I don’t watch shows or films that I know from the outset aren’t feminist. Somewhere along the line I just got fed up with the pervasiveness of scripts and screenplays that reinforce or celebrate male privilege, and I just stopped. (Well, white male privilege, anyway; I made an exception for Sorry to Bother You, for example, and I was very glad I did).
Programs that feature only men, or that relegate women to supporting roles, promote that perspective on life. They reinforce the idea that men do the interesting things, the things we want to know about, to witness….to understand. They reproduce the story that men are worth knowing. The women in the show will probably help us know them. They’ll probably also help the men know themselves. But they’re not the ones doing the interesting stuff. Their lives aren’t the reason to watch.
Here’s a game: if you’ve never done it before, grab a pen and paper, choose a streaming service and scroll through their offerings.
On your paper, write a tally mark for every show or film that:
a) contains only a man’s name in the title, or
b) contains the actual word “man”, or “men”, (or “boy,” or “guy,” – you get the point) in the title, or
c) features only men on the cover, or only men in the foreground, or
d) stars more men than women, or
e) seems primarily about a man’s predicament, issues, crisis, situation, angst, growth, fight, or life.
Now go back through and do the same for women. Count up the tallies for each group.
Count all the films/shows you just scrolled through. Now subtract the number of films/shows that you ignored because they only featured non-binary or other genderqueer characters (yeah…you won’t have to do any math).
Divide the amount of tallies in the first group by the total number of shows/films. Multiply that number by 100. Let’s call that the “man percentage.” Now do the same thing with the second group, the percentage of films/shows on the list that are about women – the “women” percentage.
And that doesn’t take into account anything about the plot, or the messages, or the stereotypes, or whether the film even passes the bare-minimum Bechdel-Wallace test (plenty still don’t), or whether the women end up dead or otherwise punished for being (insert whatever the hell you want to). There are hundreds of films and shows chock-full of women that are misogynist as fuck. We're putting all that aside for now.
Okay, sure, maybe you happened to choose an especially sexist service. Try it with another. (I do find that AppleTV is among the worst.) But it’s not going to change very much.
It takes work to watch only shows and films that have a chance of being feminist. It means saying no to plenty of quality productions and performances, entirely on the grounds that I don’t need to spend my time watching yet another depiction of men living their man-lives while women orbit them. But it also means finding them.
I’m not telling you to boycott films and shows that are really just about men. (I mean… it would certainly help!) But in case you’re keen to watch something different, I'm working on a list of shows and movies that I find satisfactorily, happily, refreshingly feminist; that not only feature women in major, equitable roles and pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, but that are about women as people – as complete, complicated, self-contained human beings who neither orbit nor need men in order to be fully realized as characters. And, of course, that I also think are good: compelling, smart, entertaining, interesting, funny.
In the meantime, in case you're burning out on "man movies," here's a list of actors I've found I can generally rely on to choose feminist scripts. (Thank you all!)
Patricia Arquette
Angela Bassett
Cate Blanchett
Jessica Chastain
Geena Davis
Viola Davis
Tina Fey
Jodie Foster
Greta Gerwig
Sharon Horgan
Queen Latifah
Jennifer Lawrence
Frances McDormand
Lupita Nyong'o
Elliot Page
Amy Poehler
Susan Sarandon
Tilda Swinton
Charlize Theron
Emma Thompson
Lily Tomlin
Sigourney Weaver
Merritt Wever
Oprah Winfrey
Reese Witherspoon
Michelle Yeoh