Sexism in the Movies

Recently I read an article in the New York Times Magazine (being the elitist that I am) about the extreme age differences in onscreen couples. This was especially prevalent in the forties and fifties, most notably Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the movie To Have and Have Not, Bogart was forty-four and Bacall was nineteen, and a year after filming the movie, the two married. Of course, To Have and Have Not is a wonderful movie and I recommend it to anyone who is okay with watching movies in black and white, but it is a love story, and the age difference only serves to reinforce sexism in the movies regardless of whether the two were in love in real life. In The Graduate, a movie that might seem free of this kind of thing, Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Robinson) and Dustin Hoffman (Benjamin Braddock) were only six years apart. This is a good example of how a woman's age can heavily and unjustly affect people's perception of beauty while for men, age is a very minor factor, and even if they do really look old in the eyes of others words like "distinguished" are used to cover up the fact that they are at an age when a woman's beauty would most likely be dismissed regardless of whether it is present. This is monstrously unfair, but I also see no clear end to this objectifying practice as it is an major facet of the ingrained sexism that still survives in America today.

All respect to Meryl Streep for managing to repeatedly defeat this stereotype well into her sixties.