Hey wait.. that was MY idea!

 

What I found most intriguing about the readings was the article by Bielby & Bielby, mainly because it gives statistics along with commentary on such an important issue as gender inequality within the media.  In contrast to content analysis that only gives frequencies and numbers, this behind the scenes institutional analysis provides the numbers along with an explanation that makes clear the inequalities apparent for female writers in film.

The domination of men within the film industry is just another example of how our patriarchal society continues its ideologies.  The fact that the presence of women within screenwriting has not significantly changed since 1930 is a sure sign that something needs to be done.  Some big businessmen will defend that women just do better writing for women’s shows and that’s it; women can’t understand men nor can they successfully write thrillers or action genres.  But in reality, men just want to be able to (monetarily) dominate blockbusters rather than hand over that type of power and fortune to a woman.  For example, the director of Twilight, Catherine Hardwicke (who previously wrote the popular film Thirteen) was not asked to come back to direct the sequels for the Twilight saga.  Why, might you ask? Well to me it seems like the “head men” realized that Twilight would be extremely profitable and wanted to take over the saga themselves.  It’s eerily familiar to what Bielby & Bielby pointed out about novels in the early days being considered by men to be an “empty field”, that is, until they slowly started to become lucrative.  Then, out of nowhere, men jumped in to provide a double standard against women stating that women’s productions could not compare to men’s.  After learning this type of domination of women's ideas was happening throughout history, I am interested to find out if this has happened in other realms that we are unaware of.  It seems like men are just trying to steal womens’ good ideas.