.

As a first step, I think you should examine the portrayal of men in movies. Do you think the character of Juliette Lewis’s boyfriend (Woody Harrelson’s character) in “Natural Born Killers” was a positive portrayal of men? (He was the natural born killer himself.) The character of her father (Rodney Dangerfield’s character) was a child molester if I remember correctly. As for Oliver Stone, do you think the Michael Douglas character in the Wall Street series was positive?

Here is a list of characteristics. Please guess if they are more often associated with men or women in the movies: drunk, uncaring, insensitive, only wanting sex, noisy. Now here’s another list: sensitive, thoughtful, always thinking of others, kind. Which is the male list and which is the female list?

V/H/S was a low budget, nonsense film. It is unworthy of criticism.

At the end of Missrepresentation, the author says that women need to start making their own movies. Get to work. (But don't forget to portray all men positively.)

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I've only watched one of the Stone films you mentioned, Natural Born Killers, and I really love that movie. A quick search shows that Oliver Stone is just one of the writers for most of those films, so couldn't it be possible that it's not just Stone's fault?

Regarding V/H/S, I felt the women in the film came out on top. Mostly. I think the inclusion of violence against women is to create an even more despicable villain. If a man is being assaulted, it can be frightening, but when it's a woman, it's disgusting. Watching the men at the beginning of V/H/S smash windows makes them annoying. Watching them pull a woman's top off to film her breasts makes them sickening. We've instantly been shown how evil they are.

Ben, I would half agree with. The portrayal of men and women in media is something I find typically obnoxious. If either gender is good looking, they're usually stupid as well. It probably happens more to a female character, but it still happens to men. Ben's list of characteristics is right, but it misses so many other types.

How about weak, confused, unable to make their own decision, lonely. Now what about powerful, good looking, intelligent, and funny. It can go both ways for both genders.

I think the horror genre is a terrible place to judge portrayals of men or women. Men fall into the usual categories that Ben offers, while women are consistently portrayed as victims, although they usually overcome the odds and save the day. I go back to my earlier comment that violence against women is used to really ignite our fears and disgust. Violence against men doesn't have that same impact. Does that make it right? Maybe not, but it makes it effective, which translates to dollars and discussion.

I have a son and daughter. The most important thing I can teach them is to ignore everything around them. My daughter shouldn't strive to look like a model, and my son shouldn't strive to look like anybody in Magic Mike. They can do whatever they want, they can be whoever they want to be, nothing should stop them. The media should not be considered a portrayal of what we are. It's a portrayal of what somebody thinks we all want.

As parents, we need to be teaching our children things like this, but I can tell that's not really happening. Attending my daughter's graduation from grade 5, I saw some extremely inappropriate outfits on some of the girls. A 10 year old does not need heels, and heels that my girlfriend would have trouble walking in at that. The media will continue to give us unrealistic images of men and women, we need to teach our kids that it's unrealistic. That 10 year old in heels is well on her way to accepting the images she'll be shown every day. That's the parents fault, not the media.

Ben, no need to be so defensive. By cherry-picking contrary examples, you miss the larger valid point that mainstream films are overwhelmingly told from a male point-of-view and that women's roles are mostly defined by their relationship to the male protagonist. As a male viewer, I too am sick of this. I guess that makes me a radical feminist too.

It would be great if the solution was so easy as "make your own movies" but that process is also stacked against women. Most studios are run by men and they're only interested in men's stories. When someone like Kathryn Bigelow gets work and even awards, it's still for men's stories.

A final point, Kristal's article doesn't insist that female roles be positive, just interesting. An anti-hero or villainous role like Gekko in Wall Street is far more interesting that a damsel in distress – that's why Douglas won an Oscar for it. But women don't even get that much, let alone a positive role.

The late Nora Ephron said ""I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are." It would be great if everyone in Hollywood could do the same.

Here's the reality: As long as we remain slaves to regressive and divisive ideologies, we will not make any progress in equality. Instead of regurgitating someone's else antiquated ideas, without really substantiating any of them, why don't we actually look at these issues without the hinderance of biased personal agendas. It might be remarkable the progress we could make.

I'm glad Ben made his comment. I could write a longer post, evidencing a very long history of the horrible misandric bent in cinema and television, (and society in general) or point you to one of the numerous academic studies and books written on the subject, and the dire consequences of its influence, but what's the point. I'm have no desire to play this childish game, where one gender tries to one up the other in terms of their gender's misrepresentation and oppression. It's time to move on, and think about this issues in a more mature, and less prejudice fashion.

Thanks for all of your responses.

I wasn't arguing that there should be a contest to see if it is men or women who are portrayed more negatively in movies. My point was that radical feminists should consider the plight of men in their analysis rather than focusing solely on the plight of women in every scenario. In this case, men and women are both often portrayed negatively in movies. In V/H/S, for example, I really don't think the sexual assaultor is doing better than the sexual assaultee.

As for the future, I think the free market has established that the most profitable story line for a movie is man=drunken buffoon and woman=big titted slut. No one can fight the free market.

If you want to pick on Oliver Stone, then it is true that I can't think of any movies he made where a female is the main character. (Did he write Baywatch? There were a lot of female leads there.)

I shouldn't have called V/H/S a low budget nonsense film. I don't have respect for horror films and so I should have left it out of my post.

Basically what you are saying is we should edit a viewpoint that exists in the real world from films simply because a group disagrees or finds it offensive. Isnt that supposed to be the point? To rile us up, make us think, to hate or love a character? I watch movies to learn things about environments that are unfamiliar and for varying points of view, not to have everything be fluffy and nice and polite like a meg ryan movie.

Mallory Knox was a bad ass, she could throw a punch and take one. Lopez in U Turn, too, was a bad ass. Also, in the majority of his films, the ones perpetrating the stereotypical views either 1. die or 2. get their butts kicked by a woman (That Tom Sizemore scene is fabulous). I havent seen Savages… I dont think Stones a misogynist at all, i just think he produces films in situations where that line of thought occurs often (the south, war, corporate america), which is better than pretending it doesnt. he even credits his wife and daughter with his salvation. Some one brought up Wall Street – is it Stones fault most CEOs are white men? Is he being a sexist racist pig casting Douglas or a realist there?

If you read to far into anything, you can make it say what you want it to, i guess. Im not denying theres an imbalance in equality, I just think singling out one director isn't fair. Single out the HR departments that do the hiring at corporations, single out the women who love reality TV or refuse to learn how to change a tire or wear short skirts to clubs to attract men that perpetuate the weak and dumb stereotype, single out the women actors who take the roles you cant stand, but film is (or used to be) a reflection of society, not the cause of it.

The women in Stone's latest offering aren't terribly different from those in the previous Stone films I've seen. They're either ciphers or self-interested evil with little range in between. The Salma Hayek is a combination of both since her drug lord future was carved out for her by her murdered husband. "O" doesn't want to be known by her given name (which she links with the the original Hamlet character) Ophelia b/c she sees her as unformed and self destructive. It's hard to see a difference between the two Ophelias. Every time I heard "O" I couldn't help think of The Story of O, the story of a sexually submissive French woman called O, which was all the rage in O-liver Stone's youth and was the go-to novel for adolescents looking for smut; essentially it was the Lady Chatterley's Lover of his time.
Why bother pointing out such a seemingly trivial and abstruse detail? Because as the author points out, ". . . these films don't exist in a vacuum". Indeed all cultural production is informed by – sorry – our culture and the artist's cultural history. Whether he wittingly or not named a submissive, unformed character after TWO literary female victims isn't a central point to the argument but telling. The fact is these are examples of the archetypes that DO inform his creation and portrayals of women. It's just more blatant this time around (from a film maker who's never been known as subtle or nuanced) since he's bothered to name them.
When and how do we ever start to change the cultural representation of 51% of the world's population when we can't even talk about it w/o being labelled cranks? . . . or having the topic redirected towards "diversity" or "race" or "economics" (refs made in the comments to the other column at this site re Savages), as if these were all mutually exclusive?

I am a woman, I just came back from seeing Savages and I totally, totally disagree with you Kristal. Maybe it would help not to look at a character in a movie as somebody that has to represent somebody according to idealized standards. Characters in films like Savages are not meant to give lessons on how somebody is to be treated in real life.

I saw the opposite. I saw the women in Savages, in the context of the reality of the film, to be incredibly strong and powerful women. Ophelia is very important to the two men. They love her enough to risk their own lives for her. It is her narration that defines the viewer's perspective. She has the most interesting arc. And she is very sympathetic if you judge a character not as a need to be some super-human representation of eternal womanhood, but just as the flawed human being she is supposed to be in the film.

She is a naive, L.A. princess, who has mother issues and gets herself involved in a very nasty world. Everyone is treated nasty in that world. There is no respect for anyone, and women in the movie are treated with the respect women in that world would be treated. You want a movie to portray women with respect, watch The Queen with Helen Mirren again. In that world women are treated with great respect, but it is not the same world as Savages.

Elena is also a very strong woman, who was put into a certain situation in life, and made certain choices for which she now has to take responsibility. She didn't call herself a victim, blame her husband and his business dealers and spend the rest of her life crying and cringing. She made a different choice, as every woman has a right to.

She chose to be cruel when she needed to be, and caring when she needed to be. She gets the job done. The women and men in this movie are complete equals. All are morally weak, all exploit someone, all are exploited and all pay the price for it–except those who get away with it, but we all know their day is going to come and I wouldn't call them winners.

Women do not stand outside of context to men in society. We all rub off on each other. Maybe this insistence of professed feminists on making women some sort of pure, untainted, unaffected, sacred, honored creatures, no matter what, is what turns so many women off from calling themselves feminists. You want to purify women. There are no pure human beings anywhere and most women just want to be themselves, warts and all.