Why can't Hollywood write women?

Exploring recent depictions of women in film and why they can be a challenge

I was recently watching a movie with my brother. The movie was well-made and entertaining, but I could not enjoy it. There was something off that I could not shake. This feeling continued to gnaw at me until I realized—it was the women. It was a male-centric movie, which is not inherently wrong, but the women in this movie lacked depth and were continually depicted as only objects of desire. To put it plainly — a man obviously wrote the movie.

Recognizing poor depictions of women is nothing new. Laura Mulvey coined the "male gaze" in 1975, and similar discussions had been taking place for years before then.

It's important to acknowledge the progress we've made. Female characters are now being given more depth, a significant shift since the time of Mulvey’s essay. However, recent films have shown that we still have a long way to go in our quest to portray women in media with the nuance they deserve. Even in 2024, female characters often find themselves trapped in the same old categories and stereotypes.

Contemplating the state of these depictions, I have to ask — why is it so challenging to write a nuanced woman? This is what I intend to explore.

While female centered and written cinema has existed for the medium’s entire history, these stories were largely relegated to the fringes. Early female characters were frequently cheerleaders for the main male character, such as in The Jazz Singer or they were otherwise preoccupied with men’s affections.

Once the Hays Code was introduced, female characters had even less hope in the major studios. The Hays Code regulated acceptable behavior for actors both in movies and in their personal lives. It censored the content that studios were able to produce and moralized film. As a result, during the era of the Hays Code, primarily stories depicting traditional, moral women in a positive light could be produced. There were many notable actresses in this era, but the parts they could play were severely limited.

Since the end of the Hays Code in 1954, Hollywood has recognizing many alternative ways that women can exist in cinema. However, the impacts still linger.

With men in charge of the major studios, most female characters have been written through the male gaze. In the words or Mulvey, the male gaze “projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.” In other words, men write the women they want to see in real life. Mulvey explains further:

“During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully complementary fantasy world.”

“Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the the language of the dominant patriarchal order.”

That internalization of male fantasies into the patriarchal order is what lingers today. Now that we know a little more about why we are here, we can begin to learn how to get out.

In short, writing women isn’t actually hard. The only reason it becomes difficult for men to write women is because they write their fantasies. These fantasies often feature a damsel in distress or a femme fatale or a virginal figure. These are all simplifications of women that limit their agency.

Writing a fantasy is not automatically nefarious. At its core, writing involves creating a new world born from imagination. The issue comes when those fantasies undercut the perspectives of women and limit their opportunities.

Hollywood will not be able to write women until we all acknowledge patriarchal fantasies. We have to know what is fantasy and where that comes from. We have to be able to confront our own biases.

When I started researching for this article, I was hoping that there might be some grand answer for how to fix female characters that could lead to better representation and influence society for good. However, it is undoubtedly more complicated.

Confronting harmful tropes involves confronting where they come from and admitting that we have flawed systems that sustain them. Bias are not isolated incidents but indicators of a larger story. Many of these larger stories involve psychological phenomena in men that impact how they see themselves relative to society.

One of these is the “hero instinct.” This comes from the biological drive to feel valuable to the community, and it results in men frequently seeing themselves as the hero in any particular situation. Men tend to romanticize their lives on these terms. There is nothing inherently wrong with that instinct. The issue comes when men’s heroics infringe on the agency of others. If men are heroic, they have to have a reason for their heroics. This can lead to inadvertently casting women in the role of the saved.

In real life, this phenomenon results in pushy or aggressive behavior from men who believe they are in the right since they are the hero. In film, it results in movies made from that perspective. Many of these do not question the heroics of their main character. Its okay for stories to have heroes, but when their perspectives goes unquestioned it can cause people to internalize that model.

Tendencies like these have created a feedback loop in which fantasies create film tropes, and in turn, film tropes create similar fantasies.

With this feedback loop, misogyny in film will not be tackled until we tackle misogyny in ourselves.

So guys… GET WORKING.

Meadows, P. (1995). Some Notes on the Social Psychology of the Hero. The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 239-247.

Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In L. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (pp. 14-23). Palgrave Macmillan.