Democrats like to pretend they are the “party of women” while their policies and politicians undermine the claim, argues commentator Katie Pavlich in her new book, “Assault and Flattery.” In this excerpt, Pavlich takes aim at Hollywood, saying that its films and attitudes does more to promote misogyny than any Republican official.
Do you know Samantha Geimer? You should, despite the efforts of the powers-that-be in the $30-billion-a-year film industry. On March 10, 1977, at Jack Nicholson’s house on the tony Mulholland Drive, she became one of liberal Hollywood’s many victims in its war on women.
An encounter one afternoon with renowned film director Roman Polanski would forever scar the 13-year-old Geimer. She arrived to take some modeling pictures, when, according to court records, he plied her with champagne and Quaaludes.
“Toward the end it got a little scary,” she said, “and I realized he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn’t quite know how to get myself out of there.”
Years later, she recalled her discomfort after Polanski asked her to lie down on a bed. “I said, ‘No, no. I don’t want to go in there. No, I don’t want to do this. No!’ . . . We were alone and I didn’t know what else would happen if I made a scene. So I was just scared, and after giving some resistance, I figured well, I guess I’ll get to come home after this.”
Like a true gentlemen, while Polanski was raping her, he asked Geimer if she was on birth control.
Polanski fled to Europe rather than face jail. But Hollywood protected him and turned him into the victim. Petitions for him were launched by major Hollywood names like Martin Scorsese and accused child rapist Woody Allen. In 1979, he was nominated for an Oscar, and in 2002, he won the Academy Award for best director, which he could not accept in person to avoid arrest.
In short, because Polanski (like Woody Allen) was a notorious liberal — his 2010 film, “The Ghost Writer,” depicted a British prime minister, loosely based on Tony Blair, as a tool of a bizarre conspiracy orchestrated by a loosely fictionalized Bush administration and the ever-evil Halliburton — he is allowed to rape anyone he wants.
But then, why should Hollywood treat its own any different than the other alleged rapists, deadbeat dads, and sexual abusers they’ve given millions to — from the Kennedys to John Edwards to Bill Clinton.
‘Girls’ Power
To hear Hollywood tell it, the biggest threat to women today is conservatives. But which is the more pernicious? A party that takes political stands that many women agree with — or an industry that absolves rapists and peddles sexism?
“Women are sex objects. First and foremost in Hollywood, and for men, they’re sex objects, that’s just the way it is,” actress Sam Sorbo, a longtime model and television actress (Serena on “Hercules”) tells me.
This view comes from a misogynistic view of women as tramps that is all around Hollywood. It’s not just the slow-motion shots of women’s backsides in a Michael Bay film, or the porn pretending to be art in movies such as “Blue is the Warmest Color.” It extends to how movies get made — and who makes them.
“Sexism is real and it persists in film and television. I’ve seen female directors openly undermined by male cinematographers in front of the entire crew. I’ve known female TV writers who’ve been fired for getting pregnant but were afraid to fight back lest they be blackballed,” screenwriter, TV producer, and mom Liz Garcia wrote in Forbes. “Female show runners [are] undermined by their agents in favor of male clients, even by the male writers they’ve hired. It goes on and on. It can be shockingly obvious. It goes unchecked. And honestly, to review all the examples makes me want to give up. And I can’t.”
Even shows about women slap them in the face. The first episode of “Girls,” the Emmy-winning HBO series, features a hero, Lena Dunham’s Hannah, who is aimless, idiotic and having meaningless sex. Her erstwhile boyfriend shuts her up by telling her “let’s play the quiet game” during sex. This is empowerment?
When Hannah gets a full-time job, her male boss, who is just a “touchy kind of guy” who evokes San Diego mayor Bob Filner, sexually molests her. When she asks female colleagues what she should do about it, their response is, “You’ll get used to it.” Later, Hannah offers to sleep with her boss in order to get ahead in his company.
The second season of the show is equally revolting. It shows just as many pornographic sex scenes of Dunham and other female characters, portraying all young women as sex-crazed, unemployed, desperate losers — in other words, ideal Democratic base voters.
“Girls” is “Sex and the City” on steroids for a younger generation. It’s even more pernicious, though, portraying women straight out of college as hopeless, broke, skill-less, nymphomaniac idiots. Say what you will about Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw and the other main stars of the show — they at least had jobs or were financially independent. In “Girls,” there’s a pervasive entitlement mentality that somehow, something is owed to young women who “just want to be who they are” in the most expensive city in the country.
Failing the test
A ratings system known as the Bechdel test takes a look at how women are portrayed in film. In order to pass the test, a film must accomplish three things:
1. It has to have at least two named women in it;
2. Those two named women must talk to each other and;
3. Those two named women must talk to each other about something other than a man.
A majority of major Hollywood films fail the Bechdel test. Most portray women as obsessed with men and their appearance. The not-so-subtle message is that women live frivolous lives outside of their pursuit of sexual satisfaction. “The entire ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, all ‘Star Wars’ movies, ‘The Social Network,’ ‘Pulp Fiction,’ and all but one of the ‘Harry Potter’ movies fail this test,” Swedish art-house movie theater director Ellen Tejle told the Guardian in 2013.
When the Bechdel test was applied to major 2013 films in the United States, the majority of them failed. Interestingly, “Iron Man 3” and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” passed. Both are movies with arguably conservative messages. In “Iron Man 3,” the hero battles terrorism and a villain with a more than passing resemblance to Osama bin Laden. “The Hunger Games” series is an obvious allegory about the perils of big government and brutal tyranny.
Bechdel isn’t the only test that shows films portray women as desperate for male attention. Oxford Fellow Dr. Diane Purkiss has been pointing out for years that Hollywood increasingly portrays women as obsessed with men and their own physical appearance.
“This is the End” failed the Bechdel test.
“We really have reached a nadir in the way women are portrayed on screen. That is, I hope it is a nadir and doesn’t sink further,” Purkiss said. “Now, the only way for a woman to have a complex character on screen is to be depressing, tormented, and self-sacrificing.”
A 2011 study by Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, showed women are grossly underrepresented (although slowly increasing in representation) on the silver screen.
“In 2011, females remained dramatically under-represented as characters in film when compared with their representation of the US population,” Lauzen wrote about her findings. “Last year, females accounted for 33% of all characters in the top 100 domestic grossing films. This represents an increase of 5 percentage points since 2002 when females comprised 28% of characters.”
Even as the number of female characters has increased, “The percentage of female protagonists has declined. In 2002, female characters accounted for 16% of protagonists. In 2011, females comprised only 11% of protagonists.”
“The Wolf of Wall Street” failed the Bechdel test.
Lauzen also found female characters are significantly younger than their male counterparts in movies and are less likely to be portrayed as leaders. The majority of female characters are in their twenties and thirties, whereas the majority of male characters are in their thirties and forties. These numbers haven’t changed since 2002.
“Overall, male characters account for 86% and females 14% of leaders. Broken down by type of leader, males comprise 93% of political and government leaders, 92% of religious leaders, 83% of business leaders, 73% of social leaders, and 70% of scientific and intellectual leaders.”
Across five years (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012), 500 top-grossing films at the US box office, and over 21,000 speaking characters, a new study by USC Annenberg found that females represented less than one-third (28.4%) of all speaking characters in 2012 films. When they are on screen, 31% of women in 2012 were shown with at least some exposed skin, and 31.6% were depicted wearing sexually revealing clothing.
“When Harry Met Sally” failed the Bechdel test.
Even worse? “There has been no meaningful change in the prevalence of women on screen across the five years studied. In fact, 2012 features the lowest percentage of females in the five years covered in this report,” said Communication Professor Stacy L. Smith, the principal investigator. “The last few years have seen a wealth of great advocacy for more women on screen.
Unfortunately, that investment has not yet paid off with an increase in female characters or a decrease in their hypersexualization.”
The authors also examined how the presentation of women varied by the age of the character. “The findings are as provocative as the outfits, especially when teenage female characters are considered,” Smith said.
Over half of female teen characters (56.6%) were shown in sexy attire in 2012, compared with 39.9% of women between the ages of 21 and 39. 2012 capped off a three-year increase in the hypersexualization of teen girls, while for other age groups the numbers do not show the same hike.
Only one way to think
Objectify women, you’re given a raise. Confess to a string of affairs with underlings, as David Letterman did, and you’re praised — as long as you keep mocking Republicans.
But when Maria Conchita Alonso, Melissa Joan Hart, Stacey Dash and Patricia Heaton openly supported conservatives, they were attacked for it.
The former star of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” Hart tweeted in 2012 that she was voting for Mitt Romney. In response, she was called, in her words, “every name in the book.” Haters said they hoped she would die and that they hoped her children are gay, “which was like somehow supposed to be some sort of punishment.” She added that the “hate was really unbelievable.”
When “Clueless” actress Stacey Dash expressed her support for Romney in 2012, after voting for Obama in 2008, she was told to go “kill herself ” and accused of “betraying her race.”
After all, being Republican — and a woman — is a sin Hollywood doesn’t forgive.
Copyright © 2014 by Katie Pavlich. From the book “Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War On Women” by Katie Pavlich, out this week by Threshold Editions, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.