People Are Sharing What Unrealistic Things About Women Shown In Movies Bother Them The Most And Here Are 30 Examples

To find out more about why women’s representation onscreen is often so flawed and unrealistic, Bored Panda talked to MaryAnn Johanson, a pioneering online film critic at FlickFilosopher.com and the author of “Where Are the Women?”—a project which broke down the ways in which women are dismissed on screen.

MaryAnn explained that unfortunately, “women are so often portrayed as nothing more than support and encouragement for men as they undertake journeys of growth and discovery.” Moreover, women are also “often depicted as 'perfect' and in no need of growth and discovery themselves.”

Such representation of female characters on screen is truly harmful and gives a “terrible example” to show both boys and girls, men and women.

According to the film critic, the second-worst thing about how women are diminished onscreen has to do with showing them as types. “So many movies have gangs of men doing whatever they're doing: The Leader, The Bad Boy, The Nerd, etc. And then there’s The Woman,” MaryAnn explained.

Representing women as a type gives viewers the wrong impression that female characters “don’t come in the same full range of human interests and talents as men do.”

MaryAnn said that she doesn’t really know the answer to just why so many male filmmakers choose this kind of female portrayal.

She wondered whether it may be “because male filmmakers are projecting their own fears about themselves onto female characters.” Or, “because male filmmakers are afraid of acknowledging that women come in the same full range of humanity—strong and weak, emotional and stoic, messed-up and got-it-together, and so on—as men do?” It may as well be because “male filmmakers don’t know any real women?”

MaryAnn explained that until the entirety of the filmmaking industry, from writers and directors to studio executives and festival programmers, is much more gender-balanced, nothing will change. “Storytellers tell stories that are important to them. We need more different kinds of people telling stories, stories that get seen and heard, than we have now.”

The film critic believes that the worst part of such flawed female representation is that it generally tells the audience that women don’t matter that much. “Movies matter. Pop culture matters. The stories we tell each other matter. Children are listening, and they hear what we are saying.”

MaryAnn warned that these “kids become adults with warped ideas about the wide variety of women’s actual experiences—which are so much wider than what we see onscreen—and what women want out of life, which is so much more than what we see onscreen.” She concluded that this is totally unacceptable, and that “the culture that has so far not accorded women the same full humanity it accords men has to change.”