Don’t believe Hollywood’s sexual fantasies about female journalists

Don’t believe Hollywood’s sexual fantasies about female journalists

In the movies, we jump into bed with practically every interviewee. Strange how the men don’t get that treatment

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I was now more intrigued by his amazement at my failure to shag on the job than the prospect of a celebrity trying to seduce me. Was this yet another part of journalism I’d somehow missed out on, like learning shorthand? No, of course not. (Seriously, have you seen most journalists? No one’s trying to sleep with us – as a demographic, we’re a riposte to Darwinism.) But I eventually understood my friend’s amazement: among all the lessons to be gleaned from Hollywood movies, there are few that have become as established as the idea that female journalists have sex with the people they’re writing about.
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In 1940’s His Girl Friday, Hildy Johnson was so engrossed in her work, she didn’t even notice the romantic machinations around her masterminded by her ex-husband – and he was played by Cary Grant, for heaven’s sake. Now, the idea that female journalists work by spreading their legs has become so established, it is damn near a trope.

Whereas male journalists in movies work by using their malicious minds (Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole, Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler) or unimpeachable morality (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men, George Clooney and David Strathairn in Good Night and Good Luck), their female counterparts use a part of their anatomy that has nothing to do with their brain. Sometimes they do it to get a story, sometimes it just happens because, well, that’s what it’s like being a female journalist: you go to the office and, next thing you know, your knickers are around your ankles.

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To a certain extent, the depiction of female journalists in films reflects how movies in general belittle women who work these days. Women’s jobs, today’s Hollywood movies imply, are a mere hurdle they need to scale before discovering the meaning of life (marriage). But the Hollywood obsession with female journalists’ sex lives feels especially ridiculous as there are few professionals who film folk encounter more than journalists. So this idea that female journalists are all just dying to jump into bed with them is a fascinating insight into certain film-makers’ tragic sexual fantasies.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/29/hollywood-sexual-fantasies-female-journalists-sex-lives