Friday, April 04, 2014

Good News Friday: Rennie Gibbs, The Bechdel Test And Movie Profitability and the Saimaa Ringed Seal As A Metaphor


My puny attempt to report more on positive things.  First, Rennie Gibbs doesn't have to go to court for her miscarriage many years ago.   I wrote about her case recently.

Second, having more women in movies doesn't seem to hurt financially, even if the women actually talk to each other about something else than the men in the movie:
We did a statistical analysis of films to test two claims: first, that films that pass the Bechdel test — featuring women in stronger roles — see a lower return on investment, and second, that they see lower gross profits. We found no evidence to support either claim.
This matters, because the most common argument to explain the scarcity of women in Hollywood movies is that the markets (often defined as teenage boys and young men) don't like watching women unless the women are in those traditional roles (eye-candy, partners of the male stars etc.).

Third, and this link is only in Finnish, sorry, volunteers helped the endangered Saimaa ringed seals to give birth to more pups by creating human-made snowdrifts (necessary for more pups to survive as the alternative is to be born on the open ice).  Those were needed because of the unusually warm and snowless winter.  The population of Saimaa ringed seals was estimated to be about 100 in the early 1970s.  Current numbers of adult seals are estimated to be above 300.

The early counts suggest that at least 27 pups were born in the human-made snowdrifts.

I like this news because it reminds us that humans can change things, that environmental degradation and the extinction of species is not something we must just accept.