The silence of the not-men

The BBC shared a graph last year after the Oscars:

Graphic showing that more men than women speak in 24 recent best picture films

Pretty stunning, isn’t it. Chicago is the only one in which women speak more.

Just think how that seeps into all of our consciousnesses, without our even noticing it. Just think how it’s been seeping in our whole lives, and the implications for how absolutely everyone sees and understands and thinks about women. What does all that silence and absence suggest? That women are an afterthought, an oddity, an exception, a deviation from the normal; that women live in the shadows, doing their weird spooky womany thing, and emerge only occasionally, to say “thanks honey” or cuddle a baby or be raped or murdered or both. That women are helpless and incompetent and feeble.

Also, that men are the real people, that men do all the real work, that everything that matters in life is done by men and planned by men and talked about by men, that only what men do is interesting or important or heroic or effective.

I look forward to hearing more about the cis privilege women have.

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