Women and Men in Movies

Alright, let's start with the fact that I know I'm probably going to make a lot of people upset by something in this post, for different people it will be something different, but I'm sure I'll make you upset by the end by something.  Let's also point out that this is going to be somewhat stream of conscience and not an argument over one thing, such as whether there should be women-only cast spinoffs of movies.... though I'm relatively confident that will come up given that I just watched a youtube show with a group of people arguing about it.  I also recognize that this isn't going to be some of my best writing, in part because it's just a rant, and probably not a very good one at that.

First aspect of women and men in movies, though, is going to be "I'm going to see that movie because so-and-so is hot".  For the love of movies, if you're going to see a movie to see a guy or a girl, you should just stay home and rent a porn with a lookalike or get a video with them in it and watch that over and over again instead of spending the $8-12 on a one-off viewing.  To me, movies are exercises in story-telling, first and foremost.  They are not opportunities to watch hot people be hot, they're opportunities to watch hot people perform in a story... I mean... they're opportunities to watch people perform in a story... ok, it helps when you cook with better ingredients and certainly part of visual story-telling is the scenery and, though it sounds shallow, beautiful people make for better scenery most of the time.  That said, I don't go see any movie because of a hot chick (or hot dude for that matter)... I go see it because I think it'll be fun or I think it'll have a good story.  I'm happy that women are going to see Marvel movies, but it saddens me whenever I hear that they're going because the men are hotties.  I know that men do the same thing and that creates 2 problems for me: 1) I'm ashamed for my gender and 2) it takes a lot out of my being annoyed by women who see Thor because Chris Hemsworth is hot topless.

All-women-lead casts.  Alright, the discussion online centered around what franchise should have an all-women-lead spinoff (other than Ghostbusters).  One person picked Mission Impossible, another picked Bridesmaids.  The person that picked Bridesmaids made the argument that she didn't want to see women playing male roles but instead wanted to see women being women and talking about things women talk about.  I'm sorry, there are already movies geared toward women, just as there are movies geared toward men.  There's nothing ground breaking about movies geared toward women with leading women, and it doesn't further the discussion, or the fact that there shouldn't need to be a discussion, of women playing different roles in movies.  There's also no way you can suggest that men in Mission Impossible are playing me, they're playing spies and heroes.  Men in Mission Impossible don't talk about normal man things.  Sure, a comedy movie about women would further the goal a little, but it has to be a movie for men or for both men and women.... not a movie that women bring their husbands/boyfriends to because their husbands/boyfriends brought them to X-Men and it's payback time.  Women in, let's say action movies, can also play different roles within those movies.  They can play stereotypical women roles, they can play stereotypical guy roles, they can play ... whatever.... point is, women and men have a wider range of characters than have historically been portrayed.  We're just starting to see geeky characters in action movies not be insanely wimpish and also not being super-awesome... expand it all and you're breaking barriers and proving that we don't need one-dimensional characters (Ethan Hunt), we need multi-dimensional characters (Loki, Magneto) and we need more of them to be women so that we can get past the whole discussion, then we can let it flow naturally to the point where we don't see the token woman or the token man but instead see true ensemble casts.

In conclusion, we should go to movies for the stories, not how sexy the people in them are and while we shouldn't need to think about whether we should cast strong women characters or whether we have enough women characters, we do for the time being until it becomes natural that there are strong women characters as often as there are strong men characters and the same with supporting roles.