BlogHer - Ouch! Lack of Females in "Bee Movie" Stings - Comments

Yeah, it stung, but not for that reason

alyssaroyse — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:15:23 -0600

Frankly, Bee Movie just kinda sucked. I actually fell asleep (which may have more to do with being a working mom building a startup tech company, but.....)

But really, there were 2 lead characters here. And one was a woman. So i really didn't see the gender bias in this one. And i was looking for it.

From a bee perspective, the whole thing was preposterous. There are virtually no male bees in the real world, and all they do is, well make more bees. Once. But they went way out of their way to make a gender-role-neutral bee world. Which is pretty stupid. But then again, the bees also wore sweaters, drove cars, used machines to gather nectar.... So I can't make myself bitch about any of the other inconsistencies, if i'm willing to accept a love affair between bees and humans in teh first place.

But i have to say - the over all message was really good.

I'm gonna request that all my vegan friends who refuse to eat honey see it. They have to make honey. The really do.

But, um, dumb movie.
___________
Alyssa Royse
JUST CAUSE
make some good news!
www.JustCauseIt.com

Okay, I'll Buzz in

alyssaroyse — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:57:09 -0600

Dern it Suzanne - as usual, you made me think. Now I have to go see it. But, as an avid beekeeper and LOVER of my bees, hives, their honey and wax, I have been on the fence about seeing this. As others have pointed out, bee hives are pretty much a bastion of feminine energy. Out of 50,000 or so bees, nary a few hundred are males. and all they do is vie for the chance to impregnate the queen, and they die immediately afterward - in fact, they lose all their internal organs immediately after mating, hundreds of feet in the air, and are dead before they hit the ground.

i'm seeing it at 12:45 today, i'll chime in this afternoon. while drinking hot tea with the honey from my very own bees. (theres a few thousand of them in my profile picture.)

and while we're on the subject of bees and sex, nerve.com did a "sex advice from beekeepers" column, in which i was interviewed. it's amusing, very amusing. so here's some fun rainy day reading. http://www.nerve.com/regulars/sexadvicefrom/beekeepers/

more later.
___________
Alyssa Royse
JUST CAUSE
make some good news!
www.JustCauseIt.com

I'm voting with mah moneys.

Super Jive — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:36:34 -0600

I'm voting with mah moneys. My kids won't expire if they don't see every new kids' movie.

Stop pandering to us, indeed.

****
Your Pop Culture Librarian also writes almost daily at I, Asshole.

I think part of it

fabooj — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:29:08 -0600

Well a lot of it has to do with the writers too. They're mostly men. Men think they're funny. Men in Hollywood don't think women are funny. So, we do wind up with lots of one-dimensional characters of "others" because they don't know how to write for females, nor do they particularly care to try. Women are merely props for them.

"I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal. I cannot be comprehended except by my permission. I mean...I...can fly like a bird in the sky." Ego Trippin' by Nikki Giovanni
Visit me at faboo mama

It really is getting old, isn't it?

Liz Rizzo — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 09:21:03 -0600

And many of them do honestly think that only traditional gender stereotyping will sell.

It will be interesting to see how The Golden Compass does, as I believe Lyra is the first female protagonist in a series of books selling wide to boys and girls.

Liz Rizzo

I blog at Everyday Goddess.

Ouch! Lack of Females in "Bee Movie" Stings

Suzanne Reisman — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:20:18 -0600

Sex and gender in animated films tends to make me batty. Last fall, we were subjected to Barnyard, a movie about rebellious cows in which all male and female bovines were white with black spots and had udders. Whether this portrayal of bulls as cows was due to an udder (ha ha) lack of knowledge about bovine sex or a subversive attempt to present transgendered individuals as normal is unclear to me. (I wish it were a movie supporting transgenderism, but based on the inanity of the film, I suspect otherwise.) Now we have Bee Movie.

I didn't give Bee Movie any thought until I read an op-ed piece by Susan Brackney in Friday's New York Times. In her article, "The Real Life of Bees", Brackney pointed out how inaccurately the roles of male and female bees are depicted in the film. My antennae shot up. She wrote:

In Hollywood’s version, there are more than three times the number of male roles than female ones, but a cartoon of my own hive would have thousands of leading ladies and only a handful of male extras.

The nurses that tend the young and the workers that forage for pollen; the guards that keep predators like skunks away and the undertaker bees that unceremoniously haul out the dead: they’re all female. And whereas the movie’s protagonist is repeatedly told he must choose just one job and stick with it, my honeybees rotate through all of the available duties.

That’s because non-animated drones don’t collect pollen, or make beeswax, or even have stingers. If Mr. Seinfeld wanted realism (and an R rating), his male bees would be sex workers who do little more than mate with the queen — after which their genitals snap off. Worse: when winter comes, worker bees shove the freeloading males out into the cold. If drones are required in the spring, the queen will simply make more of them.

Maybe I am too sensitive. After all it is just a kids movie, and it has an important message, as Law School Mom at Diary of a Law School Mom points out:

There is love, law, and honey... The Bee Movie tackles corporate greed and the Vanishing Bee epidemic all in one fell swoop. If only the answer to the latter were as simple as Spielberg and crew make it.

Despite her criticisms of the characters in the film, Brackney is also glad that the movie brings attention to the critical shortage of bees this country is facing. (To simplify the issue, bee colonies have been dying and collapsing in swarms. Without bees to pollinate flowers, we won't be able to grow certain types of produce.)

On the other hand, I am pretty sick of movies and other forms of entertainment that refuse to feature girls because they think that boys won't want to buy things associated with girls, but that girls think nothing of entertainment that focuses on boys. Maybe this is true. If it is, there is only one way to change it: stop pandering. Females make up more than 50% of the population. I'm fairly certain that boys are not biologically wired to dislike things that feature girls. Most likely, they take their cues from the world around them. We're plenty happy to keep reminding them that everyone should like things that are "manly" and only girls and sissies should be able to enjoy items that are for girls. (And here I digress to point out that a large portion of entertainment designed to appeal to women is complete and utter sap, so I don't blame anyone for not wanting to see most of the "chick flicks" that are out there.)

After griping about the same issues that Brackney outlined about the gender roles of bee colonies being completely unrelated to what was portrayed in Bee Movie, Bug Girl at Bug Girl's Blog agreed with my thoughts:

Now, I can totally understand the movie writers choosing to not have that sort of skewed sex ratio [hives are normally 95% or more female] for the purposes of the movie. But they went in the direction of a 1950’s Leave it to Beaver sitcom, since what few female bees do appear are pretty much restricted to cooing over the “pollen jocks” or serving as tour guides. Even in an imaginary world, it’s all about men in Hollywood… converting a matriarchal society into a male-dominated jock fest–that’s annoying

Put out something that a wide variety of people can enjoy instead of playing up to gender stereotypes. Not only will audiences actually learn something related to the real world (male bees don't have stingers; male bovines are called bulls and don't have udders), but offering more examples of female characters doing a wide variety of tasks will give our kids – both boys and girls – more interesting examples to follow.

Suzanne also blogs about a variety of topics at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants