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Image Source<\/a><\/p>\n This past summer, some friends and I went to see How to Train Your Dragon 2<\/i>. I hadn\u2019t seen the first movie, but I had been assured it was good, so I was game. Some 102 minutes later, I walked out of the theater and announced, \u201cAll screenwriters should be fired.\u201d<\/p>\n Six months later, I couldn\u2019t tell you much about the plot of the movie or the names of the main characters. Throughout the entire film, I was distracted by a side character, Ruffnut Thorston (voiced by Kristen Wiig), a teenage girl whose crush on the film\u2019s initial antagonist is consistently played for laughs. You see, Ruffnut is\u2026 rough. She\u2019s not particularly pretty or feminine, and the absurdity of her crush is emphasized over. And over. And over.<\/p>\n In a recent interview <\/a>with TIME<\/i>, Fresh Off the Boat<\/i> star Constance Wu said, \u201cStereotypes are only dangerous when they are used as the butt of the joke\u2026What makes a stereotype harmful is when it\u2019s a one-dimensional person.\u201d Her comments apply perfectly to my discomfort with Ruffnut\u2019s character. Of course women perform different degrees of femininity. Of course, at times, our love is not requited. But Ruffnut is a stereotype\u2014a stereotype that shouldn\u2019t be normalized for the five- and ten-year-olds (of all genders) who innocently and uncritically went to see a movie about some dragons.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, my \u201call screenwriters should be fired\u201d mantra has not been swept away by magnificent representation in the months since. Over Winter Break, I watched the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D<\/i>., and I was utterly dismayed by how often female characters were referred to as \u201cgirls.\u201d I understand that people will say this a \u201ctiny,\u201d \u201cnitpicky\u201d problem, but it completely jolted me out of the storyline. I understand that part of the appeal of the show is how personal and professional lives become one and that the lead agent regularly takes on a mentoring, fatherly role in his young recruits\u2019 lives\u2014but a thirty-something former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, a girl<\/i>? No. Writers can do better than that. It would be so easy<\/i> to do better than that.<\/p>\n Because I know that we do not live in a world wherein all screenwriters can actually be fired and my tumblr crushes can take their places, here\u2019s what I\u2019d like to see instead: more female writers. Now, it\u2019s true that one of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. <\/i>writers is a woman, and it\u2019s possible that even if How To Train Your Dragon 2<\/i> had been written by a male-female partnership (as opposed to a single man), deeply discomforting gender stereotypes may still have been present. Women are not all inherently feminist, and there\u2019s plenty of internalized misogyny to go around, even for women who do think of themselves as feminist.<\/p>\n Still, having female writers in the room matters, because women can bring their personal experiences as just that\u2014personal experiences that reflect their multifaceted identities, rather than simple stereotypes. Furthermore, having more female writers has the potential to lead to more female-driven films (if we believe that women are more likely than men to value women\u2019s stories). And if there are more and better female roles<\/a> available for actresses, perhaps actresses can actually demand equal pay<\/a> for their work\u2026 and perhaps their red-carpet questions<\/a> will focus less on their dresses and kids and more on their characters.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a tiny snapshot of how it stands today: No female screenwriters<\/a> were nominated for a 2015 Golden Globe. BBC phenomenon Doctor Who<\/i> was without a single female writer for five seasons (in November, they added Catherine Tregenna<\/a> to the writing team for season nine). I picked Doctor Who<\/i> as my example because last May, students ran the Bechdel test<\/a> on seasons 1-7 of the rebooted Doctor Who<\/i>, resulting in a nice infographic that television shows with less devoted fan bases are spared.<\/p>\n And here\u2019s what I want for the future: I want to be able to watch a children\u2019s movie and not desire to stop every under-ten (let\u2019s be real: every everyone) on the way out of the theater so I can explain to them how sexist the film was. I want women to make up fifty percent of screenwriters, not fifteen<\/a>. I want a woman to write the episode where Skye and Simmons<\/a> end up together\u2014not just the fan fiction.<\/p>\n
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