Saturday, February 13, 2016

Sexism in Hollywood


According to the article by “WIRED” on “The ‘Jane Test,’ a New Way to Tell if Your Scripts Are Sexist”, talks about sexism in Hollywood. Sexism is known as having a prejudice or stereotyping women. According to the Guardian, lead characters played women has leaped 10% in the year of 2015. What most people don’t understand is that sexism takes place before the actor is even on the screen. Sexism usually starts with the description of the character in the script. The script-reader Ross Putman created femscriptintros on twitter to talk about this uprising problem in Hollywood. The purpose of this twitter is to pull out these female characters in these screenplays that represents everything that are superficial about these characters. Gary Whitta, who is the writer for Star Wars: Rogue One questioned his writing skills about the matter of sexism in his screenplays. He felt that his past writing of the movie Book of Eli and After Earth were examples of sexism in Hollywood. Sexism can happen very easily when writing a screenplay because we associate a description of a female lead through superficial traits of beauty. But to go further into this problem in Hollywood it has come to the point where a film only gets made because of the attached star to the role. Slowly writers are starting to understand that this is a problem in Hollywood that needs to be fixed. If sexism continues to grow in Hollywood, then we will get too comfortable with a social image of woman should be in a role of a script. If we want sexism to stop in Hollywood we have to get rid of the idea of what we think a woman should be. We have to change the idea of what hasn’t been done before for a woman in a script.