prowler wrote:you didn't argue my point, did you.
I... thought I did. Sorry?
prowler wrote:obviously the "real" problem is that, for the 50/50 representation in film school, only (say) 5% women get to be directors. well, there's not much that i as a viewer can do about that.
First, however, one must establish whether or not this is a real problem. For all you know there can be a perfectly legitimate reason why 50% of film school students are women and 5% of film directors are women. I genuinely think that it is probably due to Hollywood being sexist up the ass
which I've even written a blog post about, but do you have any evidence that it isn't simply because women are not as good as men at directing films? Maybe they all drop out of film school by choice. Maybe women have an unnaturally high prevalence of realizing midway through their film studies that they don't want to pursue that path. Don't misunderstand me now, I don't think either scenario is even close to being as likely as the more obvious sexism scenario, but these are all things that you need to consider before deciding to act upon a "problem". If there's no problem, and you try to solve the problem, you're just going to muck things up. The problem needs to be identified first as a problem, then you need to identify the source of it, and then that is what needs to be changed. Changing other things to deal with the problem is misguided in my opinion.
prowler wrote:what i can do is, say, make an effort to see more films made by women than i would if i didn't pay attention to directors at all (which is what most people do). does this involve giving a shot to films i maybe normally wouldn't? sure, why not.
This in itself is not necessarily a problem per se, but it is a sexist position. As I've said before, sexism is not inherently bad all the time. It becomes a problem if films made by women get more exposure because they're made by women than films films made by men do, regardless of quality. The quality of the individual film is all that should ever matter, and applying some sort of socio-political agenda one way or the other to counter discrepancies is bullshit.
Let me give you a tangentially related example from my homeland of Norway:
Here there are many ways in which filmmakers can receive money to make films from the government and other agencies. One such agency, 5 or so years ago, decided to give $5 million to the production of a film called Pax. It was recently released (delayed for a variety of irrelevant reasons), and it bombed. Critics panned it, people hated it, barely anyone went to see it. The point of this story is that the director of the film was a woman, and that the person in charge of the agency at the time has since the film's release gone public with a very detailed description of the events of 5 years ago, telling how the only reason that particular film got those $5 million dollars was because it was one of few applying projects with a female director, and the director had made a film before that wasn't half bad. He went on to say that, had the project been attached to a male director, there was no way the money would have gone in that direction because the script was, apparently, awful - and the final script even more so than the draft he saw at the time. The reason he had chosen a female director was that in the same year, the minister for culture had made it quite plain that if there was not a noticeably higher prevalence of female directors in Norwegian film within a few years, they would begin to enforce hard quotation. Apparently this problem is not Hollywood-centric, and the Government sought to do something about it, pressuring agencies to give money to films with female directors over films with male directors.
A few things worth noting:
1. The number of projects that applied for this "grant" with a female director attached was apparently extremely small. For the most part directors themselves apply for this grant. The idea of "production companies" is not really applicable to Norway to the same extent as it is elsewhere (though it is not completely absent). This quite simply means that that in all likelihood, few women applied. It wasn't that anyone was telling them not to apply for the grant, they simply didn't.
2. This is a clear cut example of how attempting to negate sexism by enforcing sexism in the other direction has clear, negative ramifications. Those $5 million dollars could have gone to a vastly better production. The end result is
worse films, which is why films should always be judged on their merit alone, and the sex of their director not at all.
prowler wrote:and who knows maybe if enough people did this, we'd see a change in the "real" problem too
Yeah, maybe, but I'll first remind you that re: point 1. above you can't be sure whether there is a "problem" or if there are other reasons for the state of affairs you want to correct and re: point 2. above while it may result in more female directors it may also result in great films not being made and subpar films being made, when that would not have been the case had you not tried to apply negative sexism to the issue.
Have I replied to your point now?
Let me just say once more that if you want to seek out films made by women because you're curious as to, say, which contributions to cinema women have offered, or any other such reason, that's perfectly OK. I have no problem with that.
EDIT: Sorry, but I only picked up on this sentence now...
prowler wrote:every step ever taken towards gender equality could be interpreted as sexism against the then-status quo.
This is the single most weird statement I've heard in a long time, and it's just plain wrong in every way. Let me reveal to you a method of approaching gender equality which is absolutely impossible to interpret as sexism against the then status quo:
Don't be sexist.It's that simple. The only way in which it is right to fight sexism, and I believe the only way in which sexism is actually being fought, is by just not being sexist. Write laws that say people can not in a professional context take gender into account when reviewing applicants for a position where gender is irrelevant, for instance. There is no way in which that is a sexist law.
If people stop being sexist there will be gender equality, full stop. That's all it takes. Simply don't be sexist yourself and you're contributing, do the sexism in the opposite direction spiel and you're just contributing to the problem.
