"a heroine, who is an 'I'"

     Reading Betty Friedan's classic second-wave feminist work, The Feminine Mystique, has been oddly like déjà vu:  streams of the past and present converge as I read.  This experience was especially apparent during Friedan's discussion of popular culture heroines.  She compares the "spirited career girl" in women's magazine stories of the 1930s to the “housewife-mother” of the 1950s, pointing out that the career girls were characters created by women writers and editors whereas the housewife-mothers were “the products of men’s minds.”

     Fifty years later, we like to think that our media is much more progressive.  However, what struck me about Freidan’s analysis of the 1950s housewife-mother archetype was its similarity to my own analysis of media today.  How many current, popular, critically-acclaimed movies, television shows, and novels have what Friedan calls “a heroine, who is an ‘I’ in pursuit of some human goal or dream”?

     Distressingly few.

     One measure of a woman’s centrality to a plotline is the Bechdel Test.  In order to pass the Bechdel Test, and thus have a woman central to the plot, the film must:

1.   Have at least two named female characters
2. Who speak to each other
3. About something that isn’t a man.

On the International Movie Database’s list of the top 250 movies, only 42 pass the Bechdel Test, and there has been little-to-no improvement over time (as can be seen in the graph).  This year (2013, mind you) of the 9 Academy Award nominated films for Best Picture 3 pass the Bechdel test, 3 fail, and 3 are dubious.   The fact is that men still dominate Hollywood, in terms of producing, directing, and even acting.  Films by and about women are  few and under-recognized.  Ultimately, media is still overwhelmingly "the product of men's minds."  Even Beyoncé declared in an interview with GQ:

You know, equality is a myth, and for some reason, everyone accepts the fact

that women don’t make as much money as men do. I don’t understand that ...

let’s face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the

power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.

     Certainly people are beginning to tackle the issue of gender inequality in the media.  The MissRepresentation documentary and corresponding movement are a great start to addressing the issue, but how many people will really be able (and decide to) see the film?  Why is it taking so long to make substantial progress? How can we move past the limitations that our foremothers of the 1950s and 60s endured?

What will it take for women to be “I”s, the heroines of their own stories?