Why is Hollywood so white? actors of colour asked during the Oscar award ceremony two years ago. Fed up with the lack of diversity in the film industry, they were using their platform at the annual celebrity-fest to shine a light on the underrepresentation of minorities in movies.
It was an excellent question, and one which prompted me at the time to poke a stick at another glaring anomaly in the land of mass-produced entertainment: why is Hollywood so sexist?
When at least 50 per cent of the population is female, and when at least that percentage of movie-goers are female, why is their gender so often treated precisely as though they were a minority: represented at a fraction of the rate of men, and most often done so in embarrassingly cliched terms?
It's a question that has bothered me for a long time. Hollywood's sexism is so blatant — and so infuriating — that I gave up on its offerings years ago. I found my appreciation of movies waning as I became a more critical viewer. Instead of enjoying the action, I would find my mind wandering: why were male actors of all ages so well-represented, while female actors tended to be both fewer in number and younger?
Why are male characters partnered with female characters often young enough to be their daughters? Why do women so often appear to be mere decoration in stories about men? Why do we see so many naked females on screen, and so few naked males? And why are films about women marketed as niche products (chick flicks, rom-coms) while films about men are regarded as universally entertaining?
Buried deep beneath Hollywood's glitzy veneer, I discovered a world of theories and fields of study into these issues: the Bechdel Test, which a movie fails unless it contains at least one scene in which two women talk about something other than a man (unsurprisingly, few movies pass this test).
The theory of the Male Gaze, which posits that movies, television shows, adverts and so on are produced from the male perspective, and so tend to contain scenes in which women are subjugated or objectified (since most of those producing and directing these media are men, and the few women doing so might well have internalised society's inherently sexist world purview).
"The movies we see reflect a world that doesn't exist, one filled with men of all ages and abilities, and accentuated