Every week, when I go around to the various sites from which we pull the numbers for Box Office Hell, my second stop is Box Office Prophets. And every week, when I go to that site, I see in the left-hand box on their homepage a little box labled “This is So Last Week,” their pop-culture quiz. Now, the words “pop culture” can evoke a lot of different things, right? Yet every single week (or at least, every single week since I started really paying attention to this) the picture in that box features a scantily clad, usually buxom woman, with an emphasis on boobs and cleavage.

I mean, I get that this is a site devoted to pop culture and Hollywood, but aren’t even those things about more than women’s boobs? Why are boobs what’s featured in the most prominent visual spot on their home page every single week? This bullshit pandering to the male libido, the reduction of women consistently to being only important when they’re revealing their cleavage for the visual stimulation of men, continues to be problematic in the film industry, particularly in a year when even the Indie Spirit nominations failed to recognize a SINGLE female director outside the Cassavetes category (for Pariah and Circumstance). So many strong, visionary, artistic female directors they could have chosen to recognize under Best Director — not least of all Lynne Ramsay for We Need to Talk About Kevin, Megan Griffiths for her excellent first feature The Off Hours, Miranda July for The Future, Dee Rees for Pariah, Sophia Takal for her low-budget breakthrough, Green. And they couldn’t figure out a way to recognize a SINGLE woman in the director’s categories for the Indie Spirits, even in Best First Feature? Natural Selection and Another Earth are both good films, yes, but are they better directed than Pariah? Than The Off Hours? Than We Need to Talk About Kevin?

I mean, criminy. I’m not advocating for quotas or anything, but could those nominations be any more white and male? Are stories from female and minority voices so unimportant that even an awards event supposedly dedicated to independent cinema can’t make room for their perspectives? It’s like those perpetual goddamned panels at film festivals where they cull out the female directors and writers and actors into a “women’s” panel and then the moderator asks dumbass questions like “So, what’s it like to be a female director?” You mean, what’s it like to write a story and direct a cast and crew, with all that cleavage always getting in the way? About what it’s like to be a guy with a penis to keep tucked into his boxers, I imagine. Just higher up. Neither has anything to do with the brains in your head. Everything in life does not have to be about sex and gender. So why does our industry continue to marginalize female artists?

This male domination of even the indie film world is something that is not going to change until and unless enough people keep bitching about it and force that change. Occupy Independent Film, people. Or hey, maybe we just need to follow the lead of sites like Box Office Prophets, where women are consistently reduced to tits and ass, and Film Independent should add a “Female Director with Best Cleavage” award. Maybe then we’d actually see some women get nominated, eh?

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