Hollywood keeps career women trapped in rigid stereotypes

I'll be the first to admit that I'm pretty pop culturally unaware. In fact, one of my partner's favorite party tricks is to name a slew of recent movies and ask how many I've seen. The answer is almost always none.

Perhaps my general ennui with Hollywood films is a subconscious (or not-so-subconscious) response to their portrayal of women. Now, I'm not going to rant about what you might expect -- women portrayed as sex objects, marriage-obsessed individuals, weaklings, or morons -- although there is plenty of that happening too. I'm not even going to point out how few women possess lead roles in major blockbuster films. (By the way, there's a great blog on all these issues, if you're a little more pop-culture or film savvy than I am.)

Instead, I today take issue with how career women are often portrayed as what NPR pop culture critic John Powers refers to as "bossy, uptight and utterly without personal lives. What they need, we're supposed to think, is a man. But before they can get one, they must have a mortifying comeuppance."

His story, "On Hollywood's Strong, Self-Hating Women," is a fantastic and balanced insight into yet another one of those gendered stereotypes that we as Americans have seemed to internalize without a second thought -- namely that career women are emotionless individuals who need to realize how much they need a man.

Powers' article offers several examples of films (again, none of which I've seen) in which Hollywood seems to unleash "dark, paranoid fantasies about unwomanly women and pushy shrews. It served up a parade of Prada-wearing devils." Powers attributes this oddly consistent image of women to a backlash against the feminist movement, fueled largely by a target audience of insecure adolescent men.

While it's great that professional women are becoming more common on the big screen, we need to get better at portraying them more realistically.

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