Monday 22 January 2018

American Eagle 'body positivity' campaign

You can add to your Fairy Liquid Advert paragraph that clothing companies are beginning to represent different body shapes in their adverts, e.g. http://aplus.com/a/american-eagle-outfitters-i-can-fall-2017-campaign-video?no_monetization=true
American Eagle began a campaign in 2017 to promote body positivity, showing pictures of different-sized women advertising their clothes.

Also, a plus-sized model who has made it big in Hollywood, Ashley Grahm, has also become famous for promoting positive body image.
America Eagle

Ashley Grahm
Another great point to add to your essay might be the Netflix genre 'Women that rule the stage'

Tuesday 9 January 2018

Women in Film 2018


Talk Show host Oprah Winfrey's powerful acceptance speech at the 2018 Golden Globes Awards (when she won a Lifetime Achievement Award) further raised awareness of the representation of women in the film and media industry. In wake of a torrent of accusations of years of harrassment and abuse, from Harvey Weinstein (film producer and co-founder of Miramax films) to Kevin Spacey (who was subsequently dropped from the Netflix series House of Cards), women attending the awards wore black to symbolise solidarity. Winfrey said that "a new day is on the horizon" "when nobody has to say 'Me Too' again" (referring to the social media campaign against sexual harrassment of women).

Tuesday 18 July 2017

Advertising Standards Fight Gender Stereotyping

Recently, the Advertising Standards Authority has revised its regulations to combat gender stereotyping in adverts:





'Wonder Woman' put an end to female stereotyping in film?

Reviews of the recently-released 'Wonder Woman' suggest that the film could put an end to the mistaken idea amongst film companies that 'women don't sell films'. What do you think?










Friday 30 June 2017


Well done to our Y12 students who made it in bright and early after the Prom to travel to Kent for this amazing immersive drama performance looking at gender over time. Concluded by a screening of Sally Potter's 1990 film of Virginia Wolf's 'Orlando', it was a fabulous introduction to our study of the representation of women over time.

See  http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/interviews/orlando-sally-potter-virginia-woolf-queer for more.




Tuesday 9 May 2017

Article from 'The Guardian' on Women in Film


Why, in 2016, are women still (mostly) silent film stars?

Study lays bare the fact that women are given far less dialogue than male actors – because it’s men who still get to tell the stories that form our cultural narratives
In Mulan, the dragon got more lines than the heroine.
In Mulan, the dragon got more lines than the heroine. Photograph: image.net
It’s rare to have proof that the less sexually desirable a woman is perceived to be, the less anyone cares what she has to say. And yet, Polygraph’s study of who is granted on-screen dialogue in more than 1,000 movies does exactly that: the percentage of dialogue allotted female characters waned after actors hit 31, dropped precipitously after they hit 42 and all but disappeared when they hit 65.
But when in 2014 80% of films had no women credited as writers, perhaps it’s to be expected that women overall had fewer lines and that the on-screen women the mostly male writers and directors thought audiences would like to hear are the youngest.
Maybe it’s even just par for the course that a summer would-be blockbuster such as Men in Black 3 had just one woman with enough lines to show up in the Polygraph study: “Hot Pants Girl”. (Then again, even testosterone action fest Expendables 3 gave its sole female speaker an on-screen name, even if she didn’t have that much dialogue.)
Still, when the dragon in Mulan has more dialogue than the titular character, when films with casting gender parity feature men speaking more often than women, and when only 18% of films have women as two of the top three speaking parts (a scenario that male actors go into 82% of the time), the question isn’t just whether women are underrepresented in Hollywood.
The question is who gets to give voice to the stories that form our shared cultural narrative, and the answer is “men”.
Though women aren’t proportionately represented on screen, in speech or behind the cameras, they are in front of the screens: women make up a larger share of movie audiences in the US than men and female-led movies have a stronger return-on-investment than male-led movies (even controlling for budget disparities, as Hollywood tends to spend more money on male-led films).
And yet, when we go to the movies, women are rarely the leads unless it’s a “women’s” movie – and sometimes, even when it is, we still aren’t the ones doing most of the talking.
Research from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism shows that for every one woman who speaks even in films with less than an R rating, there are around three male speaking characters and that crowd shots have an average of 17% women (a ratio that hasn’t changed since 1946).
It’s nonetheless rare – unless you count Geena Davis – that anyone comments on the lack of women on screen and speaking. Studies such as the Annenberg one show that we view a lack of female representation as normal, and we view actual demonstrable parity as giving unequal weight to women.
The lack of female representation isn’t intentional or even probably conscious: it’s just that when women aren’t seen and aren’t heard in public and cultural spaces, we come to view that absence as normal. We come to see the “everyman” as, well, a man: we learn to identify with men, to see ourselves in men (even as women) and to see the woman’s perspective as the minority one, even if we are a slight demographic majority.
Movies starring, featuring and weighted male are just movies; movies starring, featuring and weighted female are “chick flicks”, and ones that supposedly only women want to see.
That the data on “chick flicks” and female moviegoers doesn’t support the false hypothesis that women aren’t enough of an audience to matter to Hollywood hasn’t done nearly enough to spur change in the industry or our society. Just witness all the griping about Rey’s ascendence in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Some male fans seemingly couldn’t see themselves in an orphan stranded on a desert planet who has access to The Force and helps defeat the Empire in battle unless that orphan was male like Luke Skywalker or Finn, John Boyega’s character, and complained that the movie had gone too far by casting a woman in the lead. But 78% of the dialogue was spoken by men and Finn had more lines than Rey, even though The Force Awakens had the highest percentage of dialogue spoken by women (28%): in the original movie, Episode IV, just 6% of the dialogue was spoken by women.
One outspoken woman is apparently, at least subconsciously, viewed as equivalent to two men – in cinema, and sometimes in life. And while that feels like the start of the joke, it’s not really funny to the two-thirds of women left standing silently on the sidelines to make things feel more “equal”.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/12/women-film-speaking-roles-2016-study-hollywood