-- Download Women: The Majority, Not a Media Niche as PDF --

I couldn’t really fault you if you felt that only about 22% of humanity were women.

If we based it all on how frequently they are represented in politics and the media, we wouldn’t know they made up a 51-ish% majority.

This is why Cate Blanchett and Geena Davis have some words for us all.

And god[dess] help us if we try to contradict them:

Blanchett won an Oscar the other night. In her remarks she mentioned a truth that many people still don’t understand, offering gratitude regarding her film

“to the audiences who went to see it and perhaps those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences. They are not. Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

Watch her speech here.

In an interview, Geena Davis summarized the issue thusly:

What role does feminism play in closing the gender gap in media representations?

It’s all about feminism. Feminism simply means equal social and political status for men and women. There’s nothing radical about it or about using that word or having that as a goal. We’re simply trying to elevate the status of the female characters to equal. We take up half the space in the world so it would be great to see roughly half of characters be female.

Sharing power and status feels great as feminists, but what it means is not so much that “we” let women have more of it, but that “we” have to take/possess less of it. That means sacrifice, all you/us entitled men!

Are you up for the challenge?

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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