Sept. 17, 2016 "I didn’t set out to contribute to rape culture": I found this article by Ellen Vanstone in the Globe and Mail.
I like this article because it's about being a female TV writer and producer, and that is a career that I have wanted since I was a teen:
I didn’t set out to contribute to rape culture. Like all sensible people, I’m a feminist. Granted, the white, privileged kind who’s gone through life with easy access to education, well-paying jobs, sexual liberation, freedom of speech and the right to trash men and the patriarchy in the most general and vile terms every time something didn’t go my way in matters of life or love.
In short, I never felt particularly personally oppressed. Then I started working in TV drama.
The revelatory moment – the point at which my complacent-feminist innocence was violently taken from me, leaving me feeling exposed and violated, so to speak – came when I was writing on a series about cops who dealt with the mentally ill.
It might help to know how scripts are written on most TV shows, familiar to anyone who’s seen 30 Rock: A group of writers spends the morning discussing how pod coffee is bad for the environment but what else are we supposed to drink, segues into where to go for lunch, goes for lunch, then spends the afternoon trying not to eat the piles of junk food that seems to come with the furniture in these rooms.
Somewhere along the way, we hash out
character arcs
and season arcs
and put up dozens of colour-coded index cards to keep track of who’s sleeping with whom,
and whom we want to get rid of when.
(I’m referring to the show, but similar dramas in the writing room are not unheard of.)
Once the big picture is more or less sorted out, we focus on specific episodes.
The room brainstorms ideas and, as the episode moves from pitch page to outline to script, the producer gives “notes” every step of the way, e.g.,
“Does our lead actor have enough to do?”
or “WTF! I effing hate this! I don’t know WTF is going on!”
Both kinds of notes can be helpful, since we writers are so mature and know to look for the “note beneath the note” that points to fundamental story problems.
Pitch pages, outlines and scripts also get notes from network executives.
The series producer owns the show,
but since the broadcaster is paying up to several million bucks per 43-minute-hour to actually make the show (in return for the right to air it first),
the network executives get final approval on everything from cast and characters to writing-room staff.
Everyone understands how important it is to please the network executives.
On the show about cops and the mentally ill, my loss of innocence began when I pitched an episode about an old lady who dies alone in a rundown mansion.
In the opening scene or “teaser,” her corpse is carted off in an ambulance while neighbourhood kids dare each other to go into the “haunted” house.
Two of them sneak in. Suddenly, the ghost of the old lady appears at the top of the stairs! She descends toward them, uttering gibberish. The children scream and run. One falls. She’s still coming! …
Cut to title card and theme song. At the top of Act 1, our cops reveal it’s not a ghost, it’s
another old lady who’s insane and secretly living in the attic.
Like Rochester’s mad wife in Jane Eyre, the second old lady was stuffed up there years earlier owing to the stigma of mental illness. Our hero cops and menta lhealth workers must now solve the mystery of who she is and how she ended up there.
The room liked the premise and I, with a co-writer, wrote up the pitch page.
Except then the notes started.
Do there have to be two old ladies?
Do they have to be so old?
Are the stakes high enough?
Can we create an interesting bad guy to attract a big-name guest star? Et cetera.
By the time we went to camera, my dead old lady had turned into a thirtysomething adultress who gets her head bashed in, and my old lady in the attic had turned into a beautiful blond teenager in a basement being held captive by the world’s most adorable predator, Rossif Sutherland.
And I had just co-written a rape episode.
Over the next year, I went from feeling indefinably icky about that episode to rage over how much female rape there is on TV in general.
The most notorious example is Game of Thrones, winner of nine Creative Arts Emmys last weekend and the most nominated show going into the Primetime Emmy Awards tomorrow.
After the violent rape of Sansa Stark in Season 5, “geek girl” blogger Tafkar produced a “Statistical Analysis of Rape in Game of Thrones”:
rape acts in Game of Thrones the TV series: 50;
rape victims in Game of Thrones: 29;
rape acts in the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George Martin: 214;
rape victims in ASOIAF: 117.
GoT toned things down in Season 6, but there’s always a new show to pick up the slack, and this season, it looks as if it might be the new HBO series Westworld (premiering Oct. 2).
In the first episode, set at a resort where humans can interact with lifelike robots, an android played by Evan Rachel Wood is dragged off by her hair to fulfill an older man’s rape fantasy.
Elsewhere, the female rape trope is a staple of shows such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, CSI and Criminal Minds, and sprinkled throughout other procedurals such as NCIS, Hawaii Five-O, Bones and The Mentalist.
t’s used as a back story (usually with graphic flashbacks) for characters such as Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans, raped by her Soviet trainer;
Norma Bates in Bates Motel, raped in the pilot by a previous owner of the motel, after (we later learn) being raped by her brother as a teen;
the gang-raped girlfriend Lumen on Season 5 of Dexter;
Claire Underwood in House of Cards still traumatized by a college rape;
Jessica Jones’s lead raped by her abductor/keeper;
Mellie Grant on Scandal raped by her father-in-law.
Rape is also used as a device to motivate male heroes,
from Tony’s anguish and need for revenge after the rape of his psychiatrist in The Sopranos
to Ray Velcoro’s anguish and need for revenge – and also a paternity test for his son – after the rape of his wife in Season 2 of True Detective.
Even “quality” shows have rape aplenty: Anna Bates raped on Downton Abbey;
police sergeant Catherine Cawood driven by the rape of her daughter, who died by suicide, in Happy Valley;
Gillian recovering from years of marital rape on Last Tango in Halifax;
Joan Holloway raped by her fiancé in Mad Men;
Queen Mary raped by Protestant soldiers in Reign;
Detective Robin Griffin dealing with fallout from her own prom-night gang rape while solving a child-rape case in Top of the Lake.
The current avalanche of female rape on TV has even become something of a joke.
As in: “I joke, morbidly,” Sonia Saraiya wrote in Salon, “that my job title has changed from television critic to ‘senior rape correspondent.’ ”
Meanwhile, Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller made headlines last season for not using rape, telling Entertainment Weekly, “It’s so overexploited, it becomes callous. … You’re reduced to using shorthand, and I don’t think there can be a shorthand for that violation.”
Note how my repetition of the word “rape” becomes numbing after a while. It’s because seeing something over and over tends to normalize it, and eventually make it meaningless.
During my year of ranting about all this TV rape to anyone who’d listen, I was forced to think about what, exactly, I was mad about.
Did I want the female-rape trope banned? No. Some shows used it in a way that was respectful to the victim and essential to the story.
Even the rape factory over at Law & Order: SVU might be defensible:
According to a 2015 study from Washington State University, SVU’s regular viewers demonstrated “decreased rape-myth acceptance and increased intentions to adhere to expressions of sexual consent.”
(Viewers of the more popular CSI, on the other hand, indicated “decreased intentions to seek consent.”)
In any case, as a writer, I don’t believe in censorship. I’d never ban anyone from writing or directing rape scenes. What I object to is twofold.
First: how the trope is overused as a plot device. The sin of bad taste and its potential contribution to moral degradation aside, let’s just say here that the young, beautiful, battered dead female is exhaustingly trite.
The second, bigger problem is with how the crime is aestheticized for the camera. Massive amounts of time and money are spent on hair, makeup and lighting to sexualize rape victims.
Look at the first scene of the first episode of the lauded French series Spiral, which shows a dead, naked girl covered in blood on a garbage heap.
I’m willing to bet many minutes, if not hours, were spent lighting her and positioning the camera in order to capture the silhouette of the erect nipple of her right breast against a background of black tires.
The only onscreen rape I’ve seen that was presented in a believable – i.e., unsexy – manner was in the movie Deliverance. I’m not saying we need more scenes such as Ned Beatty in his underwear scrabbling in the mud while being treated like a pig, but at least it didn’t prettify the crime.
One show that really made me angry was The Fall, in which Gillian Anderson’s character pursues the world’s second-most adorable predator, played by Jamie Dornan.
As he stalks his victims, the camera lovingly caresses their nubile, sometimes naked, sleeping bodies, and then, when they awake to find Mr. Grey in their bedroom, the lens captures all their tremulous, flailing, picturesque panic as he assaults and tortures them.
Adding to the “sexy” vibe is how Dornan’s compelling persona teases and intrigues Anderson’s character right up to the end of Season 2, when, in a moment of charged intimacy, Anderson cradles a doe-eyed Dornan in her arms after he’s been shot.
I believe creator Allan Cubitt is sincere when he says, “I was at pains from the start to make sure that there was nothing gratuitous or exploitative in the drama.”
But there’s a disconnect between what he thinks he’s doing and what appears onscreen.
A fundamentally different approach is taken in Top of the Lake, in which Elisabeth Moss’s character goes after the man (or men) who impregnated a 12year-old girl. There’s plenty of female nudity, but – shockingly – it’s of the non-rapey, slack-bummed, middle-aged-lady variety.
The 12-year-old girl is beautiful, but she’s never sexualized. She appears clothed at all times, and in the poster for the show, she’s wearing a winter jacket with a rifle slung over her shoulder. She patently does not fit the classic, sentimentalized portrayal of a vulnerable, sexualized victim.
My point is that the images TV uses to tell rape stories always, without exception, trump the dialogue or supposedly worthy aims of us, the writers.
It doesn’t matter how much rationalization or feminist rhetoric we cram into our actors’ mouths.
When rape is lyricized as something that happens to attractive young women, it becomes conflated with sex, which reinforces rape culture.
Since The Fall was created by a man (Allan Cubitt) and Top of the Lake by a woman (Jane Campion), this offers an excellent segue into blaming the usual suspects: Men! The patriarchy!
And I can offer evidence that sexism is alive and well in writers’ rooms across the land.
On one show I worked on, after various male writers kept suggesting we rape the female lead to “raise the stakes,” I suggested we rape the male lead instead. They went nuts – calling me “sick” and referring to me as “Man Rape Vanstone” for the rest of the week. (I laughed. But still …)
As one anonymous female TV drama writer told Variety’s Maureen Ryan:
“Every single year we get dudes pitching ‘rape the women’ stories and every season I have to stomp my foot in the writers’ room and say no, which I probably shouldn’t do, for the sake of my career, but dammit, NO.
If rape were so illuminating, such a great story, then you know what? They’d be pitching to rape the men. But that never happens and never will happen, so it’s this blatantly internalized misogyny that drives me nuts.”
“You’re never more aware than when you’re in the room of just how unconscious it all is,” writer Marsha Greene says.
“Say you have a story with two people who are business partners. One screws over the other. In a male dominated room, if the characters are two men, it’s probably money.
If the characters are a man and woman, it’s like:
‘He didn’t like her, or she was in love with him, or he had an affair with her and broke up with her and then to get revenge, she tore down his business.’
The default in the room is always that she was motivated by some romantic feelings for this man.”
Some women use a term for making sure a female POV is present when crucial decisions are being made in the writers’ room or on set: “accountable vagina.”
Anecdotal evidence aside, hard data tell the story of a rigidly sexist TV and film industry in Canada and beyond.
Women In View, a Canadian non-profit organization that promotes gender and cultural diversity, reports women make up 38 per cent of TV writers.
The Canadian Unions for Equality on Screen just released a study reporting that less than 16 per cent of all directing jobs go to women.
A study by the Annenberg School at University of Southern California analyzed 11,927 speaking characters for gender roles in film and television,
which showed female characters wore “sexy attire” more than three times more often than men
and had exposed skin more than three times more often than men.
The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has funded a mountain of research showing men onscreen hold better jobs than female characters.
The female-rape trope comes as no surprise when
women behind the camera are treated as second-class citizens,
and women on camera are seen primarily as sex objects.
Unfortunately, I cannot in good conscience blame my own rape episode on men. Yes, there were a lot of them: male producer, director and showrunner and a 5:2 male-female ratio in the writers’ room.
But they were, to a man, committed to a nonsexist workplace and open to ideas from all of us.
Further, it was my male co-writer who flagged the potential misogyny of the evolving rape plot before I did.
And the network executives who approved the script were female.
It’s also true that the episode itself had no onscreen violence. No rape scenes. No nudity. The victim’s story was given more time and weight than the predator’s.
And I have to hand it to Rossif Sutherland – he made the unusual and morally courageous choice of delivering a straight-up evilly banal character, sans any softening mystique.
The episode might even win approval from the Washington State University researchers.
So who was I supposed to be mad at?
Alas, after a year of angry, defensive stewing, I figured out it was … me. I was the one who ignored my own vague misgivings, who deep down was afraid of rocking the boat with female complaints about feeling “icky” and risking a reputation for being “difficult.”
Part of it was moral cowardice and part of it was my own warped, male-identified, patriarchy-pleasing brain.
It made me think of the old Pogo cartoon: We have met the enemy and he is us.
Here's her imdb page and she wrote for a show I like Rookie Blue.
She also wrote for Cracked, but I never watched it.
Jan. 14, 2021 TV and movie comparisons:
A student writes or does an assignment about being touched. A teacher and a parent investigates it:
Titus: The episode is called "The Protector." This is is the season 3/ series finale of the show. I remember watching this when I was 17 yrs old. Amy was touched by Frank. Amy writes a poem about a rose tattoo on Frank's privates.
They were all in the men's washroom.
The guys look at Frank's privates in a stall, and there is a rose tattoo.
How would Amy know about this tattoo in this private part of his body if he didn't touch her?
Or at least he undressed in front of her?
Frank: You will never convict me of this. It's her word against mine.
Amy Fitzpatrick: That's exactly what you said when I was little.
Christopher Titus: Oh, oh. That's it.
[grabs baseball bat]
Frank: Seriously, guys. Don't do this.
[swings back at Frank, but stops]
Frank: Please, no, no...
Christopher Titus: Relax. Important thing right now is Amy.
Erin Fitzpatrick: Right. The best thing for all of us is to help Amy get through this.
Frank: I agree. 100%.
Christopher Titus: Wow. Really? God, man, I am so glad to hear you say that.
[gives bat to Amy]
Christopher Titus: Amy, let the healing begin.
Principal Wells: Wait. I'll go get security.
Christopher Titus: Oh, come on!
Principal Wells: It'll take about 5 minutes.
[pauses]
Principal Wells: Or maybe 30.
[Titus smiles]
Principal Wells: Call me when you're done.
My opinion: This is a sitcom. They have to resolve and help a young woman get justice for being touched. They will let Amy beat up her attacker with a baseball bat.
If this was an episode of Law and Order: SVU, they would have to find evidence, and then go through court, etc.
A sitcom is short and not have enough time (30 min.)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205700/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_7_tt_2_nm_6_q_titus
"Christopher goes to school to confront a bully who has been picking on Amy, however he learns a horrible secret."
"Titus" The Protector (TV Episode 2002) - IMDb
Jun. 24, 2021 Boston Public: The teacher Marilyn Sudor hears a teen girl read a poem she wrote about her dad touching her. Marilyn investigates and the girl says it's just a poem.
Marilyn is unsure if she should ask/ accuse the dad of touching his daughter.
Marilyn: What if I'm wrong?
Counselor: What if you're right?
Later the girl said she accidentally had the video recorder running and she may have taped her dad touching her and hasn't watched it. If I remember correctly, the tape did have the evidence.
Boston Public (TV Series 2000–2004) - IMDb
This is from my Apr. 2022 blog post:
"This man will pay you $10,000 to find him a girlfriend"/ "Matchmaker, make me a match"/ "Autistic teenager found more than two years after disappearing in California"
Summer Heights High:
"The life of a public school epitomized by disobedient student Jonah Takalua, self-absorbed private school exchange student Ja'mie King, and megalomaniac drama teacher Mr. G."
Summer Heights High (TV Mini Series 2007) - IMDb
Season 1, Episode 4: This is the episode where Jonah draws a picture of his dad touching his privates, so he can get out of English class.
"Ja'mie undermines her relationship with her new friends; Mr. G holds auditions for his new musical; a suggestive drawing puts Jonah's irate father on the defensive."
"Summer Heights High" Episode #1.4 (TV Episode 2007) - IMDb
At the 22-23 min. mark, Jonah, dad, the Teacher and the Counselor are talking about the picture.
(830) Summer Heights High Ep4 - YouTube
When I first saw this in 2010, there was this:
This is:
A. Offensive
B. Funny
C. Both
D. Neither
I was 25 yrs old and I thought this was 95% offensive, and 5% funny. Now I see this as 99% offensive, and 1% funny.
I remember telling to this to my friends.
Jessica, 23 yrs old: Offensive.
Angela, 25 yrs old: Offensive.
Dan N. 25 yrs old: Both.
Trayton, 20 yrs old: Both.
https://badcb.blogspot.com/2022/04/this-man-will-pay-you-10000-to-find-him.html
This week's theme is about women in the TV and film industry:
"Competition aims to rewrite the rampant sexism in India's Bollywood movie songs"/ "Indian films have gone 'beyond the diaspora': Director Karan Johar"
http://badcb.blogspot.com/2017/07/movie-articles-feminism-done.html
"In Hollywood, boys never outgrow their toys" (Cars movies)/ "The 'Jane Test,' a New Way to Tell if Your Scripts Are Sexist"
http://badcb.blogspot.com/2023/09/in-hollywood-boys-never-outgrow-their.html
My week:
Mon. Sept. 18, 2023 The Swarm: I have the CW channel, but this show didn't air on this.
I checked Telus on Demand and this show airs on other channels that I can't watch on.
That's ok that I can't watch this.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808491/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_7_nm_0_q_the%2520swarm
Yellowstone: I watched the 2 hr pilot on Global last night. This was average. I'll record the series, but I don't know if I'll watch more.
You can watch this on CBS and Paramount +.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4236770/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_4_nm_3_q_ye
Robyn Hood: I then saw a promo for this and will air on Wed. Sept. 27, 2023. I'll probably check out the pilot:
"Follows Robyn Loxley and anti-authoritarian masked hip-hop band, The Hood, as they call out injustices and fight for freedom and equality in the city of New Nottingham."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20918756/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_robyn%2520hood
Telus on Demand: They extend the TV shows that you can watch. I checked on CTV and Global, and there are shows like FBI that were to end access on Aug. 2023. I see that they extend access until Sept. 2024. Probably because of the writer's and actor's strike and lack of scripted TV shows to watch.
Tues. Sept. 19, 2023 Construction on my street: I can feel the vibrations of the ground. That's how big the construction of the truck paving the road is.
Wed. Sept. 20, 2023 Fiverr: I started a Fiverr account. I put an hour in to creating an account. I help you with your creative writing and screenwriting.
https://www.fiverr.com/tracyau2/help-you-with-your-scripts-and-creative-writing?context_referrer=user_page&ref_ctx_id=a5d9f8a9dae91baa4c461f9fdcbca2d5&pckg_id=1&pos=1&seller_online=true&imp_id=330fc043-9ef0-407d-a24c-5c4955fbe96a
The saying: "If you want to get something different, then you have to do something different."
We'll see if I get hired. I had my 2 blogs for years as a place to show my writing talent and skills, and to get hired as a screenwriter. I didn't get hired through my blog.
"How Canadian ammonia could help keep the lights on in Japan": Today I found this article by Paula Duhatschek on CBC:
Japan plans to import millions of tons of ammonia in the next few years in a push to decarbonize that country's power generation — an initiative that could present a big opportunity for Alberta's energy sector.
While Japan was once nearly synonymous with nuclear power, the country's use of that technology plummeted after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Today the country has one of the lowest energy self-sufficiency rates of any country in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and relies primarily on imports of coal, oil and liquefied natural gas for its energy supply.
Protesters from No Coal Japan Coalition dress as Pokemon character Pikachu as they demonstrate outside the Japanese Embassy in London, England, in May. (No Coal Japan Coalition via Gett)
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