Feminist, All Too Feminist

On a recent Best of the Left podcast episode, “What are women complaining about?,” I found out about action being taken to address Hollywood's gender bias, which has received a lot of media attention in the past year. What really caught my ear was the stat that the percentage of speaking roles for women in Hollywood movies has only increased by 5% since the 1940s and 50s. And what interested me about that stat was that, as a fan of classical Hollywood movies, I was under the impression that there were now far fewer major roles for women – not a few more. Fans of classical Hollywood movies just think that there were more and better roles for women then because so many of the movies from that era that film buffs still care about have terrific roles for women: canons are not necessarily representative of the norm.

So far, so awesome for women that the ACLU has taken political action to have the industry investigated for gender inequity. In fact I think that every industry where there's perceived discrimination should be subjected to thorough governmental investigation, especially if that industry is as powerful as Hollywood (or Silicon Valley). How else is the public going to know, and how is discrimination by the powerful going to combated except by transparency, public pressure, and public accountability?

However, the segment lost me when an indie director who was asked why it matters that there are so few women in the industry gave a standard leftist response: that we won't see more “authentic portrayals of women" in movies in television until we have more female directors. In the first place, surely what matters about women not being able to make careers in an industry is... women not being able to make careers in an industry.

Second, as a writer and English major I'm disturbed by the implication that only female creators can produce good female characters. Because there are so many more canonical male authors than female ones, almost all of the female characters who mean the most to me were authored by men. The exceptions are the heroines of Jane Austen and George Eliot, but they don't mean more to me than the heroines of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ibsen, or Tennessee Williams. Nor are they noticeably more “authentic”: they are all distinctly literary characters, and as such resemble (and are, no doubt, influenced by) each other more than actual people.

The question of authorship is more complicated in the case of film directors, but assuming the fiction that the director is the “auteur,” all of my favourite female film characters were authored by men. I don't tend to think of it that way, though, because many classical Hollywood actresses have more-or-less-unofficially attained the status of auteurs in their own right, so that I think of a Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck or Jennifer Jones character as being authored by her; or, if she's paired with a remarkable director (or, occasionally, producer) in a remarkable film, co-authored. Sometimes directors and actresses develop ongoing creative relationships in which the collaborative aspect is emphasized: Sternberg and Dietrich, Fellini and Masina, Godard and Karina, Cassavetes and Rowlands, Lynch and Dern. The other part of this is that I've hardly seen any movies by female directors, a fault I hope to remedy some year soon (I have a lot of faults, though, so I can't promise when it will happen), and it so happens that my favourite movie by a female director, Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, contains a couple of my favourite male characters.

Which leads to my objection as a writer to this use of “authenticity”: of course both male and female authors have to be free to create characters of both genders. I don't want to be told what I can write about, and I don't want any other writer to be told that, either – although if they create a representation that's offensive in some way, they should be criticized. If you want to hear me criticize sexist representations, please enjoy my podcast about time travel movies, co-hosted by David Fiore. (Criticizing sexism isn't the purpose of the podcast, but we do spend a lot of time doing it in each episode, especially me, really loudly, with swearing.)

Moreover, if you tell men that they can't write female protagonists, you reinforce the notion that women are utterly alien, which isn't exactly conducive to the feminist project. At its best, imaginative literature and filmmaking about women by men has been about the fluid movement between desire and cross-gender identification; about the affirmation of heteronormativity through desire and its undermining through identification; about sympathy and sadism. To remove cross-gender identification from literature and film would be to remove at least 50% of what interests me about them.

So, based on my responses to this segment, what do you think: am I a feminist, or not a feminist? Please answer in 3-5 paragraphs, giving the reasoning for your position.

I think the answer is that I'm all too feminist, but it will take more than five paragraphs to flesh it out.

Penultimate Post

Although I first promised this post on feminism a long time ago, I've gone back and forth about whether to write it. As I finally sit down to compose it as the penultimate post of this blog, I wonder if I can finally do it without getting too angry or sarcastic – the reason I've abandoned my many previous attempts.

A couple of things have happened to make me less angry. First, my political perspective has vastly broadened this year, which has had the effect of taking my focus off of feminism. When I'm not focused on it, I'm less upset about it. I also realized, quite a long time ago, that a tone of anger is never going to persuade anyone to listen to your criticisms. It didn't work when Camille Paglia did it in the 90s, and it doesn't work when Cathy Young does it now.

In fact, my first criticism of feminism is its resistance to criticism. And that's the final reason my anger about feminism has subsided a little. When I was listening to the Best of the Left episode yesterday, hoping to get myself riled up to write this post, because now the problem was that I was too calm about feminism to write it, I noticed that one of the clips, a collage of reasons to be a feminist, featured a couple of MRA talking points, I realized that feminism has, in fact, been absorbing criticisms from all corners, and not just from other communities that feminists recognize as oppressed, such as Women of Color and the trans community. Does that make me any more hopeful about feminism? We'll see.

Definitions 

First, let's get the context out of the way. What is feminism, and am I a feminist? If feminism is the belief in the equality of women and men, then why yes, I am. I think the majority of people in most countries nowadays would define themselves that way, in fact. (If you want stats, don't look to this post, because I'm not going to provide them for every point. Many critics of feminism have written many stats-laden articles that can be easily found on the internet. I decided it's not worth my time to produce one of those articles, because I'm not getting paid for this and because mountains of stats alone won't persuade anyone of anything. If you find yourself concerned or intrigued by anything in this post, I'd suggest that you do your own internet research, like I did, and, like I did, draw your own conclusions.)

The very fact that this is a popular sentiment – few would define themselves as racist, either – means I have to further define what I mean by “feminist.” So let me be clear that not only do I think men and women are equal, but I also reject traditional gender roles. I have never wanted children and my life is centred around my artistic and intellectual pursuits.

On the other hand, if being a feminist means adopting certain political stances (e.g., on reproductive rights) and/or adhering to at least a few of the theories propagated by the feminist movement (e.g. those theories evoked by terms like “patriarchy,” “objectification,” “rape culture,” and “consent”), you're starting to lose me. If it means feeling righteous anger about street harassment or male “spreading” on public transit, among other popular talking points and memes, you've lost me. If it means believing that women as a global group today are oppressed, I'm not going to agree without heavy qualifications. I'm not even sure that “oppression” is the best lens through which to look at the traditional position of women (it's a lens, and an informative one), and increasingly I think that each instance of oppression, or disenfranchisement, needs to be looked at in its own particular cultural, historical, and political context.

Finally, if being a feminist means thinking that there's a place for a women's movement even in supposedly modern, democratic countries today – then again, yes, I do. But I have given up thinking that feminism will ever be “reformed”: that is, that it will ever purge the elements that I find objectionable and become a collection of ideas and set of priorities that I largely agree with and find positive. Nevertheless, there are of course many people, from lawyers working to improve the legal process for rape victims and ensure access to safe abortions for economically deprived women, to members of civil rights watchdog groups committed to social justice, who do good feminist work with real, important consequences every day.

In summary, then, as soon as you move outside of a definition of “feminist” that means “person who believes in the equality of women and men and rejects traditional gender roles,” feminism, for me, is just another set of ideas to be considered independently and objectively. Some of them are interesting and useful, many of them (even the same ones) are misguided and infuriating; all of them have been carefully considered by me, and none of them are accepted by me without many qualifications. Sometimes, as in the case of reproductive rights, I agree with the feminist position, but not for the reasons most often given by feminists: I don't think that being able to control one's reproductive capacity is in itself essential to equality, because I don't think that opposition to abortion is solely a conspiracy by the patriarchy to keep “control of women's bodies” in their hands. That, like so much feminist poststructuralism, is a melodramatic cartoon that obfuscates more than it illuminates. I do, however, think (in keeping with older trends in feminism) that control of one's reproductive capacity is necessary for economic independence, which is necessary for equality.

I'm not here today to talk about the hard (in the sense of both “difficult” and “concrete”) issues, though. I'm here to talk about the stuff that a person of my demographic (highly educated, raised middle class) is going to most often encounter on the internet: the theory, on the one hand, and the memes, on the other. In fact, it's unavoidable. Along with geeks, feminists may be the highest-profile colonizers of the internet – no doubt because they're pouring out of college and university campuses.

Keeping this in mind, here are my Top 5 Criticisms of Feminism:

Imperviousness to Criticism

If you start to criticize a trend in feminism to or in front of a feminist – say, for example, the way that feminism treats the topic of rape – the first thing you will hear is some variant of “feminism is not a monolith.” The response neatly serves to shut down the conversation because it's irrefutable but fails to address the point. It doesn't matter to me, or my criticism, if some feminist in a cave somewhere agrees with me. What matters is the general tenor of the conversation, and that is the source of my frustration.

Many critics of feminism have pondered why such criticism engenders such defensiveness. Believe it or not, I can also be the feminist responding defensively to attacks on it – all it takes to trigger that response is for the attacks to be made to me. The best explanation I can give is that, whether or not the mainstream media is “liberal” (that's an argument for another day), people of leftist sympathies have picked up the liberal message from the media that “feminism=equality for women=good for women=good” and identified with it to such a degree that any criticism of feminism is equated with being anti-woman and, as such, next door to evil. So that when, as a teenager, I heard about Camille Paglia the “anti-feminist,” I genuinely believed that she must be some kind of Antichrist. Until I saw her on a talk show, risked listening to her, and found what she had to say fascinating and challenging, even when I disagreed with her.

To me it seems like a no-brainer that no political movement can be at its strongest unless it's open to having its most fundamental philosophical positions questioned. I don't mean negated: if we take as the basis of feminism the assumption that women and men are equal, feminism doesn't have to entertain the idea that they are not equal. But any positions formed on the basis of the assumption of equality should be open to criticism, with the idea that proponents and critics have the same goal of advancing the idea and reality of equality. So if your ideas suck, or if they may in fact be harmful to the cause of equality, you ought to know about that, think hard about it, and abandon or refine them.

Since, however, the left is no better than the right at having open, objective, rational discussion about its pet ideas, but instead wants to find reasons to cast out traitors, the bullshit of feminism goes unchecked, and reform is impossible. Because if “feminism is not a monolith” or its variants doesn't succeed in shutting down the conversation, the next move is to discredit your critic by branding her an “anti-feminist.”

Now, there are people who are actually anti-feminists, and not always from a conservative perspective. There are many reasons for a person to be an anti-feminist: you can actually think that women and men are not equal, or you can think that men and women are equal but different and traditional gender roles honour that difference, or you can think that feminism is opposed to “family values,” or you can think that feminism promotes political divisiveness and does not actually serve the cause of gender egalitarianism. In my experience, people who are anti-feminists are quite happy to identify themselves as such. For my part, I think I still identify as a feminist despite a hugely fraught relationship with feminism from my teen years on because I don't want to be confused with traditionalists. As much explaining as I have to do in order to identify as a feminist, I feel like I'd have to do even more explaining in order to not identify as a feminist, and my time is limited.

One day maybe we'll get to the point where we can all call ourselves “humanists” or “egalitarians” and it won't seem like a complacent move, but we're not there yet. In the meantime, what I've learned to do is to continue to identify as a feminist but to broaden my egalitarian focus. What you are actually thinking, saying, and doing is probably more important than how you label yourself.

Failure to Model Enfranchisement

My second criticism of feminism is its failure to provide a model of what an enfranchised woman would look like. There were two roads feminism could have gone down: the road of emphasizing victimization, and the road of emphasizing enfranchisement. Guess which one it took. I was never happier as a feminist than when, as a teenager and in my early 20s, I was reading Molly Haskell on the types of independent womanhood represented by the great stars of classical Hollywood (Garbo and Dietrich, Davis and Crawford, Hepburn and Stanwyck), or Camille Paglia celebrating feminist role models (mostly those same women plus heroines of Spenser and Shakespeare); or marveling at forceful famous women of arts and letters from Colette to Courtney Love – or for that matter, Paglia herself.

Part of the reason for feminism's emphasis on victimization is, presumably, that the idea of “personal responsibility” was so tainted by conservative rhetoric that the left surrendered it to the other side long ago. (Which is exactly why Paglia's use of it was so electric.) The left seems to consider the rhetoric of liberation and independence to be in conflict with the recognition of systemic victimization. The result is that feminism can look awfully fucking depressing, and attracts on the basis of feelings of anger and victimization rather than feelings of possibility and aspiration. 

Not that the idea of agency has been entirely banished from feminism. Here, feminism is definitely not a monolith, but rather a mishmash. Recently, for example, Charlize Theron's action hero character in Mad Max: Fury Road was widely celebrated as a victory for pop culture representations of female agency. This is something that seems to happen periodically in the era of the action blockbuster – I can remember the excitement and controversy over Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgement Day when I was a kid. Women are, obviously, never going to get equal representation in the action genre, so that every time, at long intervals, a movie of this kind with a good, ass-kicking role for a woman does come out, it will feel like something revolutionary and “feminist” all over again.

Personally, I'm not that inspired by depictions of women kicking ass. (Linda Hamilton in T2 is more interesting to me because she's a complex character who's a bit of a psycho, not an idealized mother, and not at all a sex object – while still being very badass.) But a feminism that envisions its end goal as a woman who is free from male oppression and victimization is going to look very different from a feminism that envisions its end goal as a woman who is intellectually, emotionally, and economically independent – which is not, notice, necessarily the same thing as a woman who is unequivocally triumphing in a late capitalist society. The first has its emphasis on (a negative view of) men, and what they do; the second on (a positive vision of) women, and what they can be.

Linda Hamilton in T2: a bit of a psycho, but check out those buff arms

And lest you think that the personal responsibility “piece” (to use late capitalist businesspeak out of a business context, like a real asshole) is just about celebrating female capability and strength, the other side of it is the recognition, which some iterations of feminism consider essential to considering women as full human beings, that women can be just as deeply shitty as men can. That is, I think, what Lionel Trilling meant when he said that Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse is one of the few female characters in literature who have “a moral life” just like a man. People who are just victims, who have no agency, can be pitied, but they can't make true decisions and choices, and therefore can't be held responsible for their actions.

Perpetuation of Gender War

It's bizarre how some feminist arguments seem to be stuck in a time warp: they keep appearing, decade after decade, as though no progress, or attempt at progress, has been made. For example: the catcalling issue, which emerged again when that woman posted that video on YouTube. What did the video add to the discussion, other than bringing the argument to a new medium? Have we made any progress toward stopping catcalling? Or have we made any progress toward understanding and addressing the cultural and economic reasons why it happens? Or are we still chanting the mantras “patriarchy” and “misogyny”?

A whole lot of feminism, especially the kind that occurs on the internet, is just the perpetuation of gender war. One of the feminist memes I've heard endlessly repeated is that people who say that feminism is about male-bashing “just don't understand” what feminism is. Obviously, the ideological basis of feminism is not hating men, nor does it logically entail hating men, but not everyone who thinks that feminism has a man problem is simply confusing the idea of being equal with men with the idea of hating men.

Men and women have been accusing each other of terrible things throughout history. That is, apparently, what human beings who are necessarily (for the propagation of the race and transmission of property) intimate with each other, and who are on more-or-less of an equal social footing (compared to, say, property-owning men and slaves) with each other, do. Since men, for most of this time, by and large wrote the books, this argument has survived as anti-feminist literature and its refutation, the latter of which could be put in the mouths of female characters (Chaucer's Wife of Bath, for example, or Cervantes's Marcela), and which could involve criticisms of men as well as defenses of women. Now that women not only write more books but also have access to Twitter, they can write their own attacks on men, which can go viral, because there's nothing that either men or women like better than a bitter stereotype characterizing the “opposite sex.” Since feminism is predicated on the idea that “men oppress women through patriarchy,” a notion that's broad enough to include every complaint any woman might think to make about men, feminism legitimates this demonization of men, which in fact often proudly announces itself as feminism.

If you try to point this out, you will be told that “reverse sexism” isn't a thing because “reverse racism” isn't a thing. Feminists don't, can't, hate men; they can only react against misogyny. The fact that the racism analogy is always brought out to avoid addressing criticisms only goes to show that, unconsciously, feminists know that people consider race a more serious problem than gender, and in fact share that bias. It's true that men don't suffer from systemic sexism, which is not to say that the traditional male gender role doesn't involve plenty of hardships and disadvantages. (Feminism has got this covered under “patriarchy is bad for everyone,” although that phrase, too, is often used to deflect rather than to engage with criticism.) However, the fact that demonizing men doesn't contribute to systemic sexism doesn't make it more pleasant. All it does is add fuel to the neverending gender war.

Sexual Parochialism

I could write a book about the sexual parochialism of (most) feminism. Camille Paglia did write one, and it's called Sexual Personae. Credit where it's due, a lot of feminists did come around after the 90s debates: BDSM feminists emerged; it seems to be largely acceptable among feminists for women to direct pornographic films as an expression of their sexuality; and feminists seem to be recognizing sex worker's rights as a legitimate women's issue.

But alongside sex-positive feminism there arose rape culture feminism, which as far as I can tell is an excuse for the left to police any language or behavior that it doesn't like by associating it with rape; and campus rape hysteria, which appears to be a volatile mixture of sheltered middle-class women at their hormonal peak who are being fed a steady diet of victimization feminism, men at their hormonal peak who are being fed a steady diet of misogynous sports culture, controlling parents paying exorbitant tuition fees and expecting that their children will be protected from dangerous reality in return, and a culture of binge-drinking. Sounds like the makings of an American tragedy to me.

Meanwhile, feminist hostility toward the concept of personal responsibility has become a self-caricature wherein, by tortuous logic, no one – women included – is allowed to discuss strategies for rape prevention other than “telling men to stop raping,” or they risk being accused of “victim blaming” or even being a “rape apologist.”

Rape is to the left as terrorism is the right. Rape is, no doubt, a bigger actual threat to American women than terrorism is to Americans, though the numbers that float around and have even reached the White House are bizarrely inflated: more soberly, in a 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey about 6 per 1000 female college students age 18-24 reported being raped or sexually assaulted. Both left and right trade in fear-mongering, as the dwindling middle class invents bogeymen in its entitled pursuit of a vacuum-sealed reality of perfect safety.

Back in the 90s, when I first became aware of problems with feminism, I was willing to entertain the possibility that feminist studies were inflating rape statistics. But I could not buy Paglia's claim that date rape “hysteria” consisted of sheltered young women, unprepared for the fact that adult life and sexual freedom can sometimes be physically and emotionally unpleasant, having “bad sex” and then retroactively – perhaps due to the intervention of feminists – interpreting it as rape. Until, two decades later, I read Lena Dunham's account in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, of what she labelled on the book tour, though not in the book, as her “sexual assault,” which is an absolute textbook case of the process I've just described. There are sometimes good reasons to expand the legal definition of rape, as feminism has been doing and attempting to do for some time now, and there are also good reasons to be concerned about its expansion. All we've got to go on are our intuitions, which are themselves culturally determined, but all I know is that there's not an intuition in my body that can account for why Dunham (who I think is a fine comedic writer and performer) thinks that she was sexually assaulted, unless she thinks that a traumatic sexual experience is, ipso facto, a sexual assault. There's one occurrence early on that one could make a case for as a sexual assault, but Dunham specifically doesn't describe it in a way that would make it unambiguous.

If Dunham had refrained from labeling the incident in life as on the page, the account could have stood as an example of some of the shit young women experience in their sex lives, although even as such it casts a sort of Gothic shadow over female sexuality, as if, here as elsewhere in the book Dunham is conveying the message that the sexual freedom for women that one version of feminism fought for is a cul-de-sac that ends in male violence and callousness. If I say that my own experience, although sometimes weird and awkward, hasn't been that bad at all, I know I'll get the response that offering a different example is insensitive to people who aren't as fortunate. But the very fact that these dark experiences are apparently widespread makes me think that Paglia called it when she said that middle-class feminism was producing generations of depressive young women who were not equipped to philosophically or emotionally handle the turbulent reality of their sexual imaginations and experiences.

Hence – the ongoing problem of the sexual parochialism of feminism.

Failure of Cultural Perspective

Feminism's difficulty with philosophically dealing with sex is part of its broader failure to look at the issues it raises in a wider cultural perspective. To use the example of rape culture: the tortuous logic of rape culture theory is that our culture, rather than condemning sexual violence against women, actually condones it. Of course, there's a certain striking, paradoxical truth to this. You can make the same argument about violence in general: on the one hand, we strongly condemn it; on the other hand, we glamourize it; make it the constant focus of movies, TV, the news, even popular music; celebrate it in sports; institutionalize it in the police, military, prisons; make it the cornerstone of masculinity.

Given this similarity, I don't see why we're not making the leap that the problem we should be doing something about is not violence against women, but violence. MRAs, whatever their problems, have made the points that although women are at far greater risk of being murdered by an intimate partner than men are, men are at far greater risk of being murdered in general, and also at far greater risk of death by suicide. Why should we so focused on rape? Because we're invested in female virtue? Not as feminists we're not. Because feminists are only interested in problems that affect women? Because that would be a problem. It was one thing when we thought that violence disproportionately affected women; as we apply the arguments of feminism to men, we become increasingly aware that that is not the case.

Likewise, one of the more interesting feminist articles I've stumbled upon on the internet have to do with looking at the problem of the wage gap from the perspective of worker's rights and women's unpaid labour as mothers. In other words, for me, as soon as you look at the problems that affect women alongside problems affecting other groups, they become a lot more interesting, but maybe that's because we're no longer simply repeating the words “patriarchy” and “misogyny,” or, more recently, “privilege” and “entitlement,” and thinking we're done.

Trust me, I've been an angry young woman in my lifetime, and at the age of 40 (as of the end of next month), I still get pissed off at sexism as often as I get pissed off at feminism. Female anger, as a symbolic, lightning-in-a-bottle substitute for female agency in a world that stifles the latter, is a glorious thing (as long as you're not dealing with it in person), and it's still a delight to see it disrupt expectations of soothing, submissive feminine niceness. But I've never been especially interested in being angry at men. Insofar as men do terrible things to women and other men, is it because they're inherently evil, or because that's how masculinity is constructed? If it's the latter, why are we wasting our energy ranting about “toxic male entitlement,” as happened in the wake of the Isla Vista Killings? Couldn't we, instead, be talking about toxic gender roles and their relation to violence?

It seems to me that the majority of feminism happening on university campuses and the internet is a lot more invested in staying angry at men than in doing something about the issues it has raised. That's a shame for many reasons, and not least because once upon a time some people thought that one of the great boons of feminism would be the transformation of heterosexual love into a relationship based on equality; that changing the meaning and improving the nature of love would be feminism's contribution to a new and better world. 

Failing that, nevertheless, at this point in history, I don't think there's any point to trying to adjust the current social and economic system to make it better accommodate women, with their same old biological disadvantages (slightly curtailed by birth control) – not that the white men at the top of the global power structure are interested in sharing their power anyway. We should all be focused, women and men, on creating a better, more egalitarian, social and economic system. All of the ideas of feminism are valuable to think about; the best ones, by their own logic, ought to be extended beyond feminism and take feminism beyond identity politics; the worst ones should be unequivocally rejected.

The Gender Parity Gap in Three Areas of the Arts: An Overview

The idea of this post is to see how women are faring in three areas of cultural endeavour: writing, popular music, and TV and film. Much more extensive research would have to be undertaken in each area to get a real picture, but even at a glance it's easy to see that women haven't achieved parity in any of these areas of either sales or prestige.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I absorbed the idea that feminism had already happened, in my childhood. Nothing and no one around me suggested that a husband and children were mandatory, or that working wasn't. By the time I was in my mid-teens, in the early 90s, I had become aware that feminism was still around, and inequality was, too, but I assumed that the latter was left over from before I was born and would soon be gone. Certainly, it would be gone well before I reached middle age.

As I discovered, growing up, that I had a fondness and talent for writing, I had no reason to think that it was something men did. Through early adolescence, female writers came my way with a much greater frequency than male writers. My favourite author of what are now called “chapter books” was Lois Lowry; my 5^th grade teacher assigned me a novel by Agatha Christie, whereupon I read almost her complete works; in the 6^th grade, a female friend introduced me to V. C. Andrews; as a young adolescent I adored Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, a postcolonial, feminist, and slash fiction-y retelling of Arthurian legend from the POV of Morgan Le Fay, and the (also slash fiction-y) vampire novels of Anne Rice. 

Even when I was reading novelizations of sci-fi series, even though I'd encountered the notion that "women didn't write sci fi," I couldn't get away from female writers – like Star Trek novels writer Vonda N. McIntyre and 'V' novels writer A. C. Crispin – an “Ann,” I was surprised and pleased to eventually find out. Later I understood that prior to the 20^th century, the female writers who were taken seriously could be enumerated using one hand: Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. As frightening a blow as that was, however, there was no reason at all, glancing at the Fiction section in bookstores or libraries, to think that women weren't as successful as men as writers now.  

Whatever good or bad can be said about it, it's internet feminism that, by calling attention to things like the underrepresentation of female contributors in the elite literary journals and the lack of good roles for women in Hollywood movies, has made me aware, in the past decade, that even if it seems like there are powerful female celebrities everywhere, all may not be equal. And it's the internet that makes basic research into this area unprecedentedly easy, providing us with information on everything from album sales to prize winners to the names of the writers and directors of TV shows, all just a google away.

Writing

Part 1: Awards

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (formerly The Novel), 1917-2014:

1920s: 5/9 (women/total)

1930s: 6/10

1940s: 1/8

1950s: 0/8

1960s: 3/9

1970s: 2/7

1980s: 4/10

1990s: 3/10

2000s: 3/10

2010s: 2/4

31/87=35.6%

1980s-present: 12/34=35.2%

First female PP winner for the Novel, Edith Wharton

Most recent female Pulitzer winner for Fiction, Donna Tartt

Man Booker Prize, 1969-2014:

1970s: 5/11

1980s: 3/10

1990s: 2/11

2000s: 4/10

2010-2014: 2/5

Total: 17/48=35.4%

1980s-present: 11/36=30.5%

Governor General's Award for English-Language Fiction, 1936-2014:

1940s: 2/10

1950s: 3/10

1960s: 2/8

1970s: 3/10

1980s: 3/10

1990s: 3/10

2000s: 3/10

2010-2014: 3/5

Total: 24/75=32%

1980s-present: 12/35=34.2%

GG Award for English-Language Drama, 1981-2014:

Total: 12/34=35.2%

GG Award for E-L Poetry, 1981-2014:

Total: 16/34=47%

Part 2: Sales

Publishers' Weekly, Novels (US):

(No. of female authors out of total no. of authors per decade)

1895: all men

1896: 2/10

1897: 1/10

1898: 2/12

1899: all men

Total: 5/42=11.9%

1900: 2/10

1901: 2/10

1902: 2/10

1903: 3/10

1904: 5/10

1905: 7/11

1906: 4/10

1907: 4/10

1908: 2/10

1909: 2/10

Total: 33/101=32.6%

1910: 7/11

1911: 4/10

1912: 3/10

1913: 3/10

1914: 3/10

1915: 2/10

1916: 5/10

1917: 3/10

1918: 4/10

1919: 4/10

Total: 37/100=37%

1920: 3/10

1921: 5/10

1922: 3/10

1923: 4/10

1924: 3/10

1925: 3/10

1926: 4/10

1927: 4/10

1928: 3/10

1929: 3/10

Total: 35/100=35%

1930: 3/10

1931: 7/10

1932: 3/10

1933: 2/10

1934: 5/10

1935: 3/10

1936: 3/11

1937: 2/10

1938: 4/10

1939: 5/10

Total: 37/101=36.6%

1940: 2/10

1941: 4/10

1942: 5/10

1943: 3/10

1944: 4/10

1945: 3/10

1946: 4/10

1947: 2/10

1948: 4/10

1949: 1/10

Total: 32/100=32%

1950: 4/10

1951: 0/10

1952: 4/10

1953: 1/10

1954: 3/10

1955: 1/10

1956: 4/10

1957: 5/10

1958: 4/10

1959: 1/10

Total: 27/100=27%

1960: 3/10

1961: 0/10

1962: 2/11

1963: 4/10

1964: 1/12

1965: 0/10

1966: 3/10

1967: 2/10

1968: 3/10

1969: 4/10

Total: 21.5/102=22%

1970: 3/10

1971: 1/10

1972: 2/10

1973: 2/10

1974: 1/10

1975: 2/10

1976: 3/10

1977: 3/11

1978: 2/10

1979: 1/10

Total: 20/101=19.8%

1980: 2/12

1981: 2/10

1982: 2/10

1983: 2/10

1984: 3/11

1985: 4/10

1986: 3/11

1987: 2/10

1988: 3/10

1989: 3/10

Total: 26/104=25%

1990: 5/10

1991: 5/10

1992: 5/10

1993: 3/10

1994: 4/10

1995: 3/10

1996: 3/10

1997: 6/10

1998: 6/10

1999: 2/12

Total: 42/102=41%

[Note: 2000 and 2005 Harry Potter novel excluded from this decade; Twilight books excluded: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008]

2000: 3/12

2001: 1/12

2002: 4/12

2003: 3/11

2004: 1/12

2005: 5/10

2006: 2/12

2007: 5/12

2008: 4/10

2009: 4/10

Total: 32/10=32%

[Note: Adult Fiction and Children's Fiction tallied separately as of 2012; but women also dominated AF with 8/10]

2010: 3/10

2011: 3/11

2012: 8/10

Total: 14/31=45%

The Publishers' Weekly lists are a bit weird. Seemingly they concentrated on adult fiction up until the YA boom of the 1990s, with some exceptions for anomalous runaway bestsellers – like the Eloise children's books in the 1950s. The Harry Potter books were excluded from the lists during the 90s; a couple get into the Wikipedia lists in the 2000s, but the Twilight books are excluded (but Meyer's adult fiction novel is included). The 2012 list above, however, is drawn (as the Wikipedia reference link reveals) from both the adult fiction and children's fiction lists, which I guess is how it's going to be for as long as YA and children's fiction are selling like crazy (or – which may be more accurate – are the categories that still sell print copies).

Nevertheless, the rough picture that emerges is this: Jonathan Franzen was talking complete crap when he complained that in America, reading is considered an activity for women, and therefore books “for men” (and, presumably, by men) don't sell. With a sudden jump in numbers at the turn of the 20^th century, female novelists hold steady at 30-40% until a bad dip in the 1950s, from which they do not recover until the 1990s. God knows why, but suddenly in the 1990s female authors are at near-parity even without taking J. K. Rowling into account. With Rowling, they are probably at parity. And Rowling changed everything, paving the way for the Twilight series (which paved the way for the 50 Shades of Grey series) and the Hunger Games series. In the 2000s numbers dip down again, but would probably be higher than pre-1950s numbers if all of Rowling's Harry Potter novels plus the Twilight series were included. And in the 2010s, so far women are at near-parity.

But Franzen's vision of women's petticoats sweeping away serious men's fiction was clearly always a fantasy. Decade by decade, there have never been as many novels by female authors among the Top 10 bestsellers as there have been books by men, and I assume that the Top 10 is roughly representative of what's going on below. It hasn't been 50/50 – and, just sticking to the 20^th century, often it wasn't even close. And sure as hell female novelists weren't crowding male novelists – whether serious or frivolous – out of the market.  

Part 3: Literary Journals

The London Review of Books and New York Review of Books have already been called to task by feminists in recent years (as in, 2013) for their extremely low numbers of female contributors. Did anything change in 2014?

Well, if the numbers from last year are an improvement, they're still a joke. The number of female contributors per issue in the NYRB didn't once reach as high as one third, and only three times (out of 18!) reached as high as a quarter. That would be pretty good, if this were the 18^th century. LRB did mildly better: out of the 24 issues in 2014, the number of female contributors got as high as a third twice and as high as a quarter six times.  

But these offenders pale in comparison to The Paris Review. Check out the dismal gender numbers for their author interviews:

1950s: 3/25=12%

1960s: 5/37=13.5%

1970s: 8/39=20.5%

1980s: 15/75=20%

1990s: 18/88=20.4%

2000s: 26/66=39%

2010s: 10/43=23%

Holding steady at 20% since the decade of second-wave feminism, TPR only got into the game, in the previous decade. So far in this decade, however, they've fallen back into old habits. And yet somehow we find ourselves talking about a past Dark Age for female writers. Fucking pathetic.  

It's one thing when dinosaurs like the LRB, NWRB, or Paris Review offend. What's really irksome is when sexist attitudes are carried over into a new medium, and perpetuated by young people. This is the case with Scott Esposito's The Quarterly Conversation, an online journal devoted to international modernist literature in translation that I'd like to love, if only it weren't for the distinct odour of machismo presiding over the proceedings. As proof, here are the stats from the past 10 issues, nos. 29 (Fall 2012) to 38 (Winter 2014). These are the number of articles about women out of total articles about a woman or a man (usually an author, but sometimes a filmmaker); so themed articles are excluded. (I also excluded translators as contributors, which is ironic given the nature of the publication, but less confusing.)

Issue 29, articles about women: 5/20

Issue 29, female contributors: 4/21

Issue 30, articles about women: 3/25

Issue 30, female contributors: 11/27

Issue 31, articles about women: 11/31

Issue 31, female contributors: 12/31

Issue 32, articles about women: 2/18

Issue 32, female contributors: 9/21

Issue 33, articles about women: 3/19

Issue 33, female contributors: 4/19

Issue 34, articles about women: 4/21

Issue 34, female contributors: 6/25

Issue 35, articles about women: 11/22

Issue 35, female contributors: 7/23

Issue 36, articles about women: 1/10

Issue 36, female contributors: 4/10

Issue 37, articles about women: 3/16

Issue 37, female contributors: 5/16

Issue 38, articles about women: 3/12

Issue 38, female contributors: 7/14

Total articles about women: 46/194=23.7%

Total female contributors: 69/207=33.3%

So, about a quarter of the articles over the last 10 issues are about women, and a third of the contributors are female. What are we to make of this? Are women, internationally, not writing experimental fiction and poetry? Are they not being published? Are they writing and being published but not being taken seriously enough to be translated? Are they writing and being published and translated but not being taken seriously by TQC?

The links along the right side of the QC website, to articles on the site's contemporary heroes (two of them dead at a young age), McCarthy, DFW, Murakami, and Bolano, so no women, were what made me first start pondering the place of women in serious contemporary fiction. I knew that the traditional heroes of modernism and postmodernism were men: all of the High Modernists except for Woolf, and especially Joyce and Kafka; Faulkner, Beckett, Pynchon. But that was in the past. Surely no one would perpetuate such preposterous hero-worship now that so many more women were writing, and we were all alert to, and on the same page (SO TO SPEAK) about, the injustice of gender bias.

Or then again....

There are of course other, more female-friendly places one can go on the internet to read about serious new writing, such as Jessa Crispin's Bookslut. My quarrel with TQC is not that there are no alternatives to its modernist machismo, but that that machismo is unnecessary and antiquated, and especially disappointing in an online-only publication, which should break with the biases of the past.

Popular Music

Part 1: Village Voice Pazz & Jop Reader's Poll

For me, the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Reader's Poll is the only bright spot out of all of this research, revealing as it does how the number of women in rock has risen, and the profile of women in rock with it, while the profile of women in pop has also risen, and with it, the prestige of pop. Still, as we get to the most recent poll, only 34% of the top 100 albums have female artists attached to them – and I counted cases where there was even one woman, not necessarily the singer, in the band.

1970s: The website only lists 10 albums up until 2008. In the inaugural year, albums by female artists creep into the 9^th and 10^th spots: Joni Mitchell's Blue and Carole King's Tapestry. In 1975, Mitchell's Court and Spark tops the list, but there are no other albums by female artists on it, or any women in the bands on the list. In 1974, Patti Smith is the only female artist to get on the list, with Horses, in the second spot. There is obviously already goodwill toward women who are serious songwriters – but not many around. In 1976, Kate & Anne McGarrigle take the 5^th spot, with Joni two spots behind. In 1977, only Fleetwood Mac, in the 4^th spot with Rumours, features women. In 1978 there are finally none at all, and in 1979 we're back to the initial situation, with Donna Summer's Bad Girls sneaking into the 10^th spot, and the B-52s at no. 7.

1980s: Things remain pretty much the same in the 80s. There are no women to be found on the list in 1980, but in 1981, X (whom I confess I've never heard of before) is in the 2^nd spot, Rickie Lee Jones in the 5^th spot, and The Go-Gos in the 10^th spot. In 1982, Richard & Linda Thompson are in the 2^nd  spot; X sneaks into the 10^th. In 1983 – X again, this time in the 4^th spot... and that's it. In 1984, Tina Turner is in the 5^th spot; in 1985, Aretha Franklin's at no. 9; in 1986... nothing. In 1987: nothing. In 1988, we're in business again: Sonic Youth at no. 2, Tracy Chapman at no. 3, Michelle Shocked at no. 5. In 1989, Neneh Cherry is at no. 5, and The Mekons and Soul II Soul have women in them, as do The Pixies, at no. 10.

1990s: This is where things change. All of a sudden, a lot of women are being taken seriously across the board, in rock, in punk, in electronica, in country, and in hip-hop, and there are a lot more all-female or female-led bands around. Sinead O'Connor takes the second spot in 1990; Sonic Youth is at no. 4; and Roseanne Cash is at no. 8. In 1991 (the year of Nevermind), there's only The Mekons, squeezing into the last spot. The following year, P. J. Harvey appears for the first time; the next year Liz Phair takes the no. 1 spot (beating out In Utero), Harvey is in the 3^rd spot, and The Breeders are in the fourth. Hole take the no. 1 spot in 1994, with Liz Phair in the 6^th spot. In 1995, top spot to P. J. Harvey (third year in the row for a woman or female-led band), Elastica is at no. 4, and Bjork at no. 7. In 1996, the Fugees are at no. 2, Sleater-Kinney at no. 3, and Amy Rigby at no. 8. The following year it's Sleater-Kinney at no. 4, Missy Elliott at no. 6, Erykah Badu at no. 7, and Bjork at no. 9. In 1998, it's Lucinda Williams at no. 1, Lauryn Hill in the second spot, and P. J. Harvey at no. 7. The decade closes on a slow year for women, with only Fiona Apple, at no. 7, and Beth Orton, at no. 9; and there's a woman in The Magnetic Fields.

2000s: The 2000s start strong. Year 1: P. J. Harvey (2), Shelby Lynne (4), Jill Scott (9), and Sleater-Kinney (10). 2001: Bjork (3) and Lucinda Williams (9). 2002: Sleater-Kinney (5) and Missy Elliott (10) – but where are the new artists? There are some in 2003: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (5), led by Karen O; and The New Pornographers (7), featuring Neko Case. But in 2004, there's only Loretta Lynn, at no. 3. 2005 is a good year, with a new artist, M.I.A. bursting onto the scene at no. 2, Sleater-Kinney and Fiona Apple at 4 and 5, and The New Pornographers at 9. In 2006, a Neko Case solo album gets into the 8^th spot, with Joanna Newsom right behind it. M.I.A. takes third position the following year, with Amy Winehouse's Back to Black right behind her. 2008: Portishead in the 3^rd spot, Erykah Badu in the 5^th spot, and Santogold at no. 7. 2009: Neko Case at no. 3, Yeah Yeah Yeahs at no. 4, Dirty Projectors at no. 5., and The xx at no. 7.

Only including bands with significant female content, then, the 2000s hold strong, with female artists making up about 25% of the Top 10s in both the 1990s and the 2000s. That's compared to about 15% in the 80s and around 10% in the 70s. The importance of the 1990s to women in popular music can't be underestimated. But what about the current decade – and the Top 100 albums?

The wondrous Janelle Monae emerges in 2010, taking the 4^th spot. There are women in Arcade Fire, and Beach House and Sleigh Bells are male-female duos. Merrill Garbus's tUnE-yArDs take the no. 1 spot in 2011, with P. J. Harvey back in the second spot, Wild Flag in the 4th spot, and Adele in the 6th spot. In 2012 there's Fiona Apple at no. 3, Grimes at no. 9, and Beach House at 10; in 2013, Beyonce's at no. 4, My Bloody Valentine at 6, Haim at 7, Janelle Monae at 8, and Kacey Musgraves at 10. Finally, in 2014, St. Vincent took the no.4 spot, with FKA Twigs (a producer!) at 5, Taylor Swift at 7, and Angel Olsen at 8. For the decade so far, content by (cis) women is at 35.6%; in the Top 10, 40%, a big leap again from the 2000s. 

2008: 3/10; 25/100

2009: 4/10; 42/100

2010: 4/10; 32/100

2011: 4/10; 39/100

2012: 3/10; 39/100

2013: 5/10; 34/100

2014: 4/10; 34/100

Verdict: The 90s were the breakthrough decade for serious female artists in popular music, following in the wake of pioneers like Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. But although there were suddenly a few dozen female artists and bands of major reputation, the mass of buzzy bands and rappers out there, most of whom will only appear on these lists once, are still overwhelmingly male. Women hover at 35-40% of the total content, but only if you include a lot of bands with only one female members, who is not the lead singer or main songwriter; or a couple of female members, if it's a large collective. If you stick to girl bands, female-led bands, male-female duos, and female solo artists, it would probably be more like 30-35%.   

Part 2: Best-Sellers

In commercial popular music, women have also gained successes in recent years without attaining full parity – as sellers; who knows how well they're paid. If the music industry is anything like the movie industry, which it probably is, there's probably even less parity there, but probably also some gains in recent decades.

I didn't bother to look at prizes for the music section because my time is limited and I'm way more interested in which albums Village Voice readers like than in which albums win Grammys. Whereas although I don't give any more credence to the Pulitzer Prize than to the Grammys, I was more interested in finding out how women had fared with the former than in tracking down decades of year-end best-books lists. So basically, the research I did for this post reflects partly what I happened to want to know about a particular topic and partly what information was (readily) available on that topic.

To get a rough idea of how women in popular music sell, I looked at this Tsort site, which has compiled chart info from worldwide sources.

Out of the 50 biggest chart acts, worldwide, by decade:

1960s: Barbra Streisand (22); The Supremes (23); Aretha Franklin (29); Peter, Paul, and Mary (33); Petula Clark (35); Joan Baez (42)

1970s: ABBA (4); Donna Summer (23); Fleetwood Mac (27); The Carpenters (28); Carole King (42)

1980s: Madonna (2); The Eurythmics (12); Whitney Houston (15); Tina Turner (31); Diana Ross (35); Pat Benatar (42); ABBA (46)

1990s: Mariah Carey (1); Madonna (2); Celine Dion (3); Whitney Houston (7); Janet Jackson (17); Alanis Morisette (20); Spice Girls (21); Roxette (24); Ace of Base (34); TLC (36); The Cranberries (37); Cher (47); Sheryl Crow (48); Shania Twain (49)

2000s: Madonna (2); Britney Spears (3); Beyonce (7); The Black Eyed Peas (8); Pink (10); Avril Lavigne (11); Alicia Keyes (14); Norah Jones (15); Jennifer Lopez (20); Rihanna (21); Mariah Carey (25); Shakira (28); Celine Dion (30); Christina Aguilera (31); Destiny's Child (35); Kelley Clarkson (36); Kylie Minogue (38); Nelly Furtado (39); The White Stripes (40); Evanescence (43); Taylor Swift (46)

In the 1960s, the women who chart highest, making up only 12% of the Top 50, have nothing to do with rock. In fact there are no women in rock, at all, at this point, and the only women on the list that have anything to do with modern pop are The Supremes. In the 1970s, the supreme decade of the rock group, it's worse. ABBA, the epitome of modern pop, get into the Top 10 with two women, and Donna Summer, the queen of disco, is the first female solo artist on the list. There's also Fleetwood Mac, another 70s supergroup of married couples, and, of course, The Carpenters.

Madonna leads the way to the light in the 1980s, showing what a female pop superstar really looks like. Annie Lennox and Whitney Houston are other pioneers, and Streisand comes back strong, but other than Madonna in the no. 2 spot, women haven't made that much advancement.

But wait! We were just warming up. In the 1990s, female solo artists occupy the first three spots, and female acts or acts featuring women make up 28% of the Top 50. It seems as though the 1990s are a breakthrough for women in music commercially, as it was for women in music being taken seriously. Second-wave feminism may have failed to produced any theorists that I wanted to read, but I can't argue with its effects on music. The seeds were sown, however, in the era of first-wave feminism. Patti Smith showed us what a female rock star looked like, and even if The Runaways were manufactured and exploitative, afterwards it was possible to envision a female rock band. By the 1990s there are a lot more women in bands, even if they're usually in bands as vocalists, and Madonna has provided the model of a female pop star who's obviously and unapologetically in control of her image and career. But few post-Madonna female pop stars will give us the impression of control over their careers and personas from beginning to end, and few – certainly none of the white ones – will be allowed to not be girls-next-door, however crossed-with-porn-star their image may be.

And the improvement holds during the following decade, with female acts/female-featuring acts getting up to 42%. This has little to do with women in bands and a lot to do with remaking pop, after the example of Madonna and the decline of Michael Jackson, as exclusively female. No need to fight the perception that the role played by women in popular music is as vocalists and, with few exceptions, eye candy. The exceptions are the true legends, but the standards of appearance for people in the public eye seem to get higher all the time, especially for women, that it's hard to think of Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand becoming superstars now – and it was implausible enough at the time. Reality TV let an ordinary young woman, Kelly Clarkson, become a star, and the internet allowed Adele, a plus-size woman, to become a megastar, and those seem to be the only means. A different, “edgier” style of attractiveness is favoured in the indie rock world, and being too conventionally attractive, like Lana Del Rey, can get you kicked out of the cool kids' club, but the ornamental function of the frontwoman still has few and usually partial exceptions – which is why someone like Merrill Garbus is such a delightful surprise.

Merrill Garbus

Now women seem to be stuck – and men too. Once it was considered acceptable for men to be crooners – neither songwriters nor musicians. Elvis wielded a guitar but didn't write his songs, and was primarily known as a voice, face, and set of hips. A decade on, it had become necessary to be “authentic” and write your own material. But women had a harder time making the shift, and have continued to have a hard time going behind the scenes in other ways – notoriously, as producers and engineers. For one thing, women were going into popular music as vocalists rather than forming bands, so writing their own songs wasn't a natural step. For another, there was no shame for women in being ornamental – at least not yet. Ultimately, this situation – where “authentic” rock or indie musicians wrote their own material but “manufactured” pop singers had their songs written for them – led to an unfair devaluation of the role of vocalist. But perhaps this was also partly because it was so easy to sell a pretty white girl with a pleasant voice.

Despite the huge success of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill (1995), somehow the notion of marketing female rock singer-songwriters didn't take off, whereas the solo female pop star after the Madonna model became a juggernaut. But then if you look at the albums that are selling in the US in this decade, there are no performers that one would call “rock,” either male or female, while “rap” is only one category among many (and there are even some top-selling female rappers). The favoured categories are male solo performers, female solo performers, and bands, in about equal numbers, and rock and roll might never have happened (whereas the favouring of country acts is an American eccentricity). The female percentage suffers because the all-male band continues to be the norm while the all-female band continues to be an eccentricity.

The idea that there should be more women in rock or rap has nothing to do with women's success in popular music – at least not at this stage. Women are doing great as solo vocalists, probably much better than they did in the pre-rock era, although they'd do better still if there were more women in bands, which appear to be the only legacy from the rock era in the charts. Only hipsters (such as the Village Voice readers) keep rock alive, and increasingly rap as well, it seems. 

No, the main reason to care about women getting into rock or rap has to do with the prestige accorded these genres as originally male genres. Of course women have great reasons to rebel and be angry, and no doubt it's helpful to the cause of feminism for women to show that they can project aggression, intimidation, and power, so it's easy to see why the idea of women in these genres appeals – to women, and to fans of the genres – and why the idea of these genres appeals to women. Still, encouraging women who want to try non-traditional (i.e., “masculine”) things easily turns into denigrating “feminine” things, since our culture is already eager to encourage the latter. And we should be wary of this as feminists, even as we're aware that asserting the awesomeness of Disney princesses is not a sufficient kind of feminism.

(As one example: you still hear well-meaning people bemoan the fact that there has never been a queen of late-night TV. But why is this such a terrible thing when women clean up as day-time hosts? Ellen DeGeneres already out-earns David Letterman. Just because an area is female-dominated doesn't always make it pink-collar. Of course the domination of the daytime talk show by female hosts depends on a lot of women being at home with the kids, at least temporarily. But that's another story.)

Film and TV

Hollywood's problems with women seem to get endless attention without anything ever changing. And I'm just talking about its problems developing movies with female leads or even non-perfunctory supporting female characters, and, when it happens, paying the actresses as much as the actors. Let alone with getting women into a directing role.

I'm sure that many more women are directing now than in my early 20s, when I took it for granted that film directing just wasn't something that women did. (Since I like movies a lot and admire many directors, that thought did bug me a little, but not that much, since I had no interest in directing movies myself.) Even now, though, there's usually only one fashionable female director at a time, and without the help of the internet, I know the names of less than half a dozen that are currently working.

The gender parity gap in the US entertainment industry has been well-covered, so I'm not going to add new information here. I'll just restate some of the points and discoveries that have been made:

• Jennifer Lawrence was the top-grossing actor in Hollywood in 2014, yet she was paid less than her male co-stars on American Hustle. 
• In 2014, the combined spoils of the top 10 highest-earning Hollywood actresses was a little over half that of the top 10 actors
• In 2013, according to a study by San Diego State's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women represented 15 percent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films, 29 percent of major characters, and 30 percent of speaking characters  

Now that TV series creators are starting to emerge as auteurs, it also bugs me that the problem from film seems to belong to the entertainment industry in general. And it's not just the entertainment industry. The problem is also a culture of fandom, criticism, and its overlap – as with cinephiles and auteurists in film criticism/fandom and modernist machismo in literary culture – that perpetuates the idea of the hero-worship of men by men (and sometimes by women) as culture. Hence the hilariously solemn celebration of Matthew Weiner and Vince Gilligan, or, in geekier corners, the giddier fandom directed toward Dan Harmon (and Joss Whedon and Gene Roddenberry before him). (In fact I'm pretty sure that TV auteurism emerged in sci-fi corners first – didn't it? Not counting British comedian comedy.)

The only high-profile female tele-teurs to date have been Lena Dunham, who also gets a spectacular amount of hate, and Jenji Kohan, who is generally considered to be extremely uneven as a showrunner based on her first series, Weeds. (Which really does suck after the second season.) Among the series creators that one hears less about because they make popular television, the phenomenal Shonda Rhimes had two TV shows among the Top 50 broadcast TV shows of 2013/2014, both near the top; 2 Broke Girls was co-created by Whitney Cummings; Maurissa Tancharoen co-created Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with the Whedon brothers; Gemma Baker co-created Mom with Chuck Lorre and Eddie Gorodetsky; Elizabeth Meriwether created New Girl; Elise Doganieri co-created The Amazing Race; The Middle was, amazingly, co-created by two women, DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler; the now-cancelled (after one season) Super Fun Night was created by star Rebel Wilson; and that, of the 53 non-football shows on the list, sometimes with up to four male co-creators, is it.  

Shonda Rhimes

The one area where we can trace improvement for women, both commercially and in terms of prestige, is popular music. In the mainstream, there hasn't been much challenging of gender norms by women, but in the 80s, the solo pop star regained the ground lost to bands, and female pop stars became a charts fixture, ever-increasing in numbers and stature. Nor should it be forgotten that Madonna's projection of both financial and sexual power as a global superstar was its own kind of challenge of gender roles, and allowed women in pop to have more assertive personas – although that, of course, has now become simply a box to tick (not unlike male rock “attitude”). Among music lovers, the prestige of female artists has steadily grown, and although the 90s burst of all-female rock bands didn't keep up, it's now more common in indie to see female-led bands (but not that common).

Film is still going through a Dark Ages as far as gender parity goes, and TV isn't much better. Presumably women have had trouble breaking into film directing for the same reasons they've had trouble breaking into music production: because it requires combating stereotypes about women and leadership and women and technology. But we notice this more in the area of film, because the director is the auteur, whereas in music, the artist is usually assumed to the be the auteur. Music journalists and critics pay some attention to producers, but overwhelmingly their attention, and the attention of the public, is directed toward the artist. In mainstream music, often producers have more creative control than the artists, but that is precisely the area that receives less attention from music journalists and critics. Only in the area of club music are producers considered auteurs by aficionados.

In literature and fiction, the position of women as either prize winners or sellers hasn't substantially improved since the beginning of the 20^th century, and it is notably vulnerable and subject to setbacks. For the past couple of decades women's writing has had a commercial boom, I think largely due to the phenomenon of female fandom, which saw adult women reading YA genre lit and teenage girls reading online erotica, as well as vice versa, and the YA lit becoming online erotica and then becoming a best-selling print erotica series. This boom relies on marketing literature by women to women, but then so did the successful marketing of commercial fiction by men to men for so many decades. In this moribund time for books, publishers have found a way to tap into a thriving market of female readers.

In the area of literary prizes, there's no clear rhyme or reason at all to the fate of women. In recent decades women have won the Pulitzer for Fiction more often than in the 40s and 50s, but less often than in the 20s and 30s. Overall, female writers have won the Pulitzer 35% of the time, which is the same percentage as female winners of the Man Booker Prize – but since the 1980s, which is to say, in the era of modern feminism, women have won the Man Booker only 30% of the time.

Meanwhile, in the Canadian poetry scene, women would appear to be at parity. Now how did they manage that? Was there such an abundance of female poets, or such a dearth of male ones, that women got in control of the prize-giving? And if parity can be achieved in this area, why not in all of them? While it's easy to see how having children could interfere with the career of a TV writer or a Hollywood director, it's less easy to see how it could interfere with the career of the majority of novelists, poets, playwrights, musicians, or indie directors, who make very little money and, accordingly, have low stakes attached to starting late or taking long breaks. I could see the low income of being part of the arts community making a woman put off having children more easily than I can see the choice to have children being a blow to her career. Is institutional sexism the biggest obstacle to women's advancement in the arts, or do most women, whatever else they want to do with their lives, simply prefer to put motherhood first? I don't know, but I don't think we can deny that the combination of the two, and the way they reinforce each other, is the reason that parity seems to be so difficult.

In cinema, not only are things slow to improve behind the camera; in front of it, things may have actually gotten worse. Conventional wisdom attributes this to a combination of late capitalism and competition from TV, which made the marketers panic and decide that they should only make movies for teenage boys. Lo and behold, those teenage boys grew up and became middle-aged men, and still wanted to see the same kind of movies: even better for Hollywood, but worse for women who like movies, and worst of all for actresses. And since corporate filmmaking has no investment in diversity, only in making money, no one wants to make the effort of making action blockbusters with female protagonists, even though at least once a decade someone comes along and proves that they can make money.

I think some blame also has to go to the auteurs and auteurists, though. American independent filmmaking has always been a macho enterprise, led by the Kubricks, Scorseses, Coppolas, and Altmans, and their fanboys. Whatever the virtues of these filmmakers, it is rare for American auteurs to be interested in telling stories about women (the alternative tradition is represented by De Palma, Cassavetes, and Lynch); whereas in Europe, as Molly Haskell has pointed out (with a lot more savageness than I would use, especially with regard to the heroines of Dreyer – and yet I take her point), directors kept using women, but as symbols more than as characters. In any case, in recent years it's hard to find a female protagonist whether you're in the mood for a blockbuster or for arthouse fare.

But what do the execs of publishing houses, movies studios, and TV networks think that women are doing? They don't think we're going to movies; they've only recently found out that we read; and they can't think we're watching TV, since few shows with female main characters can be found there. Of course there are exceptions on network TV: Grey's Anatomy is a soapy monster; Modern Family features upper-middle-class men and women who are in completely traditional gender roles, for which the “clueless,” yet understandably smug, men are endlessly beaten down by the “assertive,” yet economically dependent, women; the female characters on The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother are almost as important as the male characters; there are lots of genre shows with female sidekicks, like Elementary, Bones, and now Sleepy Hollow. It does look like things are a little better for women in front of the camera in TV than in movies, though not great.

Modern Family, a convincing argument for the extreme horror of traditional gender roles (the gay couple included), where no one wins

I'd like to know, however, if female stars ever had the box-office draw that male stars did, and if “woman's pictures” were ever made in greater numbers than they are now. That genre is remembered primarily because the memory the great female stars of Hollywood was kept alive by gay men (definitely not by auteurists), which allowed young women of later generations a point of entry into film history. So as much as I admire Stephanie Zacharek's Kael-influenced critical voice, I can't share her bewilderment and seeming distaste (in an interview on the podcast The Cinephiliacs) at the fact that well-known female film bloggers like Kim Morgan and Farran Smith Nehme have come to share the gay male admiration of these actresses. Men worship men all the time, and women worship men, too, because there aren't enough celebrated women to worship – so we can always do with finding more. 

Presumably the parity gap that remains in these and other areas is the result of a combination of unconscious sexism on the part of men; women being less interested in these areas than men; and the difficulty of combining motherhood and career. Although the basis of one kind of classic feminism is to argue that women would be exactly like men if the obstacles to it were removed, it is also possible to argue that biology predisposes men and women differently and that they should not be forced to be the same or exact parity expected in everything. The evidence, however, is that the number of women in areas once thought reserved for men climb as attitudes toward what women can do change over generations.  

How do attitudes change? Through the actions of pioneering women (and the men who welcome them and even champion them) and through men and women calling attention to sexism. The best way to prevent calling attention to sexism from descending into petty bullying and harassment of men is, I think, to have a movement that's centered on women's achievement: on what women can do, not what is done to them. But that's for a future post. Others think we have to take action, such as by creating special classes or camps for girls to combat the societal message that there are certain things they can't do. Should change happen organically, over time, or should it be pushed along by directing girls into male-dominated areas? I don't have the answers, but I think we should all keep asking questions.