From my memory as a schoolboy in the 1980s, it was mostly just endless profanity whatever there wasn’t an adult in hearing. I can just imagine the reaction to a movie full of teenagers who can’t speak a sentence without at least one four letter word in it.
According to wiki, a 2022 study covering 341 films over 40 years showed that 95% passed the reverse Bechdel test. So there’s an imbalance in Hollywood.
Is this really a bad thing though? We’re not discussing Shakespeare; this thread is about shitty Hollywood TV shows. Admittedly it’s been shown that films passing the Bechdel test tend to have higher rates of return, so the imbalance is bad for capitalism. But sometimes you have to make financial sacrifices to advance the greater goal of order under patriarchy. Hail Cobra!
But this view is too narrow. Statistical rankings of gender equality by country show the US having greater gender equality than Japan by a hefty margin. (The US is put alongside the Netherlands and Colombia, while Japan is next to Bhutan and Angola. The 2 countries leading the patriachy list are Sudan and Pakistan - a triumph of the will I say.)
And yet Japanese manga and anime tend to have stronger and more varied female characters. I’ll comment on the top 12 manga with highest book sales. All of them barring one are Shonen or Seinen comics, which means that the target audience is male (boy and young male adult). The outlier was Doraemon which has a children’s demographic.
One Piece - has strong female characters
Doraemon - not sure, general framework is boy with crush on girl. Probably Hollywood friendly.
Golgo 13 - hard boiled, not sure.
Detective Conan - has strong female characters
Dragon Ball - I think it has strong female characters. At any rate an earlier work of the author had a female lead, IIRC.
Naruto - has strong female characters
Demon Slayer - has strong female characters
Slam Dunk - not sure
KochiKame: Toykyo Beat Cops - I had not heard of this one.
Jujutsu Kaisen - has strong female characters
Crayon Shin-chan - not sure
Attack on Titan - has strong female characters
So a culture creating works with interesting female characters can also be promisingly patriarchal. I implore our overlords to look at the bigger picture.
Or, if boys haven’t changed too much since I was one, it’ll be bathroom humor. And as @Der_Trihs suggested, profanity.
Although “grade school” in my era meant elementary school which topped out at grade 5 = age 10-11. IIRC, adult-quality profanity other than bathroom words was pretty rare in that crowd. But we grew our vocabulary real quick once we hit middle school, harbingers of puberty, etc.
To steal a phrase from software development, it’s a smell and smells need further investigation. Why is it unbalanced? What is the impact on viewers? What is the impact on actors? How is the imbalance related to writers, directors, producers?
There are other important imbalances: there are a lot more works about police, than carpenters for example. And as you said, there are other ways to measure gender equality.
But I think it is important. By focusing on men’s perspectives, we’re missing out on a variety of women’s perspectives. How does this shape how we see women?
This thread had me thinking about the original Smurf figures in the 80’s. While it is interesting how a new product, without any existing lore, was created with 100 different males and just 1 female, but it’s even more interesting that I didn’t even notice.
That’s how I feel watching the opening credits; the guy is almost always listed first. Sure, maybe because he’s more famous, but then why are the guys all more famous?
To answer the OP’s question: basically, if a show predominantly featured men or boys, they would add a bit of diversity by throwing in a woman or two.
It’s not so much that it was remotely every show, just how common it was. And, similar to the Bechdel test, how much less often we had the reverse.
One example that came to my mind from the 1990s was Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. They added a second girl, when their source material only had one, in order to try and diversify a bit more.
And I will note to @Spice_Weasel that the 1987 series also added Irma, Channel 6’s secretary and April’s friend who she unsuccessfully tried to keep from learning about the Turtles. I had a bit of a crush on her as a kid.
The real token female was when they added Venus, their long lost “sister” (i.e. another Turtle transformed by the same Ooze at the same time), in the live action Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, which basically replaced the 1987 cartoon after its cancellation.
This happens in literature, too. There’s a whole class of stuff called “Women’s Fiction” largely because it deals with the lives of women. When we keep the stuff of women’s lives confined to these neat little genre categories it makes it very, very easy for the average reader to be blissfully ignorant about the stuff of women’s lives. Yet some of the greatest works of literature are about women’s lives. We don’t need a separate literary category for our gender.
Directing this back to movies and TV, the same sort of segregation exists. It was my husband who pointed it out to me. Women generally enjoy a lot of stuff that is marketed to men, but men frequently act allergic to anything with a whiff of femininity. Not men here, of course. But there’s a general attitude where there’s mainstream entertainment and then there’s women’s stuff.
That may or may not be true, and it probably isn’t as true as a lot of people think. But just the fact that entertainment executives think it’s true causes a lot of damage.
Anecdote: My mom was an elementary school teacher, and she wanted to do everything she could to encourage her students to read, so she kept all forms of age-appropriate reading material in her classroom. Consistently the most popular book with her students, among both genders, was the American Girls book about Addie. The boys liked it because, regardless of her sex, she was a victim of discrimination due to her race (it’s a segregated school district, and all of her students were black), so they could relate to her. Well, that, and the American Girl books in general just tend to be very good books.
To bring it back to books: many boys or men won’t read books written by woman. It’s why Alice Mary Norton wrote as Andre Norton and Joanne K Rowling as JK Rowling.
The Smurfs are from the 1950s.
And why Susan Eloise Hinton wrote The Outsiders as S.E. Hinton.
It wouldn’t occur to me to notice the name of the author. Much less which gender their name suggests.
I’m sure some people care about that stuff. But at least some bunch don’t.
Again, is this actually true, or is it just an “everyone knows”?
Well, google says it is true:
A Nielsen Report from 2024 agrees.
It’s what publishers think is true, which is all that really matters, for the author. It’s especially relevant for certain genres, such as science fiction. I have a friend who writes thrillers and sci-fi/post-apoc who was advised to use a man-sounding name. She used a man sounding name for post-apoc and her full name for thillers.
This should all be contexualized with the fact that women overwhelmingly make up the majority of readers, period. I imagine this is all happening at the implicit bias level, and that women are no less susceptible to this bias.
What about the version of Ghostbusters with all the characters flipped in gender?
I mean, it’s a problem either way. But if it’s a myth, the solution to the problem is different to the solution if it’s actually true.
For sure.
But at the same time, actual self-reinforcing spirals are very hard to break. If e.g. actual male preferences are conditioned by what’s actually published and what’s actually published is conditioned by actual male preferences, even though both are artificial artifacts of the other, you sorta need to use the Gordian Knot technique or the nuke it from orbit approach to break the self-reinforcing spiral.
Who is in a position to apply that much force to a pernicious social / commercial problem?
Strangely, the major SF awards tend to go to women more than men.
After Doug Henshall left Shetland the obvious thing to do was promote Tosh to be the new DI. And to my surprise they did. Alison O’Donnell was largely unknown outside of the show, and was still quite young, but she led the cast fantastically, even if it is shared with Ashley Jensen (who was trying to shake off Agatha Raisin).
When I think of classic authors like Bujold, I can’t help but think they’ve vastly improved the genre. The major issue I always had with classic science fiction was the lack of characterization and for me, discovering her writing redefined my relationship to the genre. Today there are a lot more options for readers/writers of all genders and I think that’s a lot because of the influence of women. As a writer, I have aspirations to write science fiction because of writers like Bujold.
What sells in this genre is often what’s different, because sci-fi readers love new ideas and perspectives, and when that difference is attributable to experiencing life as a woman (or a trans person, or a person of color) well, sometimes that difference creates some really cool shit.