Dec. 09--I'd love to make a holiday tradition of tuning in with my daughter to the annual ratings juggernaut that showcases -- worships, really -- one strong female after the next.
If only the women were wearing clothes.
The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show was Twitter's top trending story for much of Tuesday night, with something like 420,000 tweets about the festival of bras and thigh gaps. Ratings aren't out yet, but Victoria's Secret won the night in 2014 and 2013, and there's no reason to believe it won't do the same this year.
Fine. "Magic Mike" -- starring hot, barely clothed men -- made $167 million worldwide in 2012. Skin sells, especially sexy skin.
But "Lincoln" came out the same year, and it grossed $275 million. "The Avengers," which starred not one, but four men (and a lone female who was later called "a slut" and "a whore" by her co-stars) also hit theaters that year. That one made $1.5 billion worldwide.
What's my point?
I have two, actually. The first is the same point women -- and increasingly men -- have been making for years in entertainment: Women deserve better roles.
For every objectifying "Magic Mike" romp, there are a handful of pictures starring men saving the world, exploring space, fighting espionage, inventing cool things, forever changing the course of history -- always with their clothes on. Women, as Variety notes, are too often "the girlfriend, the mother or the wife. Their value is determined in relation to the people they bed, marry or birth." And, the same article points out, they only accounted for 12 percent of protagonists in the top-grossing films of 2014.
Ugh.
Television does a far better job of populating our screens with females. Women made up 42 percent of speaking characters on prime time TV in 2014-2015, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.
(Almost half!)
But characters are fictional. When large numbers of people tune in to watch women portraying themselves on television, too often those women are in their undies.
Which brings me to my second point: We've got a long way to go.
Apart from the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, I can't think of an all-female show that routinely scores huge ratings and takes over Twitter.
I can think of a whole bunch of all-male shows that do: The Super Bowl. The World Series. The NBA championships. The Stanley Cup playoffs. Republican presidential debates (pre-Carly Fiorina).
It's a bummer that one of the year's most female-centric nights of TV is a lingerie fashion show.
It would be less of a bummer if audiences routinely flocked to their TV sets to watch women competing to prove who's strongest, fastest, smartest, funniest -- with their clothes on.
That would help Victoria's Secret's angels feel a lot less sinister.
hstevens@tribpub.com
