Female Representation

Admit it, you are spending a lot of your time watching shows and movies. Lots out there to binge on or go back in time and see movies you missed.

As a kid, I watched all the TV shows. They were part of my daily life: cartoons, old Shirley Temple movies, and The Partridge Family. In my college days, I watched soap operas. Laura and Luke, I mean, c’mon. Then post-college, it was LA Law and, of course, Six Feet Under and the Sopranos. The Sopranos is the last time we really dug in and watched shows until, of course, Covid struck.

Movies are definitely my favorite form of entertainment. One film we had never watched was Fight Club. It was indeed a movie of those times. Brad Pitt is brilliant, and his relationship with Edward Norton is quite good. The physical desire and masculine bonding over beating the shit out of each other is truly something. Today that movie would be destroyed in the press but remember we watched it in the day. We watched all of this in those days.

Then we tune into Lupin. Lupin is a show set in Paris, starring Omar Sy, an absolutely stunning human being trying to avenge his father’s death. We got in a few shows and began to dislike his character. At one point, he pretends to be a policeman with ease and walks into an older woman’s apartment who is so Parisian. He tells her that they have kept the bad guys at bay, but knowing them, they will come back until they complete the job. He says to her that he could hold her jewels down at the precinct until they catch the thief….but alas, that would take a lot of paperwork. The woman says not to worry about the paperwork, but she trusts him. After all, he is a cop.

At this point, I turned off the show and will not return. Oh, stupid woman!

A few years ago, I met Geena Davis, who began the Geena Davis Institute that focuses on gender in media. If movie and TV characters continue to be stereotypically portrayed, then it will take us a lot longer to create equality in all other facets of our lives. It doesn’t allow us to change the narrative that a white privileged male society has set up.

This is just one of the issues that continue to sit inside my brain as I am spending a lot of time thinking about why women have taken so long to rise or why it has been such a slow crescendo.