'Sex,' Part 2: Do Men Still Dominate Criticism?
In the post below about "Sex and the City 2," some of the comments reference frustration with the male-dominated nature of the entertainment industry as well as the hegemony of men among movie critics.
While I tend to agree about the industry (and especially its product), I'm not sure that particular complaint still holds in regard to the endangered species known as critics.
"Any old lame formulaic movie that's aimed at guys scores better on RT [rottentomatoes.com] than a formulaic movie that is aimed at women," one poster commented. "I guess women don't do the movie geek thing, they don't blog and tweet incessantly about movies but they'll pay to see them."
In raw numbers, there are doubtless more male critics than females. But the gap is narrowing, and I would argue that the influence scale -- that is, critics at top outlets -- has shifted dramatically.
While I'm generally not a fan of New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley, because of her platform, Stanley's opinion certainly matters and carries disproportionate weight. Mary McNamara is the lead TV critic for the Los Angeles Times (and, congratulations, just won an internal editorial award at the paper). And while she's not a critic per se, Washington Post columnist Lisa de Moraes is one of the most influential voices in covering television, as is the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan.
On the movie side, there's the NYTimes' Manohla Dargis and the LATimes' Betsy Sharkey, as well as USA Today's Claudia Puig -- three of the most significant outlets for such coverage.
In short, a simple head count doesn't always tell the story, and even that data is changing as more women have gone into journalism -- a questionable career move in hindsight right now, I know.
Certainly in the blogosphere, things aren't equal. But at major news outlets, it's a far cry from the mid-1980s when I started in this business, and Variety's editorial staff consisted almost entirely of old white guys in white shirts and ties.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
While there are huge issues concerning the inequality of men and women in criticism (though as you point out, occupying the head film critic post at the three largest papers in the country is nothing to sneeze at), I honestly don't believe the critical response to crappy women-skewing films and crappy men-oriented films is that different. Case in point, "Sex and the City 2" currently has a 15% positive rating on RT. Pretty bad. But then you look at the rating for what I'd consider the male equivalent of SATC2, "Transformers 2": slightly higher with 20% positive. Either way, these are both horribly-reviewed films, and in most cases the male and female critics were in agreement about both.
Perhaps every male moviegoer wants to see a film with lots of explosions and boobs once in a while, just as every female moviegoer wants to see some shopping, shoes, and cliched fabulousness. Fine -- there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But critics aren't supposed to just pat us on the back for indulging our own laziest, most base escapist impulses. I don't expect someone to come congratulate me every time I play "Madden" or watch porn, and so too should no one read film criticism hoping to be validated for watching self-aggrandizing fantasy.
"Transformers" and "Sex and the City" are escapist and populist entertainment, but they're also terrible movies, and they embody a lot of really ugly impulses, from grotesque consumer fetishism (the latter) to brain-dead militarism (the former) to sexism (both). A critic is around to point out these negative subtexts, and also around to point us toward movies like the "Bourne" franchise, or "The Proposal," which give us our fill of cool explosions and fabulous shoes, but also aren't cinematic aberrations.
In this particular case, I don't think gender has anything to do with it.
Posted by: ahem | May 27, 2010 at 07:26 PM
http://movies-on-my-mind.blogspot.com/2010/05/are-we-too-quick-to-judge-taliban.html
Posted by: Mike | May 27, 2010 at 11:55 AM