My thoughts on gender and race representation.

    So we all know the story, right? How HollyWood seems to have an exorbitant amount of white male stars in their movies. This also applies to videogames, and, to a lesser extent, books. (Mostly those for young adults.)

"The results across [G, PG, PG-13, R] reveal that
73% of the characters are male. This translates into a ratio
of 2.71 males for every 1 female."
       -Dr. Stacy L. Smith – Annenberg School for Communication

    Now. I don't argue that this is a problem, however, I do argue with many of the medias way of fixing it. Simply throwing character that meet the requested parameters is treating a symptom, not the disease so to speak. Here's why I say this. For those of us who are writes, this will be easier to understand, but I think everyone will be able to grasp what I'm saying. For someone creating, writing, and representing a character, its significantly easier if they relate to that character on multiple levels. I see this in my own work, in how my male characters tend to be widely developed, while females tend to just be blank shells, all with the same base personality. It isn't becasue I have a problem with women. It's because for me, as a adolescent male, I find it really difficult to put myself in someone elses shoes. I don't write female characters simply because I don't really know how. I have a few good ones, but they are all of a more in-the-middle type of thinking, where I could easily just make them male, and move on. I don't know how women think. It's that simple. And I believe this is the same for those high up in media production positions. How can a privileged white male be expected to correctly represent an opressed, black female from the 1800's? Maybe you'll get someone who's brilliant, but in all likelihood, you probably won't.

    Effectively, my final argument is this. Don't try to artificially represent those who havn't had enought representation, actually represent them. HollyWood needs more black, Mexican, female, just anything that isn't getting its proper say, not in the lowely worker positions, but in writing positions. Producing, directing. I can say right now that I can only name ONE director off the top of my head that isnt a white male. That's pretty sad. And yes I focused most of my argument of the movie industry, but this also applies to games, and to a lesser extent, books. Let's fix this people. The media needs some diversity among its work force.






~Sorry for all the spelling errors,
            Mars