Whenever I start to think that maybe our society is finally becoming less patriarchal and sexist, that perhaps #TimesUp and #MeToo have changed things for the better, somebody points out a popular movie or TV show where the woman gets paid less than the man or has fewer lines than the man. The pay disparity in show business is bad enough, but until now there has been insufficient awareness of the syllable gap.
This blissful ignorance is finally ending, and the men have been put on notice. At the Cannes Film Festival this week, Quentin Tarantino was called to account for his complicity in keeping women silent by putting them in his movies. His enraged, spittle-flecked tirade in response will shock you:
Quentin Tarantino snapped at a female reporter from The New York Times who asked why Margot Robbie wasn’t given more to say or do in his latest film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” https://t.co/xACQXjyBu8 pic.twitter.com/5GraEtaSyw
— Variety (@Variety) May 22, 2019
“Well, I just reject your hypotheses.”
Wow. Hate women much, Quentin? Why do you even cast so many of them in your movies in the first place, if you don’t count the number of lines you give them to make sure they get at least as many as the men? Quantity, not quality. That’s how progress is made. That’s how art is made.
Quentin Tarantino is cancelled, when has he ever done anything to promote strong female characters in film pic.twitter.com/24hxLDL9il
— Some guy tweeted something 🤷🏻♂️ (@jtLOL) May 22, 2019
If you think things are any better on TV, then you’re just another incel neckbeard who probably has a small penis. BBC News:
Female characters in Game of Thrones speak about three times less than male characters in the show, according to new data given to BBC 100 Women…
The data by research group Ceretai suggests that across all eight seasons, male speech amounts to about 75% of all speaking time in the series…
Lisa Hamberg, co-founder of Ceretai, told the BBC that by analysing Game of Thrones, they wanted to make viewers aware of the wider problem of how women are portrayed in the media.
“We are not doing this to make people stop watching, but to make them aware of the fact that it’s an unfair representation of the world”, she says.
Well, maybe not the world. The show depicts a world. It’s got different continents and species and history and stuff. But still.
I mean, obviously women don’t talk a lot on Game of Thrones. It’s fantasy!
This is vital research, but I’m not sure if that count includes the dragons. Are they male or female? When they roar, does that count as a line of dialogue? Do women’s screams of terror and agony as they’re being burned alive by dragons count as dialogue? We need to get some more researchers on this problem.
Women are strong and independent, which is why they’re always victims. In real life, men don’t talk enough, and in fiction, they talk too much. Why do they always have to be such… such… such MEN???
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