Almost1998: The Importance of Representation: The Serious Stuff

As a society, we are massively effected by the media. It defines our ideas about what we don’t already know, shaping assumptions and stereotypes based on what it presents to us. The media is our gateway to the rest of the world, outside our own personal bubbles. This means that what it does and doesn’t show us is incredibly important.

Representation in the media is something people have been fighting for for a long time. It effects a lot of the population: women, ethnic groups, the LGBATQ community, people with disabilities, mental health patients and many more. Chances are, if you’re not angry about representation, you’re probably already being represented.

Let’s get some stats in here, shall we?

Representation of women:

10% of all films have a gender balanced cast (20% in the UK, 0% in Australia, France, Japan, India and the USA).
31% of speaking roles are occupied by females.
23% of films have a female protagonist.
Women in film at 2x more likely to be shown in sexual clothing.
Out of those women sexualised in film, 36% are teenagers, 32% adults and 15% middle aged.
Comments about appearance are 5x more likely to be made towards female characters than male.
24.2% of females will have a nude scene, and 38.5% are thin. This may seem low, but it is compared to 11.5% and 15.7% for males.
Male characters are 22.5% more likely to be employed.
In the industry females make up 22.7% of producers, 19.7% of writers and 7% of directors.

Representation of race:

Across 100 top-grossing films of 2012, only 10.8% of speaking characters are Black, 4.2% are Hispanic, 5% are Asian, and 3.6% are from other (or mixed race) ethnicities. 76.2% are white.
Hispanic characters are 8.3% more likely to be shown in sexy attire than white characters, and 7% more likely to be fully nude.
In the industry 5.5% of directors are black males, for females this drops to less than 1%.
It is shown that when the director is black, the characters are 42.7% more likely to be black.

Representation of LGBT:

13.7% of characters identified as either lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. That’s 14 out of the 102 major films reviewed. 25 LGBT characters in total.
64.7% of these featured gay male characters, 23.5% featured lesbian characters, 17.7% contained bisexual characters, and 11.8% contained transgender female characters.
Male LGBT characters outnumbered female characters 64% to 36%.
Of the 25 different characters counted, 19 were white (76%) while only 3 were Black/African American (12%), 2 were Asian/ Pacific Islander (8%), and 1 was Latino (4%).
Of the 102 films reviewed, 19 were comedies and 8 contained LGBT characters.

All of this simply proves the point of unequal representation, which is something most of the people reading this will know about and understand already. What this blog post is really about, however, is the importance of equal representation.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the media depicts how we see the world. It’s supposed to be a representation of how things are, or how things should be. So when we see that women are almost 2x more sexualised than men, it can be really damaging.

This is most effective on the youth. Young people have smaller views of the world than adults, as they haven’t been around as long to learn and form their own thoughts and opinions. So when young girls see that 91.5% of legal professionals in film are male, it shows them that being a lawyer is only for men.

This unequal representation also breeds hate through xenophobia (fear of something different). People, in general, don’t like things they don’t know or understand. Due to the limited positive representation of people with disabilities, the LGBATQ community and people with mental health issues, things like this are not seen as ‘normal’.

People with disabilities are seen as weak and are used as a pity device. The LGBATQ community are seen as unnatural, confused or just used for comedic purposes (this especially applies to trans people), discounting the seriousness of LGBT completely. People with mental health issues are seen as aggressive and dangerous; there is a reason why an insane asylum is still one of the most popular settings for horror films/games.

What I’m trying to say is: lack of representation displays things that are not shown to be not normal. This is extremely toxic because it gives people a twisted idea of the norm, breeding xenophobia and hateful stereotypes.

It is also worth noting that data I have used above is for film only. Media is not just film, there are many platforms such as Television, the Internet and things like Video Games where the statistics are very different.

In the gaming industry especially, there is a massive gender divide. The amount of female characters drops from 31% (in film) to 15%. This drops further for female protagonists, making up only 4%, and only 40% of games have the option to take up a female character in multiplayer. As a lover of games, this is especially disappointing. Seeing no option for my gender to be the hero in almost every game I have seen or played is extremely discouraging. Furthermore, when there is a female character, she is usually used as a love interest for the male protagonist, or as someone to kill off so the male has a reason to do something. Over 80% of female characters are either sexualised, scantily clad or a vision of beauty, created for a straight male audience. Even though recent studies have shown that 48% of gamers are female.

In summary, representation in media is something that effects a lot of us without us realising it. It is something that needs to change drastically, the sooner the better. Luckily, there are a lot of people being made aware of these issues and calling industries out on unequal representation. Recently, there has been many complaints towards Ubisoft for their decision to make another male protagonist in their Assassin’s Creed series, so far an all male line up. This pushed them to give ‘Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China’ a female protagonist.

Pushes like these need to continue, as equal representation will not only encourage and include a much wider group of people, but also give a much fairer example of something other than the straight white male. This will decrease xenophobia and hateful stereotypes, decreasing sexism, racism and homophobia in the process. This is especially helpful for todays youth.