It’s a funny thing. We all know that there are far too few female CEOs and US presidents, that boards of directors and university faculties rarely reach parity, and that the people who cast our movies in Hollywood are primarily women but that the people who helm them and edit them into the stories we remember are primarily men.
We also know that those are real people, though, and with real people it’s complicated. There’s all kinds of societally entrenched crap that started when we were kids or when our employers were kids.
But what about fake people? The fictional CEOs and politicians and professors and cops and, heck, druglords and supervillians and hopeless wanderers, we read about in novels and watch on TV and at the movies? They could be, on the whole, half female tomorrow. And if they suddenly were, if writers wrote them that way and producers ok’d it all the way up the line… what would that do for the next generation’s pesky societal entrenchments? Or even for ours?
A lot, says Geena Davis.
Frickin’ Geena Davis. She really is in a league of her own – back in 2004, shortly before she played a female president of the United States on television, she founded a think tank called the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and commissioned a huge and definitive research project across TV and film that confirmed a hunch she probably shared with many of us.
As the organization’s website states the stats, “in family films, there is only one female character for every three male characters. In group scenes, only 17% of the characters are female.” And adds, “the repetitive viewing patterns of children ensure that these negative stereotypes are ingrained and imprinted over and over.”
So girls wind up thinking, on some level, that there are fewer options for them (especially since a big chunk of the lady characters that do exist are sexed up or lacking in occupational ambition). And boys wind up thinking, on some level, that a 17-to-83 ratio of girls to boys is what 50-50 feels like. (By the way, she pointed out in an NPR interview, about 17% of cardiac surgeons, tenured professors, and congress members in the real world are women. So.)
But are we damsels in distress here, doomed within our tower of scary stats? It can feel that way sometimes when we read that the numbers have basically not budged since the ‘40s. But Ms. Davis rode in last month like a knight in shining armor brandishing a delightful solution. As my colleague here at Ms. in the Biz, Holly Derr, pointed out earlier this week, Geena Davis wrote a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter’s “Women in Entertainment Power 100” issue, in which she offered an easy two-step guide to get those writers writing and those higher-ups giving the thumbs up. Basically, change a bunch of the characters names to female ones. And explicitly state, as ridiculous as it may seem, that crowd scenes are to be made up of half women.
My favorite line of hers: “What if both police officers that arrive on the scene are women — and it’s not a big deal?” It’s absurd how revolutionary that sounds.
All this talk of the potentially enormous effects of nonchalant pronoun switching reminds me of something a friend posted on Facebook to another friend with a toddler: scientist and science writer Michelle Nijhuis wrote a piece that got picked up by Slate suggesting we change the pronouns in stories we read our kids. Or rather, that we heed our kids when they insist we do. Her own daughter decided Bilbo Baggins was a girl and when Michelle fought back, attempting to preserve the purity of Tolkien’s story (or in irrational fear that his estate might somehow overhear), her little girl told her nope, she had to read the book “the right way.”
And it worked. And it didn’t just make for a good heroine, it made for one for whom doing venturesome things – despite being a girl – was, again, not a big deal. Because although there’s a lot of kiddie books out there these days with female leads, there’s something a little creepy and counterproductive about over-celebrating a female protagonist. “Isn’t it amazing that a girl did these things, they seem to say – implying that these heroines are a freakish exception to their gender, not an inspiration for readers to follow.”
I don’t have any kids yet but I can imagine that this would be pretty healthy for girls and boys, this swift kick in the pronouns. As the author says, “friends tell me they pull similar tricks while reading to their sons and daughters: women who farm become not “farmer’s wives” but “farmers.” Boy animal characters become girls, and vice versa. Sleeping Beauty goes to MIT. Their kids, boys and girls alike, get to hear about a world as full of women as the real one – and as free of stereotypes as we’d like ours to be. Kid-lit may be catching up to our kids, but we don’t have to wait for it.”
In fact, there’s an awesome story of a father who did this for his daughter when she was playing The Legend of Zelda back a decade ago. And lest you lament that you’re too old to have your entertainment reprogrammed by a doting parent concerned with eradicating sexism, Google Chrome recently came out with an extension for your browser wherein you can toggle on and off living in a male-dominated world: Jailbreak the Patriarchy changes the pronouns and gendered terms of the webpage you’re reading to comical but perhaps eye-opening effect.
The lesson in all this seems to be: yes society, entrenchment, blah blah. But we really can do something about it – and, like, now. There are tiny revolutionary steps we can all take, whether we consider ourselves writers/creators/shapers of culture or “just” consumers. The culture is ours to shape. Every story we tell an audience of thousands or even a single child will make a difference in ways we can’t even imagine. Basically the formula seems to be: real people make good fake people who inspire other real people to be better, and the numbers finally budge.
And we end up with a lady president. Sounds like a plan to me.