Speaking of movies...

...The Hathor Legacy has been having an interesting discussion about how the film industry actively keeps female characters off the screen. This starts as early as how screenwriters are trained:

According to Hollywood, if two women came on screen and started talking, the target male audience’s brain would glaze over and assume the women were talking about nail polish or shoes or something that didn't pertain to the story. Only if they heard the name of a man in the story would they tune back in. By having women talk to each other about something other than men, I was "losing the audience."

The blogger was totally frustrated by the ever-shifting excuses made, and eventually threw up her hands:

I concluded Hollywood was dominated by perpetual pre-adolescent boys making the movies they wanted to see, and using the "target audience" – a construct based on partial truths and twisted math – to perpetuate their own desires. Having never grown up, they still saw women the way Peter Pan saw Wendy: a fascinating Other to be captured, treasured and stuffed into a gilded cage.

However, she does explore a subsequent question, fascinating in an industry so driven by money: Why discriminate if it doesn’t profit? Her conclusion that it's mostly about ego and self-protection fits with stereotypes we have for film industry personalities, but that seems to indicate that things aren't going to change anytime soon... Sigh.