed by women that have broad and/or commercial appeal to both genders. I DO think we expect female audiences to have bi-sexual interest in protagonists (meaning they watch stories with both men and women in the lead), while we assume men are single-sex oriented (lovin’ only the male leads). I DO think television has broken some of these barriers in important ways (which somehow seem not to translate to its big screen sib). And I DO think marketing executives should be challenged to find a way to mobilize men as an audience for good stories that happen to be about/by women.  In this internet-driven micro-targeting culture, we are increasingly marketed to and treated as the sum of our properties (m/f, age, race, zip code, income, political party, etc), rather than who we are.
Thus in this inaugural post I am calling for an adjustment. We are on autopilot and in this, the so called era of change, I'm issing the rallying cry that we look at things a little more thoughtfully, or hell, look at them at all.   - TVB