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Keira Knightley Wants to Know 'Where Are the Female Stories?'

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | March 31, 2015 |

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | March 31, 2015 |



Every time a Shailene Woodley or a Russell Crowe says something dumb about women, I feel the need to counterbalance with someone who doesn’t think the word feminism is icky, just to keep my own frustration tears at bay. So thank goodness for Keira Knightley, who has no problem questioning why we (the collective we, not any of you brilliant people, of course) have such a hard time getting out mouths around the (other) F-word.

I don’t know what happened through the ’80s,’90s, and ’00s that took feminism off the table, that made it something that women weren’t supposed to identify with and were supposed to be ashamed of. Feminism is about the fight for equality between the sexes, with equal respect, equal pay, and equal opportunity. At the moment we are still a long way off that.
In an interview with Violet magazine, she talks about how women’s roles in society play out in film, and how that affects her own choices in her work.
I think it is interesting that for women in film the problems they face are generally put into the sphere of home and family and not into the workplace. Joan’s real struggles were to get her rightful ‘place at the table,’ and then once she was there, equal pay, which she never came close to.
But while “equal pay” gets tossed out as the big fight in women’s rights— without discounting the importance of that issue!— Knightley also addresses the more general, pervasive imbalance present in everyday life.
Where are the female stories? Where are they? Where are the directors, where are the writers? It’s imbalanced, so given that we are half the cinema-going public, we are half the people [who] watch drama or watch anything else, where is that? So yes, I think the pay is a huge thing, but I’m actually more concerned over the lack of our voices being heard.


Via Mary Sue.