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“Nicholas Stoller, director of ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall‘ and ‘Get Him To The Greek,’ says, “There’s a misogyny in audiences, a much higher bar of required likability for women stars. You need to make the actress completely adorable, or else she’ll be thought of as the straight man or the bummer — which is why I focus so carefully on trying to write fully fleshed out roles for women in my movies.” To make a woman adorable, one successful female screenwriter says “you have to defeat her at the beginning. It’s a conscious thing I do — abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry 15 minutes into the movie.”

— A profile of actress Anna Faris in The New Yorker by journalist Tad Friend became a larger thinkpiece about the “required likability for women stars,” as one director put it put it. There’s a requirement that women on film are not too threatening to male — and one would assume, as well, female — audiences. You have to wonder why that is. I’ve always said that sexism still exists in 2011, only it is a lot less blatant than in years past. But if you ever needed evidence that sexism is alive and well, there you go. (If you’re curious, I wrote a post back in 2009 on this same general topic.) [The New Yorker via AnnaHolmes.Tumblr.com] Keep reading »