Newsweek columnist Julia Baird denounced popular cartoons and family films for having too few female characters who are too beautiful and too small-waisted.
October 2, 2010 - 12:17pm
Don't
read Newsweek magazine while drinking a beverage. A spit take is the
obvious first reaction to a column by Julia Baird headlined "The Shame
of Family Films." On the Internet, this article is coded as "Why family
films are so sexist."
Baird's denunciation of Hollywood's fraction of
decent entertainment began: "They have all been smash hits: 'Finding
Nemo,' 'Madagascar,' 'Ice Age,' 'Toy Story.' Fish, penguins, rats,
stuffed animals, talking toys. All good innocent family fun, right?
Sure, except there are few female characters in those films. There are
certainly few doing anything meaningful or heroic - and no, Bo Peep
doesn't count."
So what does feminist bean-counting have to do
with whether a movie is "good innocent family fun"? Did any young girl
come away from "Finding Nemo" feeling like the memory-challenged Ellen
DeGeneres fish character didn't represent female empowerment
effectively? Were they offended by the oppressively archaic stereotype
of Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl during "Toy Story 2"? Families can't
enjoy these films without expecting them to pass some politically
correct quota exam?
The
Newsweek columnist was promoting a new study from Stacy Smith and Marc
Choueiti of the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at
the University of Southern California. They reportedly analyzed 122
family films (rated G, PG, and PG-13), including 50 top-grossing ones,
between 2006 and 2009. She found it "startling" that there is "only one
female character to every three male characters in family movies."
(Well, not exactly - they claim 29.2 percent of characters were
female.)
Worse than that, Baird the Angry Feminist
protested, "The female characters were also more likely than men to be
beautiful." Well, that's scandalously unfair! (Don't think Baird
wouldn't also protest if a certain number of women were ugly beyond
repair.) There's more. One in five female characters were "portrayed
with some exposed skin between the mid-chest and upper thigh regions."
If a conservative tried to suggest "The Little Mermaid" should put on a
shirt, tell me Newsweek wouldn't point fingers and laugh. But that's
what Newsweek's Angry Feminist is suggesting.
Baird
was especially upset that cartoons might exaggerate the female
physique: "One in four women was shown with a waist so small that, the
authors concluded, it left 'little room for a womb or any other
internal organs.' Maybe we could carry them in our purses?" Baird even
claimed "another study" found "women in G-rated films wear the same
amount of skimpy clothing as women in R-rated films."
That just sounds ludicrous. Anyone wanting to
check on Baird's academic assertions would have trouble, since these
two studies she's referring to cannot be found on the Annenberg School
website or anywhere else online. The Annenberg study was commissioned
by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which has been
compiling data on women in film. Davis, the actress who most recently
played the president on ABC, told Newsweek that 17 percent of animators
are female, and women form 17 percent of crowd scenes in family films.
Only 17 percent of narrators are female.
Ridiculous - and funny, too. How nit-pickingly
intricate are these studies to count genders in "crowd scenes"? WHO
CARES? As for only 17 percent of females being narrators, does Davis
find it distasteful if her husband reads a bedtime story?
But Davis isn't done with her feminist footnotes.
She also claims research shows that the more TV a girl watches, the
fewer options she believes she has in life, and the more a boy watches,
the more his views become sexist. A look at the Geena Davis Institute
website shows that her group is marshaling feminist research attacking
on all of these fronts - the dearth of female characters and the dearth
of female animators and directors and so on - with the entire panoply
of TV and movies, not just the family films.
There's nothing wrong with seeking more female
directors, producers or major characters in Hollywood - they're
supposed to be feminist enough to have already imposed "affirmative
action." But for Newsweek to single out family films as somehow
shameful is beyond unfair - especially since none of them are truly
singled out. Tell us how "Finding Nemo" or "Toy Story" are the work of
sexist pigs.
Baird isn't just an Angry Feminist, she's a
hypocrite, too. Last year, her own magazine tried to embarrass Sarah
Palin by putting an old photo of her on the cover in running shorts,
suggesting this Caribou Barbie wasn't ready for prime time. Did Baird
protest? No, she defended the cover since Palin "has been photographed
and filmed more than once in aerobic gear."
Newsweek, heal thyself.
