Thursday, October 16, 2014

Somebody finally responds to Bitter Gertrude's bullshit

I'm so glad that somebody has finally responded to the argument by Melissa Hillman in Bitter Gertrude that it's perfectly fine for her to produce men's plays 75% of the time, because in her opinion (in so many words), women as a group suck at writing plays.

I should say somebody besides me, but I don't really count because I self-published in this personal blog, I wasn't published by the Theater Communications Group.

In my own experience, I have run the NYCPlaywrights Play of the Month since 2011 and in all that time I have never detected what Hillman claims is a female play trait:
However, that female character isn’t driving the narrative– she is, instead, just reactive to whatever the male characters are doing. It’s a woman sitting around wondering what to do about some man in her life, talking to her friends about some man, interacting with some man about his decisions or actions.
Granted the plays I've reviewed are 10-minute plays, but if women are such complete losers as portrayed by Hillman, I think I'd have picked up on it. Without any conscious effort to achieve parity at all, the plays chosen for the Play of the Month are a 50/50 gender split.

I have no fear that my speaking out about Hillman's internalized sexism will harm my career because I will never submit any plays to Hillman - not only does she clearly have bullshit attitudes towards women, so I know chances are my play wouldn't get a fair shake, but she's dead set against an entire genre of plays - the romantic comedy. For idiotic reasons.

My suspicion is that because femaleness is considered a liability in theater these days, Hillman is sure to let everybody know that she doesn't tolerate all that weak-ass girly shit. It's probably a good career move - as long as the attitude that women suck unless they emulate men reigns in the theater.