Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The Shame of Family Films (Newsweek)

This study, undertaken by Stacy Smith and Marc Choueiti at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, analyzed 122 family films ... and found that only 29.2 percent of characters were female. And one in four female characters was depicted in “sexy, tight, or alluring attire,” compared with one in 25 male characters. The female characters were also more likely than men to be beautiful, and one in five were “portrayed with some exposed skin between the mid-chest and upper thigh regions.” ... (Another study found, troublingly, that women in G-rated films wear the same amount of skimpy clothing as women in R-rated films.) One in four women was shown with a waist so small that, the authors concluded, it left “little room for a womb or any other internal organs.” ...

[Additional] studies show... the more TV a girl watches, the fewer options she believes she has in life, and the more a boy watches, the more his views become sexist.
This study was done on films rated G, PG, and PG-13. Am I the only one (besides the author and Geena Davis) that thinks there's something wrong here?

Read the full article here.

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