So last Thursday started the movie workshop, where we somehow rounded up 14 kids, age 12-18, to come to the FMP so that they can learn how to make documentaries and movies under the pretense that they will be making documents about feminist issues.
The first day of the workshop, we talked entirely about machismo and sexism and gender stereotypes, and I was highly impressed at what Eva got the kids to say. First Eva asked the group to write on one side of a piece of paper, aspects of their character that they liked about themselves, and on the other side, aspects that they would like to find in a potential partner. Everyone said things like "I'm fun, and I'd like someone I could trust." or "I'm sincere, I'd like a kind person." So the point of the exercise was to show that men and women look for the same aspects in one another, it doesn't matter, everyone wants a good person. Then she asked the group to say what comes to mind when they hear the word "mujer" (woman) and then when they hear the word "hombre" (man), and we got lists like "home, sex, pretty, emotional, mother, wife, girlfriend" and "strong, machine, fear, work,...sex" respectively. The Colombian girl was like "If you're going to put 'sex' down for women, then I want it to be put under the man column." That's right, girl. The point of the exercise was that Eva wanted the group to see that we all want the same things from the opposite sex, what women want from men and what men want from women are interchangable, yet what we think of when we think of the opposite sex are not interchangable. Men aren't seen by society as those that belong in the home, and women aren't usually seen as strong. She was saying that these are stereotypes, and our society doesn't like to think that they're interchangable at all.
They were arguing about these stereotypes, and one of the boys from Morocco was like "Men do cry in real life. Not in front of people, and they'll never admit it, but they do cry." And then the Columbian girl and another girl from Spain were getting heated about how women are supposed to belong in the home because both of their mothers work, and they thought it was unfair that they had to work and also take care of the children. It was really cool to see how this simple exercise brought this out of a group of teenagers.
I thought it was rather intersting that on the first day we barely talked about movies or documentaries, which is why the kids came in the first place. We talked about how some movie trailers portray women as body parts, or always show them dressing and undressing (Pretty Woman) or they can show women clothed and as real characters like in suits(Silence of the Lambs). (Did you know that Pretty Woman is the most-viewed movie in Spain? People eat it up when it comes on cable TV so advertisers fight for commercial time when it comes on) Eva wanted to link the idea that the ways that movies portray women are often how we come to think of them in real life because of the influence of Pop-culture, and so the same stereotypes that they talked about were the ones that showed up on screen.
This might be the most interesting thing that I've gotten to do this Summer, and it's a shame that I have only 2 weeks to be a part of it. I'll be writing more on this.
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