Sort of.
NPR has an interesting article that discusses double standard between how women and men are portrayed these days in the media. We’ll quote JTam’s part below, but it’s worth taking a quick read and/or listen to the story here [link].
We’ve come a long way, but it’s still a daily struggle, isn’t it?
“And it’s fascinating to me,” Landgraf adds, “that we just have really different, and I think, a more rigorous set of standards for female characters than we do for male characters in this society. It’s much harder to buy acceptance of a female anti-hero.”
Tell it to showrunner Janet Tamaro. She created Rizzoli and Isles on TNT, about a female detective and a female medical examiner that starts its fourth season in June. “I got a lot of a resistance when I wanted to write a scene with the two women in conflict,” she recalls. “From both male and female executives, and everyone was squeamish about it — ‘Oh no, no, no, we don’t want to see women fight.’ ”
But Tamaro prevailed, and she scripted a spirited argument between her two leads that lasts until a colleague refers to their “cat fight,” prompting them to turn on him. “Did you really just call a disagreement between two female colleagues a cat fight?” Rizzoli demands.
