In an interview with TheWrap.com, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd attacked Hollywood as a “sick society” that claims to be liberal, but fails to treat women as equals in the movie biz. Dowd cited the “shocking statistic” that in 2013 and 2014 only 1.9 percent of the directors of the 100 top-grossing films were women. Then she compared Hollywood to other “sick societies” like Saudi Arabia, and the Catholic Church.
Dowd said she found the situation depressing. “The other two things I covered like this were Catholic Church and Saudi Arabia,” she said in an interview with TheWrap. “Somewhere along the line I realized — wow, this incredibly liberal town full of men who say they’re feminists has been warped. It’s a sick society — like the Catholic Church and Saudi Arabia. If you exclude the hearts and minds of women, you get warped. That’s what happened to Hollywood.”
Dowd wrote a 70,000-word piece for Sunday’s New York Times Magazine after she “spent six months interviewing dozens of executives, producers, writers, directors and actors about the sense of marginalization many women feel in the industry.”
Hollywood liberals also drew anti-Catholic analogies:
”It’s kind of like the church,” Anjelica Huston told Dowd. ”They don’t want us to be priests. They want us to be obedient nuns.”
But Dowd’s analogy wavered when she started lamenting Hollywood’s fixation on teenaged boys, who are less comparable to Catholic bishops and Saudi kings:
The more I talked to people, the clearer it became that if the luminous Hollywood of my childhood was obliterated for good, it all started with Jaws in the summer of 1975, which would devour half a billion dollars at the box office. America fell in love with the blockbuster, and Hollywood got hooked on the cohort of 15-year-old boys. It has never wavered in this obsession, even though girls and women buy half the movie tickets and watch more TV series, and even though teenage boys are increasingly fixated on gaming.
