Bibliography - Books

Critical Investigation = Are females in teen movies always seen as bimbos and objects? Why might this be?

Thompson, Denise, 2001, Radical Feminism Today, Denise Thompson. Page 36

"Pleasure and desire 'enable' the continuation of the social conditions of male supremacy"
This quote illustrates that pleasure and desire is an asset for a women as it attracts the male supremacy. This links to my critical investigation as it clearly states that women are shown in the media to look pesaurable and desirable for the male audience.

Jill, Nelmes, 1996, An Introduction To Film Studies, London, Jill Nelmes. Page 230 & 231

"Mulvey argues that identifcation is always with male, who is the pivot of the film,its hero, while the female is often seen as threat"
This quotation states that men in films are the back bone of the film, where as the representation of women are the distraction. This will inncorparate in my investigation as it describes the women representation of being a threat, and then I can gather texts where they have been threats and find out how they were a threat;sexual objects.

"Voyeurism and the desire to see the erotic and the forbidden, yet the desire is male - centred"
This quotation signifies that the desire for voyeurism and the erotic are male centred; a dominant male audience. This will link to my investigation as it is quoting that a male centred audience is again, being drawn in by the erotic representation of females.

"Mulvey argues that women has two roles in films: erotic object for the characters in the story and erotic object for the spectalor"
This quotation is a quote which Mulvey argued, stating that the representation of females are sexual objects either in the character of the film or for the audience. This will embody with my investigation as

"The exuasion of women as object, as provider of voyeuristic plesure will then free her from the narrow limits she has been allocated in cinema"

"Audience gains voyeuristic pleasure from watching a film"

Lehman and Luhr, Peter and Willam, 2003, Thinking About Media, Peter Lehman and Willam Luhr. Page 265

"Men and women are not represented equally in films"

"The sexual women is usually represented as dangerous to herself and /or men"

"Women are frequently represented is movies as being good, dutiful mothers, and wives or independant sexual beings"

"Polarization of women is often referred to as the mother/whore dichotomy, which implies that if women are not traditional mother figures, safely under the protection of a man, they are whores in spirit"

Graham and Probert, Andrew and David, 2008, Advanced Media Studies Oxfordshire: Phillip Allan

"Women account for a sizeble proportion of cinema audiences"

Abrams and Bell and Udris, Nathan and Ian and Jan, 2001, Film Studying, New York: Nathan Abrams, Ian Bell and Jan Udris

"Female stars are constructed to appeal to male desire"

MACDOLNALD, Myra, 1995, Representing women, Myths of femininty in the popular media, London: Edward Arnold.

"Visually stunning women threters to achieve castration anxiety in the male veiwer" Page 27

"Female characters in the screen tend to be filmed in a way that emphasizes their 'to-be-looked-at-ress', and point of veiw shots within the frame are pre dominantly from a male perspective"

Page 27

"Women are the object of a dominant male gaze" Page 27

3 Article from The Guardian

Lost youth: Turning young girls into sex symbols
Last Halloween, a five-year-old girl showed up at my doorstep wearing a tube top, miniskirt, platform shoes and eye shadow. The outfit projected a rather tawdry sexuality. "I'm a Bratz!" the tot piped up proudly, a look-alike doll clutched in her chubby fist. I had a dizzying flashback to an image of a child prostitute I had seen in Cambodia, in a disturbingly similar outfit.
I was startled, but perhaps I should not have been. In recent years, the sexy little girl has become insistently present in the media – from 15-year-old Miley Cyrus photographed draped in a sheet for Vanity Fair to websites "counting down" to the day that child stars, such as Emma Watson, reach the age of consent. And, of course, there was Britney Spears, aged 16, prancing around in school uniform and pigtails in her first music video. Their allure is that of "Lolita" – very young and very provocative.
Lolita has become shorthand for a prematurely sexual girl – one who, by legal definition, is outlawed from sexual activity. The Lolitas of our time are defined as deliberate sexual provocateurs, luring adults into wickedness and transgressing moral and legal codes. But the original Lolita – the 12-year-old protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's novel – was rather different; a powerless victim of her predatory stepfather.
Like many pre-adolescent girls, she is sexually curious, but has no control over the abusive relationship. Yet it is as though the very fact of her sexuality has made her into a fantasy, rather than the novel's sexually abused and tragic figure. She is eagerly invoked in the media as a sign of how licentious little girls can be. "Bring back school uniforms for little Lolitas!" demands the Daily Telegraph in an article condemning contemporary sexy schoolgirl fashions, while Tokyo's Daily Yomiuri refers to "the Lolita-like sex appeal" of preteen Japanese anime characters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/18/lost-youth-young-girls

Observer survey reveals gender barrier stopping women reaching the top
The male stranglehold on power in the upper echelons of British business is laid bare today in new research commissioned by the Observer. Women occupy just 34 of the 970 executive director positions at companies in the FTSE 350 index, according to a survey by the Co-operative Asset Management.
When it comes to non-executive director posts – which do not involve any management power – woman fare slightly better, but still occupy only 204 of the 1,772 jobs available.
In the most senior positions of all, women's representation is stuck in the single digits. Leaders such as Baroness Sarah Hogg, chair of venture capitalist 3i, and Dame Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of media group Pearson, remain in a tiny minority.
Only four chairmanships are held by women, equivalent to 1.3% of the total, and just nine women serve as chief executives, or 3%.
No fewer than 132 of the companies surveyed, including Barclays Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland, are men-only zones, without a single woman at board level.
Overall, female representation stands at just 8.8%, taking both non-executive and executive directorships into account. This feeble showing is despite the fact that more than nine out of 10 companies in the survey claim to have an equal opportunities policy.
Harriet Harman, Leader of the House of Commons and minister for women and equalities, this weekend asked for the full background to the research in order to consider its findings with the Department for Business.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/23/women-business-harriet-harman-equality

Just dont call them chick flicks
John Ford once said that no woman could be a good film director because she couldn't throw a straight left to the jaw. A woman, Ford implied, could never get an unruly crew to stick to a schedule and a budget. It's possible that the film industry still thinks the way he did, for half a century later only 7% of directors are female.
Many of these women must have screened their work at Edinburgh this year. In a burst of what could be called disproportional representation, 12.5% of the features on show here were by women directors. Edinburgh has a history of such hospitality: in 1972, it included a groundbreaking women's section. It must also have helped that the festival's new director is female, though Hannah McGill insists she actively tried "to not know anything biographical about the director" when viewing films. Still, with the odds stacked against them, it seems right to pay attention to women film-makers, and the Edinburgh film festival provided a good opportunity to assess the current state of women's film.
Of the women directors on show this year, Julie Delpy's work as an actress gives her the highest profile. Delpy has not only written and directed the acerbic comedy Two Days in Paris, but also stars in it, as a highly strung photographer named Marion, bringing her American boyfriend home to Paris for the first time. Delpy says she knew that she'd have more chance of getting a solo project funded if she didn't stray too far from the template set by Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, in which she delivered charming performances opposite Ethan Hawke.
If Linklater's lovebirds had stayed together for a couple of years, moved to New York, developed a bewildering range of neuroses and returned for a European vacation, they might resemble the central couple in Two Days in Paris. Delpy gleefully describes her film as a "horror film for macho guys" - referring to Marion's ingenious way of humiliating the male member: she loves to take pictures of naked men with helium balloons tied to their penises. And Marion launches more than one hilarious diatribe against the male ego. Though Delpy shies away from the label, her father told her: "I am so proud of you. You made a true feminist movie."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/aug/31/edinburghfilmfestival2007.festivals

3 Articles from The Independant

Women too sensitive to succeed as film directors, says campion
She is the only woman to have won the prized Palme d'Or in the 62-year history of the Cannes Film Festival and is among a tiny handful of the world's best directors to have been recognised twice there.
Jane Campion yesterday sounded a rallying call for other women to "put on their coats of armour" and take on the male-dominated world of movie-directing.
Campion has declared herself a feminist in previous interviews and has bemoaned the lack of female directors. She is now suggesting it is time for women to toughen themselves up.
Women tend to find criticism hard to bear, said Campion, whose latest film, Bright Star, is in the running for the Palme D'Or at Cannes.
"I think women grow up without a lot of harsh criticism, they are treated more sensitively and it's quite hard when you first enter the world of film-making," she said yesterday. "But women must put on their coats of armour and get going."
"I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population and gave birth to the whole world. Without them, the rest are not getting to know the whole story."
The director, who once said "tragedy makes you grow up", admitted film studios still had a "distrust" of women's abilities. Describing the studio system as sexist, she said one of the reasons for there being a relatively large army of female film-makers in her native New Zealand was that the country did not have a thriving studio tradition.
"I think the studio system is kind of an old boys' system," she said. "It's difficult for them to trust women to be capable. I have been very, very lucky because some of our cinema is state-sponsored so they have to be fair to both men and women," she said.
Campion, 55, is one of three female film-makers in this year's competition, whose jury president is Isabelle Huppert, only the fourth woman in the history of the festival to take this role.
Yet Campion has been the first to speak up about the difference between the sexes at the festival. Only days ago Huppert said "cinema is universal" and with a shrug of the shoulders, added that she was just "happy" to be one of only four female judges since the festival was founded.
While she has seen success at Cannes, no female director has ever won an Oscar and only three have ever been nominated, including Campion with The Piano.
Campion first came to Cannes in 1986, when her Peel won the Palme d'Or for short films. Then, in 1993, Campion jointly won the Golden Palm for The Piano.
Bright Star is her first feature film in six years and it dramatises the intense love affair between the Romantic poet John Keats and his fiery neighbour in north London, Fanny Brawne.
The British actor Ben Whishaw is cast as the poet, who died at the age of 25. Campion told the story through Fanny's eyes, she said, because was drawn to her character after reading Andrew Motion's biography of Keats.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/women-too-sensitive-to-succeed-as-film-directors-says-campion-1685713.html

Is Antichrist anti women?
It has a wild, witchy woman, it has self-inflicted female genital mutilation, it even has an official "misogyny researcher" listed in the closing credits. Yes indeed: that old master-provocateur Lars von Trier has done it again with Antichrist, currently being described as one of the most vicious movies ever made. It was crowned at this year's Cannes Film Festival with an "anti-prize" for being "the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world". British audiences can now make up their own minds, with the film released here this weekend. The Cannes jury, which bestowed the award, accused Von Trier of suggesting that "woman should be burnt at the stake so that man can finally stand up."
The director certainly has well-known form when it comes to treating females harshly, both in his fictional creations and the actresses who have played them. Björk and Nicole Kidman – who worked with him on Dancer in the Dark and Dogville respectively – described their collaboration as a gruelling experience. But Von Trier is fully capable of grinding his male characters and actors through the mill with equal relish (remember the indignities visited on Jorgen Leth in the The Five Obstructions, for instance?) And, whatever his mysterious private psychosexual motives, it can't be denied that he creates compelling parts for women.
Nobody who has seen Antichrist could argue that Charlotte Gainsbourg's character – a woman who goes violently mad out of grief and guilt after her small son dies in an accident – is not immeasurably more interesting than her husband, a smug, misguided psychotherapist, played by Willem Dafoe. As Von Trier says in the film's production notes, "My male protagonists are basically idiots who don't understand shit."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/is-antichrist-antiwomen-1755616.html

Our sexual obsession damages boys as well as girls
It's official: sexualisation harms girls. Of course it does. It harms all of us. It doesn't just make girls ill, it harms boys too, teaching them to be sexually violent.
The American Psychological Association's findings - that the portrayal of girls and young women as sex objects harms girls' mental and physical health - should be addressed at the root cause: the media. Powerful and profit driven, they are left to self-regulate with their own voluntary codes. Not only is this not working, it's harming society. The Government needs to introduce responsible media regulation, in which social responsibility and harm are not compromised for free speech. Only then will we see diverse representations of females in positive roles.
As a society, we should be extremely worried. The saturation of sexualised images of females is leading to body hatred, eating disorders, low self-esteem, depression, high rates of teen pregnancy and unhealthy sexual development in our girl children. It also leads to impaired cognitive performance. In short, if we tell girls that looking "hot" is the only way to be validated, rather than encouraging them to be active players in the world, they underperform at everything else.
But the consequences of sexualising girls are far more devastating than this. Rape is at crisis levels, and one in three women will be a victim of stalking, sexual harassment or sexual violence in their lifetime.
But who are the mysterious perpetrators of these crimes? Much of the media, the justice system and one-third of the public seem to think alcohol is raping girls. That by getting drunk, dressing sexy and flirting, girls and women are responsible for the horrific violence committed against them.
Only 8 per cent of rapes are stranger rapes. It is ordinary boys and men who are committing these sexually violent crimes against girls and women. It is appalling that when another rape or sexually violent crime is reported on the news - so ubiquitous it is unremarkable - it is never followed by a report asking: "Why are boys and men sexually abusing and raping girls and women? Where do they learn to film this abuse on their mobiles? Where do boys and men learn that having power over women and being violent is an acceptable way to be a man?" Instead, the onus is on girls and women to curb their behaviour and lives.
The sexualisation of girls and the normalisation of the sex and porn industries have made it increasingly acceptable and "fun" for women to be viewed as sex objects, and for men to view women as sexual commodities. To speak out against this trend is framed as "anti-fun" and "anti-sex". The pressure group Object has documented how men's "lifestyle" magazines and lad mags do not merely objectify women, they trivialise trafficking, sex tourism and prostitution. The number of young British men using prostitutes has doubled in a decade to one in 10 in 2000.
The charity the Lilith project has found that the increasingly mainstream pole- and lap-dancing and porn industries are careful to hide their links with prostitution, trafficking and sexual violence. A five-year-old boy can buy a lad mag and learn that women are only sex objects and he has entitlements to their bodies. If he logs on to Zoo magazine's website, he can watch videos of girls stripping and lap-dancing, one set up as if the woman is being stalked and secretly filmed in her bedroom while she strips, another of a "ridiculously hot" girl being so frightened, she is screaming and crying uncontrollably in a ball. This is not just about sexualisation. Sexual harassment is being eroticised.
The sexualisation of girls exploits girls and boys. All children and young people are under immense pressure to accept it. Boys who are not enthusiastic about it, or speak out against it, run the risk of being ignored or ridiculed, of being labelled "gay", "unmanly", or not liking sex. Boys and young men are under pressure to act out masculinity in which power and control over women, and men, is normal. In which violence is normal.
The absence of positive role models in boys' immediate lives is showing. If the adult men around them do not challenge sexism and traditional masculine behaviours, boys won't either. And with absent fathers, boys are left with celebrities and sports heroes to look up to. Music videos largely follow a template of an individual man possessing a group of sexualised women, gangsta rappers promote sexist and violent notions of masculinity, many young footballers and other sportsmen behave like playboys, enjoy group sex, get away with rape and keep their "hero" status.
Damian Carnell who works to prevent anti-gender violence, says: "From boyhood, men read into the messages that we see around us, from men's institutionalised superiority over women, and privileges of being male, to negative stereotypes of girls and women. It's no wonder that 35 per cent of boys aged 11-16 believe it is justified to abuse women."
The sexualisation of girls is not just shattering the lives of girls and women, it is preventing boys and young men from relating to girls and women as complex human beings with so much to offer them. It is preventing boys from forming healthy friendships and working relationships with girls and women. Instead, it is nurturing potentially violent abusers, rapists and johns. Ultimately, it means boys are not free to be themselves, to know their own humanity.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/rachel-bell-our-sexual-obsession-damages-boys-as-well-as-girls-437307.html

Ageism Debate

It will come as a surprise to few but a delight to many that Selina Scott is suing Five over ageism in its refusal to hire her for a maternity cover role and choice of younger presenters instead. It is a delight not because Five is worse than anyone else in this respect, but because it stokes a debate which urgently needs to be taken more seriously. Casual sexism, ageism and racism are the collective dirty secret of the vast majority of media institutions, and they represent as much of an industrial challenge as they do a moral one.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission's Report on Sex and Power, published last week, drew a depressing picture for women in the workplace. In general the progression of women at the highest level in the workplace is pitiful and the media are no exception: only 13.6% of national newspaper editors (including the Herald and Western Mail) are women; only 10% of media FTSE's 350 companies have women at the helm; and at the BBC, which has often been held as an exemplar of diversity, women make up less than 30% of most senior management positions. It puts into context Jeremy Paxman's deranged rant about the white male in television. Ethnic minority representation is even worse.

A couple of weeks ago Pat Younge, former BBC head of sports programmes and planning who left to work for Discovery in the US, caused a stir at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV Festival by saying that diversity targets should be like financial targets - you don't hit them, you get fired. I have to say that as board champion for diversity at Guardian News and Media I would currently be firing myself and most of the board for some missed targets. But Younge is right - because diversity targets are not just a feelgood add-on, they are vital to the health of any media business. The temptation to hire in one's own image for most managers is as irresistible as it is subliminal - which is why there are a lot of opinionated women working in digital management at the Guardian, and why we all need targets to remind us to look beyond the mirror.

On screen, any number of unconventional-looking ageing blokes (Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles, Alan Sugar, Adrian Chiles, Jeremy Paxman, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan) are paid at a top rate for the talent they possess beyond their appearance. For women it is an altogether different story - appearance and age are clearly factors in choosing female presenters in a way that they aren't for men.

The media should be deeply concerned about this un-diversity - not because it represents moral turpitude on our part, but because it represents bloody awful business sense. What is happening to the UK population at the moment? It is ethnically diversifying, and it is ageing. It is also the case that it is, as of the 2001 Census, marginally more female than it is male. And we live longer - so older women, and non-white potential audiences are on the rise. In London, the major urban conurbation and key market for so many media brands, the population is around 37% ethnically diverse, yet this is nowhere near reflected in the management structures of media companies. Or indeed in their on-screen or in-paper representation.

How though, can you hope to address audiences for which you have no instinctive feel, and towards which you show casual discrimination? We are all in danger of becoming irrelevant to the changing demographics of our target audience at a time when holding any kind of audience is key to survival. If white men are so good at solving business problems - and given that they represent well over 80% of FTSE 100 directors we can speculate that this is a skill they must possess in measure - then I'm surprised they haven't grasped this one already.