Just a note re the gender and cinema tools/instruments thread: This conversation about 'astonishment' of sexual portrayals of women without a similar astonishment about stereotyping, even sexually narrow, portrayals of men is in itself a most astonishing phenomena. Are we (film and gender scholars) blind, too narrowly focused on our own gender navels, too unable to see the effects of such one-dimensional focus on women? An unarticulated assumption of such a focus on women seems to be that men are favored by the tools of cinema production. But "favored"? Advantaged in some way? How? If men inherit a culture's conditioning for taking up tools and instruments and the resulting authority or 'power' to create the stories and images of our lives, how is that burden in the long run only an 'advantage' for their gender--and somehow a disadvantage for women? Are power and authority to create because they (men) inherit the disposition to make the stories of our lives only an advantage? And if women do not inherit an equal disposition to take up the tools and instruments of creating our culture's stories thereby disadvantaged... ONLY? What seems more and more clear as film and gender scholars press into gender research is the paradox of advantage/disadvantage and empowerment/disempowerment... not the opposite... that women, for instance, are somehow ONLY victimized or that men are ONLY, by implication, favored or advantaged. The line of questioning and conclusion drawing of this latest discussion thread seems to be astonishingly one dimensional. Surely, the interest (somewhere in us) is to see both men and women inherit from our culture's conditioning (or redirect gene construction... if that is what must happen) a similar disposition for wielding the tools and instruments of cinema. But to invest scholarship in just a one-dimensional take on women is surely not the best way to go about achieving this end. All comments so far seem healthy, intelligent, and correct, but could we not open up the subject a bit more, to complicate it... as it surely needs to be? In a message dated 1/26/03 10:54:25 PM, [log in to unmask] writes: << Most of us are sensible to the surprising >> resurgence [laugh] of the male gaze in visual media. >> I for one am bored and intellectually astonished at the frequently obscene, >> let alone sexist, portrayals of women, their lives, and their actuality in >> media. the propensity of mass culture and mass media to see/portray women as "essentially" sexual, hardly needs to be argued . . . and this tendency is, as susanna suggests, very much having a "resurgence" . . . still, this does not necessarily entail the corollary claim that the instruments of sexism are themselves gendered male and inherently [if not "essentially"] sexist . . . even though some tools or instruments seem predisposed to lead in certain specific directions [e.g., the apparatus of television seems to entail different cultural formations than the apparently similar apparatus of cinema] it surely remains possible to appropriate a single apparatus or mechanism for radically different purposes . . . the fact that the camera has been appropriated for sexist purposes may say much more about access to money and other resources [including cameras, film, support systems, etc.] than about anything inherent in cameras themselves >> ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu