a change afoot
“A shoddy, misogynistic excuse for good television.”
I recently read a post about the TV programme Game of Thrones. It totally interested me because I had had similar feelings attempting to watch that programme. It gets excellent reviews and wins loads of awards so I figured it was worth watching. But something about it was nigglingly wrong. It slowly dawned on me that the female characters were the root of my irritation. They’re secondary, they’re weak (even the ‘strong’ ones) and their primary purpose is to be had sex at.
So, on reading the post, a rant started up in my head about the terrible sexism in broadcasting. There are a lot of programmes and films that have seriously grated on my nerves due to the scarcity and shockingly undeveloped nature of the female characters. I get angry. I get ranty. But then I started trying to list them in my head and didn’t get very far. I turned the TV on and saw adverts for Revenge, Once Upon a Time, True Blood, Grey’s Anatomy, 2 Broke Girls, The Vampire Diaries, Girls, Veep… not all programmes I actually watch but I can see that the main characters are female and, in some sense at least, strong. Okay, obviously not the pinnacle of idealistic feminism like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but then the depictions of men can be pretty crappy too. Bad writing is bad writing, and, in general, I think it’s fair to say that broadcasting is not falling quite so heavily to one side anymore.
In the end, quite unlike me, I have something positive to say. There is clearly a change afoot from the days when Buffy was out there on her own doing it for the girls. How cool is that??
Ha, love the rare positivity in this post – and I agree, bad writing is bad writing, and it can affect individuals of all ethnicities/genders/sexualities.
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Totally, that’s a good point. We tend to only notice the ones that affect us. I’m always irritated by the way women are portrayed but there’s a lack of balance in so many other areas too. Hopefully it’s a bigger change and things are improving all round! *glowing with optimism*
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Ripper Street, which will be on BBC America, is set in slum London in 1876, where women cannot be educated or have careers, and has several strong women overcoming their limitations.
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Thanks, sounds interesting. I’ll look out for it!
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I hear you, television has become quite annoying for me as a form of entertainment. Each year it seems I remove more and more programming from my cable subscription. waiting for the day when you can just pick what you want to watch station by station.
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