Hollywood is notorious for taking certain ideas to unpleasant extremes: CGI in Star Wars movies, saccharine romantic comedy tropes, the Fast and Furious franchise. But in our current #MeToo moment, activists intent on remaking the world in a more female-friendly image have gone beyond outing harassers and found a new villain: screenplays.
As the New York Times reports, activists have created “new screenplay software that can automatically tell whether a script is equitable for men and women.” The software counts the number of male and female characters and analyzes dialogue to determine whether women or men speak more often, regardless of the storyline or setting.
The technological tweak, which is now part of the popular Highland script software program, was the brainchild of Christina Hodson, whom the Times describes as being involved with Time’s Up, “the activist Hollywood organization addressing inequities in the industry.” The Times describes the software in neutral tones as an “opportunity to rethink some of the storytelling” scriptwriters do, and the man (!) who helped develop the software tool insists that “in no way did I want this to feel like scolding.” Hodson is blunter. The software, she says, is “a tool for people to self-police and look at unconscious bias in their own work.”
This isn’t the first time technology has been drafted to promote gender activism in scriptwriting. In 2016, something called the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University worked with Google to create “a software tool that used video and audio recognition and algorithms to decode gender and other details of characters on screen.” The institute’s leadership described it enthusiastically as “a spell-check for gender bias.”
Its supporters make the process sound as easy as creating your own cuddly toy at Build-A-Bear, only instead of adorable accessories you add woke insights and gender quotas to build a politically correct screenplay. But that happy outcome turns out to be far more difficult to achieve than even the wokest writer might assume. Hodson’s own work, described as consisting largely of “heroine-centered movies,” failed the gender balance test—a result the Times described as “surprising.”
Hodson and other advocates for the software seem unconcerned with how the self-censorship encouraged by this new tool might stifle creativity or storytelling. “This is all pretty easy,” said the founder of WriterDuet, which also has a gender-policing function (he clearly hasn’t considered how such software will deal with transgender or race parity). “Technology can do this, and technology should be doing this.”
Call it the Ishtar principle: Just because you can do something doesn’t make it a good idea.
