Moving Beyond

Damselhood

Jenny Rustad
October 7, 2014

ara Jenkins an 18 year old

Media Production student
at Pepperdine University
can unfortunately no longer look
at one of her favorite heroines with
the same ferocity of admiration
that she once did. When she was
four and watching her favorite
movie, Cinderella, all she saw was
a magical story about an oppressed
girl who underwent a fantastic
transformation, emerging in a
beautiful dress with a handsome
prince on her arm. She was captivated by the enchanting transformation, and would sit enthralled by
the whimsical songs and beautiful
orchestration. But now all she can
see is a bland character who is only
redeemed once a man sees value
and whom she needs to escape a
pitiful life.
Even today in western film and
media, women are powerfully
under represented. And when they
do appear on screen it is frequently
in more sexualized and less influential roles. And though there have
been improvements in the past
few decades the disparity is still
extremely relevant particularly in
regards to the incoming generation
of girls and young women entering
the field in the traditional sense

and online.
Tara acknowledges that these issues
are particularly relevant to her with
her chosen career path commenting on how these are not issues that
will solve themselves and how

Media, films made in the United

States show 3.4 men for every one
woman to appear onscreen. This

By the time Ill be

going into this industry this problem
wont be fixed and
it will still be a major issue for women
everywhere.

This certainly is not going to

change when there continues to
be little effort made to remedy
this gap. Even in what is a more
progressively aware country like
the United States the problem
persists. According to the Gina
Davis Institute on Gender in

lack of woman onscreen is only

emphasized with the lower caliber
of roles and lessened importance
to the plot. The female characters
are frequently maligned to roles

where they are over-sexualized

http://www.freeimages.com/browse.phtml?f=download&id=437593

http://cloudcinema.ru/CCPics/36/4836.jpg
RKO Radio Pictures 1933

and helpless, existing to be props

for themen.In her video series

entitled Feminist Frequency
feminist writer Anita Sarkeesian
discusses the overly prevalent
trope of damsels in distress and
how it marginalizes the influence
that women can have in finding
solutions. These scenarios turn the
women into objects in what Sarkeesian refers to as the subject/object dichotomy where the charters
only exist as plot devices to be
acted upon. This dichotomy often
leads to rather lacking characters,
such as in the case of young Tara
and Cinderella who was all to disappointed when she realized how

unhealthy it is that she centered

her dreams around a man who
only knew her in the form she presented to him. Sarkeesian goes on
to point out how unhealthy this dynamic of male /female interaction
is especially when it is frequently
used as a model for childrens
entertainment. With the pre-existing lack of female representation
on-screen any over-whelming presence of characters that are less than
optimal calls to reason, is this what
we want our youths to look up to?
When asked about how she now
views the entertainment that she
used to love mindlessly consuming when was a small child, Tara

explains that she feels like a fish

who has finally noticed the water it
is swimming in in how she cant
fully enjoy them anymore because
I see the discrepancies that have
become normalized by our society,
but will work in her future career
endeavors to improve the variety
and quality of available roles for
women in the industry.

http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/03/damsel-in-distress-part-1/
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/02/25/surprise-women-are-still-under-represented-in-media/
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/pages/the-problem
http://seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/key-findings-gender-roles-2013.pdf