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