I Found a Serious Problem!

Okay, so recently was on the poll board and I thought it would be fun to do a poll about firefighters, you know: putting together a list of famous firefighters from various movies and TV shows with the question of who you'd want to come save you. It was all well and good until I ran into an unexpected problem regarding how women are treated in these particular mediums. I'll post you a link to the article I subsequently wrote about this issue:

http://hitchcocksworld.blogspot.ca/2014/03/its-end-of-world-as-we-know -it-and-i.html

I even managed to get a few comments from an actual firefighter who had a few things to say about this problem, which I have also included in the article itself.

At this point, out of all the films and shows to center on firefighting, I've found a grand total of three that in any way actually depict women firefighters (four if you count an ex-firefighter briefly working as a cop on Flashpoint), and out of those only one had a particularly fair treatment of its female characters.

The shows so far I've found are as follows: Fireman Sam (1987), Rescue Me (2004), and L.A. Firefighters (1996). Out of those, L.A. Firefighters only had its female characters used in stereotypical roles, while Rescue Me had a female firefighter who left after one season, with no others appearing until several years later.

Fireman Sam, a kids' show, is so far the only thing I've found to actually provide anything I could consider a fair representation of women firefighters, and even that one isn't totally perfect when you consider that as great as Penny was she wasn't introduced until fairly late into the original series and only became a regular in later incarnations.

If you ask me this is a serious issue that needs to be rectified. It's not even like how old 50's science fiction films sometimes failed to anticipated the existence of female astronauts; with those I can understand it was a matter of how people thought back then. With one exception, most of the examples I cite on this issue regarding Hollywood's treatment of women firefighters don't go any further back than the 1980's and were made by people who should know better.

I thought it might be good to share this here, since this is a board for discussing issues with how women are treated on film. Hopefully you enjoy the article, comment on it if you like, share it through Facebook or Twitter or any other social media sites if you want. I just want to make sure this gets out and something is done.

David Lynch walks into a bar... he won't give me the punchline.