Under assault
Women are getting the blame for TV violence
The image of the scantily clad, beautiful female corpse has become a well-worn trope on our screens. Actresses have long been cast as victims of violent, often sexual, assault and murder, with shows ranging from The Bridge to Game of Thrones picking up critical acclaim and accolades for such grisly entertainment.
It’s an issue that has aroused concern in recent years – in 2013, Allan Cubitt the writer of BBC Two drama The Fall (starring Gillian Anderson, pictured right) was forced to defend his portrayal of violence against women.
But while many reasons have been given for the rise of sexual violence on television and in film, Germaine Greer has now offered a novel one: that “female victimisation sells” – and the main consumers are women. “Who is watching and reading the proliferating imagery of female victimhood?” Greer has written in a column for this week’s Radio Times, “Women, that’s who.”
These are just the latest controversial comments by the famous feminist, and if they were designed to bait the #Metoo generation of feminists, they’ve proved effective. On Twitter, Asia Argento and Rose Mcgowan, two of Harvey Weinstein’s most vocal alleged victims, swiftly criticised Greer, calling her “a fail and a fraud”.
Is there truth behind her comments? She builds her theory from claims that “women make up 60 and 80per cent of readers of crime fiction” and that true crime channels are “principally watched by women” – although she offers no such statistics about TV crime drama, a different beast entirely. Greer also speciously cites a much-referenced study from 2008 about how often women indulge in rape fantasies.
As Greer’s column shows, proving who watches crime drama – let alone why – can be tricky. However, what’s more pertinent, and easier to deduce, is who is creating the scenes of sexual violence on our screens. Because even if women do love watching crime, they don’t have much choice but to watch what is created by the men. And it is, by and large, men. In 2014, Directors UK found that less than 10 per cent of female directors had directed crime serials between 2011 and 2012. In the same period, no female directors worked on major dramas such as Luther and Being Human. In the US, women accounted for 28 per cent of all television creators, directors, writers, producers and editors in 2016-17.
“It’s not so much that women enjoy watching sexualised violence in shows, [it’s that] we’ve all become desensitised to it,” says Finn Mackay, feminist author and co-founder of the Reclaim the Night marches against sexual violence. “It’s very wrong and dangerous to blame women [for watching crime dramas] when they are under-represented in television production and the media generally.”
Women do, however, write the lion’s share of crime novels, according to crime author Denise Mina – so it’s no surprise, then, that the portrayal of women on the page is more nuanced. The past 30 years have witnessed an increase in diverse and intriguing female characters. Authors such as Mina, Sara Paretsky, Val Mcdermid and others have put women at the heart of crime fiction – and while their novels will refer to sexual violence, Mina says it is “much broader and more complex” than what we see in TV drama. “It’s not just women being disposed of, but women investigating sexual violence or getting through the aftermath of it,” she says. “It’s not just a screaming woman with a ripped blouse.”
Mina, author of the Garnethill crime trilogy, agrees with Greer that “women are very interested in crime and crime fiction”, but says it doesn’t mean they want to see their gender repeatedly assaulted on television of an evening. She only hopes that the kind of progressive stance towards violence against women shown by her and her fellow crime novelists will eventually make it on to our screens. “It takes a long time to trickle down into television,” says Mina. She has had two of her novels, The Field of Blood and The Dead Hour, adapted for BBC One, and expresses dissatisfaction at the process.
“Even if you have a female writer or director, the narrative forms in television and film are essentially male, and the people who control the money are men. The fallback position is the male gaze.” Mina cites an instance during the adaptation of her novels in which “the discussion was about how non-fat my fat, female central character could be, because we couldn’t have a fat girl on television being an active lead.”
Contrary to Greer’s comments, crime drama’s fetishisation of violence against women has inspired vocal dissent from women in recent years. Helen Mirren – known for her long-standing performance in Prime Suspect – and playwright David Hare are among the high-profile names who have criticised their own industry’s fascination with young, female corpses. In 2015, Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine admitted: “I’ve had enough of watching women get abused.” Other actresses, Doon Mackichan, Robin Weaver, Polly Kemp and Claire Cordier, wrote a letter to The Guardian last year demanding “a year without rape, violence, dead women on slabs [on television]”.
Moreover, increased scrutiny has led to some much-needed sensitivity. The gratuitous depiction of 50 acts of rape in five series of Game of Thrones is a world away from dramas like Broadchurch or Apple Tree Yard, and their respective explorations of the impact of assault on female characters.
But this doesn’t compensate for the fact that, however sensitively portrayed rape may be, the extent to which it is
‘It’s not so much that women enjoy watching sexualised violence in shows, we’ve all become desensitised to it’
served up as a plot point is exhausting. In the past year, female characters have been assaulted in televisual triumphs including Big Little Lies, Top of the Lake, Taboo and The Handmaid’s Tale. They have won awards, but they still rely on violence towards women in a way that can sometimes feel exploitative.
Take The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4. Originally a landmark feminist novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood, it creates a dystopian near-future where fertile women are routinely raped by powerful men. It’s an artful piece of television, with deftly handled rape scenes – but the first season still included instances of female assault that felt unnecessarily brutal.
The only benefit of Greer’s comments is that they remind us of how far we have to go to reach a stage where violence is not a cornerstone of on-screen female narratives. Certainly, having more women behind the scenes may help: for instance, Phoebe Wallerbridge, who created Fleabag, a series about a sexually dysfunctional woman in her 20s that was snapped up by Amazon after being quietly released on BBC Three in July 2016. Wallerbridge’s latest project, Killing Eve, was acquired by BBC America and is about the relationship between a female MI5 officer and a woman assassin. It occupies the kind of genre where female characters would typically get abused. In Waller-bridge’s hands, it’s an off-kilter comedy.
Certainly, the #Metoo campaign is spurring change – starting in Hollywood. In January, The Hollywood Reporter claimed that “studios are steering clear of sex”, with previously slated steamy films such as a Hugh Hefner biopic and James Franco’s film about a teenage prostitute lingering in development.
With any luck, this heightened sensitivity will trickle down to our small screens, too. Then, Greer’s argument will be obsolete, rather than just wrong-headed.