Presented without comment.
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Alright, one comment! I get what they’re doing here, but I think that the size of the chart disproves the point. Turns out: there is a great variety of female characters. In other words, a similarly sized chart could be constructed for male characters, too. Not that I’m about to do it.
Still, fun to look through.
[Via Overthinkingit]
- Top 10 Disgusting Halloween Masks
If by “great variety” you mean “great variety of second fiddles.”
A vast number of films have been made with male characters that fulfill all the criteria on the chart for strong characters. It’s easy to think of one off the top of your head. Anyone can do it. If your “similarly sized chart” was made, it would be considerably larger than this one, probably first divided into “alpha” and “beta males” and then subdivided into such sections as everyman, unstoppable warrior, misunderstood genius, antihero, superhero, idealist, underdog, criminal mastermind, wrongly accused, lothario, enforcer, etc., which could themselves be broken off into multiple subcategories. Men are shown in a wider array of roles than any other social group.
Women, not so much. There’s a website for the Bechdel test that lists movies that pass their criteria, and it’s very brief… The test is that the film has to have more than one woman in it, they must have a conversation with one another, and the topic of that conversation can’t be a man. In a variant of that test, the women also have to be named characters. It’s sort of a joke, but it’s surprisingly difficult, especially relative to the ease with which one can find a film with a scene in which male characters don’t talk about women.
Almost all the tags here that aren’t obviously negative (such as dead slut, wet blanket, or bitchy fiancee) have something else important in common… And if we lived in a world where women were depicted as real, whole people with varied interests, they would be fine. ‘What’s wrong with being mama bear, a manic pixie dream girl, or an action girlfriend?’ you might ask. What’s wrong is that a HUGE amount of films that have female characters only fill them out as far as it relates to the (male) main character. It’s incredibly boring to see film after film in which women are, in their totality, shown to be the mama, the dream girl, or the girlfriend.
The popularity of the film tropes on this chart obviate the need for a writer to create a fleshed-out female character that is a believable person and behaves like one, as explained in the site’s accompanying essay about strong female characters. It wasn’t made to criticize or say anything one-sided; the creator even posted a list of explanations and caveats before it, including that not all tropes are bad, and that this was intended to aid writers in creating believable characters; that every writer includes stereotypes because they’re a useful shortcut for minor characters, and that a problem only arises when writers single out social groups for stereotyping. I don’t think there’s anything out of line with those statements or the intent of the chart.
See also:
Women are still numerically underrepresented in film and filmmaking: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/24/women-underrepresented-in_n_475128.html
http://www.msmagazine.com/news/uswirestory.asp?ID=10342
120% increase of violence against women in the media during the last decade:
http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reports/womeninperil/study.pdf
Media stereotyping:
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/2003/goodman.html
http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/1/8/9/9/pages18994/p18994-1.php
That’s actually awesome; dead slut, lol.