Well, Groundhog Day for instance is very highly praised also among many men I know. But the decline of the rom-com is a topic for another day. I generally see your point. Just goes to show that the standard "Hollywood wouldn't keep doing it if it weren't working"-line of argument is utter garbage. Hollywood can be…

I don't know. What kind of argument where you trying to make by pointing out that Mad Men is fictional?

But it wouldn't have to be, because the source material isn't.

Well, so do you stop engaging with it?

But how can you say a show relies on the noble savage trope if it portrays none of its "savages" as particularly noble? (Treason is certainly not just a major theme of this season; it has been an integral element of the show from the start, eg. Rollo's and Siggi's ever shifting loyalities). Why is it fucked up to…

I've also seen people dismiss films entirely on the basis of a dog coming to harm in it. It's not always supposed to be a statement about the overall quality of the movie, but people are allowed to have their pet peeves. For instance, I loved the Sopranos, Breaking Bad and Mad Men, but I feel I've had my share of a…

And you think stuff like Braveheart and Gladiator isn't?

But stories are often about exceptional people, not about the statistical average. "Underrepresented" doesn't mean "inexistant". And the casts of our narratives don't exactly map unto real-life demographical distributions in other areas either. (eg. Rags-to-Riches stories are a lot more frequent in fiction than in…

It's not better, but it's equally important. Women as a group will never get anywhere as long as representation operates on the Smurfette-prinicple. Being the one token team member is not yet diversity.

I don't know what the first thing is all good screenwriters do, but I have a bit of a suspicion that the second thing they do is not _always_ going with the bloody first thing that came to their mind in _every_single_instance, because the bloody first thing that comes to your mind is usually generic and trite.

I've never ever seen anyone trying to praise a film on the merits of passing the Bechdel alone.

But being historically marginalized means just that their accomplishments were rarely properly celebrated and memorialized, not that they never accomplished anything. Just because your ancestors rarely sung their female heroes doesn't mean that we couldn't sing them now.

I think that's one of those self-sustaining myths. Little girls start out loving that stuff just as much as little boys - it takes a couple of years to properly alienate them.

I think they skipped on an exhaustive list of other examples because the phenomenon is so well documented and widely discussed that everyone who remotedly cares about it can provide long lists themselves. You really just needed one to illustrate the point. Nowhere was there any suggestion that J.J Abrams was the only…

Well, sometimes you do ruin stuff by not improving it. Because the tide waits for no one.

But that's the general problem, isn't it - that most films are geared towards men alone or women_and_men, while hardly any films are geared towards women alone (here is where people typically bring up rom-coms, but as we see here, a lot of them, and I'd argue, usually the more prestiguous/better funded, better…

Why can't I side-eye people for needlessly perpetuating things that were less than optimal in the first place? I guess Lucas felt already sufficiently progressive for having a decent heroic female part, but it should be easy to see why that alone won't get you any cookies any more nowadays.

I can't really contest this, because I'm not watching a lot of romantic comedies, but downthread I raised a similar point and someone else listed a couple of relatively well-known romantic comedies that absolutely pass a reverse Bechdel. (eg. Love Actually, Pretty Woman, Groundhog Day).

Haven't watched it. (Don't watch a lot of rom-coms, admittedly). I think someone should do a "Failing the reverse Bechdel"-Tumblr for female led movies and rom-coms. I have a hunch it would have less failing entries than the one linked in the original article, but I could be wrong. I'm genuinely curious.

I think we should totally count the reindeer, for the record.