the volume equation

I’m in the second week of my project of engaging with exclusively works by women for one  year. To be frank, I am feeling alone in the desert.

When it comes to TV, I have so far been able to watch two episodes (you read that right, episodes) of shows I would normally watch. I have watched one episode of 30 Rock which was written by Tina Fey. And I have watched one episode of Parks and Rec which was written by Aisha Muharrar–who was born in 1984.**  Welcome to the new era of women in television. Oh, wait.

Radio is even worse. The choices are basically silence or Taylor Swift. And while I would take Swift eight days a week over Birthday Sex or that teen-pop song in which the chorus is “don’t trust a ho,” infinitely-regressive Swift is unbearable.

So I went to the library to see what I could find. I was overwhelmed by the task of finding music by women—on every cd I found, the songs were written by men. I realized I needed to do some serious background research before I flip futilely through hundreds of cd booklets.

So, I moved to the film section.  The library is unfailingly,  irritatingly p.c., right?  In the American film section I basically found nothing. The French section seemed more manageable, so I rooted through and grabbed all the movies written and/or directed by women.

Ta-da.*

All the films written or directed by women in the library

And here were the films by men.

French films by dudes

Despite the fact that I was standing with all the films by women in one hand, that nagging little voice came into my head saying, “This isn’t that bad.” But it is obviously bad. And what is really bad is that the number of women involved in making a film and the roles they play in the production of that work have an affect of how many female characters are included in the movie and, presumably, whether they are  portrayed as characters who exist beyond the standard, walking blow-up-doll.

According to Women Make Movies: Women working behind the scenes influenced the number of on-screen women. When a program had no female creators, females accounted for 40% of all characters. However, when a program employed at least one woman creator, females comprised 45% of all characters. -Boxed In: Women On Screen and Behind the Scenes in the 2003-04 Prime-time Season, by Martha Lauzen

But what worries me/creeps me out even more is the idea of men writing or rewriting works that are supposed to be about the female experience. Here is what Latoya of Racialicious (writing in Jezebel) says about Tyler Perry (yes, Tyler Perry) adapting For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf, which I first read while teaching in the Bronx.

Directing? Fine.

Producing? Cool.

But writing and adapting it? From someone who writes flat, two-dimensional woman characters in all of his work? Even under the best of circumstances, I would be skeptical of a black man tackling a project like this. To bring Shange’s vision to light would take an understanding of why this work of art is so deeply intertwined with black women’s articulation of their own struggles under racist, patriarchal oppression – something that unfortunately, many still deny to this day. Black women’s voices are often lost in discussions of race (because all the blacks are men) and discussions of gender (because all women are white) and Ntozake Shange was beyond brave to put down all of these ideas and present them for public consumption even in the face of heavy criticism from black men when the play was released.

I use the word ‘creepy’ because young women are watching these movies and thinking that this is an authentic vision of female experience when in reality it is dude upon dude upon trying to impart a  super-polarized idea of gender so that they can sell them stuff now and in the future. Furthermore, I think that these movies made by men about women contribute to an inaccurate portrayal of successful women on TV and in films. It seems as though every single woman is utterly successful (in films since 9/11, the main character starts from a place of success and then realizes that she is either out of her depth of unhappy and so she has to abandon her position in order to fulfill some kind of weird, biological destiny). In reality, there are not that many women in boardrooms or at the head of magazines at all. Joann Lipman mentions this in her ill-written but accurate article in the Times last week.

I’m off to watch my handful of movies…

**30% of the episodes of Parks and Rec are written by women. 17% of the episodes of The Office are written by women. 6.8% of The Simpsons episodes are written by women. Welcome to the new era of women in television.

*There was one movie I didn’t have the stack when I took this picture. It’s The Iceberg by Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon.