What if all successful men had been women
Society is very bipolar. One man who didn’t agree with this, was David Bowie. The legendary musician was famous for being androgynous. To the uninitiated: here’s the Genderbread person, a graphic figure to make the concept of gender more tangible.
The male-female duality in reality is much more complex than it seems. Some people might laugh at the illustation above, and call it politically correct. But this is reality. Gender is so much more than sexual orientation, as most people perceive it. You can be heterosexual but still like to dress in a womanly fashion. Just watch some music videos of David Bowie to open up your horizon.
This is why I am a feminist. Gender shouldn’t be a factor in measuring someone’s qualities. Yet throughout history it was a huge advantage to be a man, and even in the 21st century gender inequality has still not completely gone up in smoke.
Gender shouldn’t be a factor in measuring someone’s qualities.
As for myself, I’m pretty conformist. I dress as a man, I fall in love with women, so I’d label myself as a straight cismale. Cisgender means that your gender identity is the same as what society considers appropriate for one’s gender.
Nevertheless, I’m not a typical man. For instance, I’ve never liked cars, nor fighting. Small boys are often obsessed with swords and knives, but this was never a thing for me. As a child I liked to make up stories on my tape deck, which I used just as much to listen to music.
As a man I was — and still am — ashamed of male-dominated human history, in short patriarchy. This is just not right, how the Greek and Romans treated women; how the Catholic Church despised the female sex.
Humans and their predecessors go back millions of years. If we look at the beginning of civilisations, then we see more or less 3000 years of patriarchy. Only in the last century the gender hierarchy was contested by different feminist revolutions, starting with the suffragettes.
The above referenced movie Suffragette was directed by a woman, Sarah Gavron. I hate it that I have to explicitly mention this. The gender of film directors shouldn’t matter. Sadly it does. Or how else do you explain that women have only been nominated five times in the (almost) century-long existence of the Academy Awards? There’s one simple reason for this: the male gaze. Cinema was invented in an era when the emancipation of women hadn’t fully blossomed yet.
Gender imbalance in directing chair
There’s certainly a huge gender imbalance in Hollywood. This is a difficult issue to tackle. One must always look who is the rightful winner in the category ‘Best Director’. In 2018 that should be Paul Thomas Anderson, once again a white man. I haven’t seen Phantom Thread, but I saw all of his other movies and they all rank among my favourite films.
I recently saw Lady Bird, and it’s terrific, and I would be happy if Greta Gerwig won the Oscar for directing this feature film. It’s always difficult to compare different film genres, and a nomination is already a crowning achievement.
You can’t give someone a prize because of their gender, but this is exactly what happened in the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
What if Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick had been women?
What if Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick had been women? Of course these men were incredible at filmmaking, but I just wonder if they would have received the same opportunities, had their gender been different.
I don’t claim to have an answer to these questions. I’m not even a scholar at a university doing research on gender studies. I only try to raise awareness on the disparity between male and female directors.
Nowadays things are moving in the right direction, but imagine being a woman in the heydays of silent cinema, the 1910’s and the roaring twenties. It simply wasn’t possible to get the same chances as men to direct pictures. In this way Hitchcock was very lucky to be a man.
Only in 1977 Lina Wertmüller became the first woman to receive a nomination for best director. The second directing nomination for a woman came in 1994, for Jane Campion. Another ten years later Sofia Coppola was the third woman to get the honor of inclusion in the Academy nominations for director. In 2010 Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy Award for Best Director, making her the first and to date only woman to win the precious little statue. Now Greta Gerwig is the fifth woman to get the nomination.
One paragraph, that’s all it took to list all the female directors with Academy nominations for Best Director. The same goes for black directors. This year Jordan Peele is the fifth black man to get a directing nomination by the Academy. The other four are John Singleton in 1991, Lee Daniels in 2009, Steve McQueen in 2013 and Barry Jenkins in 2016.
The Academy Awards have always been a celebration of white male hegemony. This is a truth we must acknowledge.
Films are being made all over the world, in America, Europe, Asia, Oceania. Yet being a white male has for a long time given people a dominant position in the film world. The Academy Awards are prestigious and I’m sure in the future things will balance out.
Who knows what’ll happen in the next 100 years of cinema? Maybe critics in 2121 will say, ‘remember when only white men used to win awards for directing pictures. The 20th century was so bizarrely limited.’
