Women in Cinema
It can be said with no exaggeration that without women there would be no cinema. Sadly, this is so not because the natural concerns of genuine womanhood have been addressed in film, but because from the very beginnings of cinema a woman has been made the centerpiece of attraction, an object of desire. This systematic cultivation of women as objects of desire has been akin to the gradual process of drug addiction: at first, the effects were rather mild and pleasantly stimulating - and thus considered not only harmless by both men and women, but even liberating - however, as time went on and doses increased, a feverish state of dependency set in. What has started out as a quest for liberation from convention ended up being a different form of enslavement.
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| Marilyn Monroe in "Seven Years' Itch" Source:www.telegraph.co.uk |
Today women can be seen to have divided themselves into roughly two groups: those, who continue to perceive this enslavement as "liberation"; and those, who vaguely sense that the real search for the true liberation of women has not even begun.
Cinema, in particular, has made a devastating contribution here. One definition of 99% of cinema would be to say that it specializes in creating beauty-substitutes. Through personality cults of stars, through promotion of escapism into fantasy, it creates images, which encourage superficiality and vanity - the two qualities that are already sufficiently developed as it is within all of us. And since women, due to their superior intuitive faculty, are more susceptible to suggestions through imagery than men, the effect on the female population has been nothing short of catastrophic. Most women are no longer able to separate vanity from beauty; to be an object of desire has become synonymous with being beautiful. During her televised funeral, Princess Diana (a role-model for millions of girls and women around the world) was eulogized (by an anchor-woman) as "an object of every man's desire". 
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