Page 17 - The Staunch Test

THE STAUNCH TEST

Still from Staunch Book Prize video ‘Copycat Writer’

Despite the amazing achievements of the female population around the world,

in film and TV dramas women are still so often shown as losing in life.
Depressingly frequently, female characters are only in a story as victims of
violence, to be stalked, abducted, held captive, raped or murdered. They end up
as photographs on an incident room wall, tied up and terrified in some hidden
location or naked and dead on an autopsy table.

Of course, there are female characters in screen roles who are empowered,
successful and respected, but weighed against so many examples of females as
victims and prey, the influence of positive role models is strongly diluted. Time
and again, rape is used as a plot point or as a backstory, or as a way of explaining
why a female character is angry, broken, motivated or empowered. As victims
of murder, they drive the action for the detective that the story is actually about.
Even in longer-running drama series, while their male counterparts continue to
get exciting storylines, strong female characters are likely at some point to

receive unwelcome sexual attention, be threatened, assaulted, raped or killed.
Writers simply can’t seem to help turning women into victims, if not sooner,
then later.

We grasp that showing women solely as stay-at-home mums in dramas set in
the present day would seem very odd and draw pointed criticism. An aproned
woman handing her husband his briefcase and kissing him goodbye as he goes

off to work before contentedly getting down to the housework (the stuff of
countless sitcoms) seems old fashioned today and rather tone deaf. A female
character of this kind is likely to be viewed as limited, downtrodden, stifled or
trapped, with her own ambitions non-existent or on hold.