![]() And the sexy, powerful woman trope can be seen everywhere - from TV to video games and even to the way women leaders in history, like Cleopatra, are seen as sex symbols. Powerful women in film and television are often characterized by their naked bodies in ways that men are not. Their characters don’t inherently need to be nude to be interesting, well-rounded people, but society’s obsession with women’s sexuality devalues them if they are not catering to a patriarchal sex fantasy.Ī recent analysis by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media found that women movie leads were four times more likely to be shown naked than their male counterparts. Women are subjected to being viewed through a patriarchal lens that focuses extensively on how attractive they are to heterosexual men, a phenomenon known as the male gaze. One reason for this might be because of who is behind the camera. Few shows have one-to-one ratios and none that I’ve seen solely show men naked. My experience as a viewer aligns with the analysis’s findings: Most media that features nudity skews towards showing naked women. It made me realize that the only bodies I had ever seen naked onscreen were of cis women, whose bodies are almost always displayed gratuitously.Īfter finishing “Babylon Berlin,” I started to become aware of the boobs-to-balls ratio in the shows and movies that I watched. Male bodies were presented in sex scenes and in nonsexual settings, like skinny dipping and nude body searches. I started noticing this disparity after watching the first season of “Babylon Berlin,” which featured the first televised male nude scene that I had ever seen. ![]() One 2018 analysis of over 1,000 popular films found that around 25% of women in these films had nude scenes, compared to 9% of men. Seeing naked women on screen is fairly standard in film and television, but male nudity isn’t as common. In high school, as I started to watch more TV from around the world, I started to think about the discrepancies between the ways women and men are portrayed onscreen, especially when it comes to nudity. These tests are flawed in many ways, but they are designed to get us thinking about what we’re seeing on screen when it comes to representation. The sexy lamp test, for example, tries to determine how important a woman is in the story - if you can replace her character with a sexy lamp without the story falling apart, then it isn’t good representation. Obviously, the Bechdel test only scratches the surface when it comes to a woman’s role in a story. When Alison Bechdel first created the test in 1985, most films were not able to pass, but, in recent years, over 50% do. ![]() ![]() The most famous is probably the Bechdel test for women’s representation - two women must have a conversation about a topic other than a man in the film for it to pass. There are several tests to quantify how well a narrative treats characters who are women. ![]()
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