REPRESENTATION - Why I'm A Feminist


I'm a big fan of films, especially films that make me feel something. Like love, hope or joy. Even sadness. 
I recently watched a TED Talk by a guy called Colin Stokes. He talked about something that I had never heard of before: the Bechdel test, created by Alison Bechdel. 
The test requires a film (or any piece of media) to pass 3 tests. 
  1. The film must have at least 2 females with talking roles. 
  1. The film must have 2 females talking to each other at some point. 
  1. The conversation of these females must be about something other than men. 
I started applying this test to all films that I watched, thinking “this test is easy, I cant imagine any film today failing”. But film after film that I watched failed this test. 
You may wonder what difference this actually makes, why bother making the test, or discussing it. The reason I believe this matters is representation. 
Representation matters in 2 ways:
  1. Films where women are present, but have no lines, reinforce a culture where women are viewed by men as the backdrop of life. Like wallpaper, they are meant to make things look nice, but not really anything else. In this view women are not taken seriously and are perceived as being unable to contribute anything of value to life. 
  1.  Films that are devoid of female lead roles reinforce a culture where women's stories are not heard, their points of view and experiences have little value and men are the leaders; the movers and shakers. In this view women have very few role models to look up to and it subliminally reinforces to them that they are secondary in life. 
By itself, these claims may seem incidental (i.e. How can a movie have that much effect?). But each incremental aspect of sexism contributes towards a complete worldview, so each incremental aspect of sexism within society must be challenged and rooted out.

 May we be those that amplify the voices of people in society whose own voices are seldom heard. May we be those that look past the superficiality of our worldview and see the harmful parts beneath it. May we be those that root out discrimination in our hearts and in our culture, to create a world that is truly at peace.

 For more on representation and the Bechdel test I highly recommend the TED Talk I mentioned at the beginning, as well as this brilliant vlog by Anita Sarcheesian.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the fact
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in acco
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich comes f
Keep reading