Our culture still isn’t comfortable with women and power
Working as a director in the 1950s, Ida Lupino commented, ”You don’t tell a man; you suggest to them.” Ally Acker writes in her bio, “The back of her director’s chair read, ‘Mother Of Us All…’, a nom de plume that Ida Lupino solicited, encouraged and used fully to subversive advantage. “It was her armor against a time when women needed to be sexless to be effective in a man’s terrain.” [More in the article Women in Film : Identity and Power. ] While we – both men and women – may enjoy current female screen characters with potency and attitude such as Jennifer Garner in “Alias” and Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Arianna Huffington says in her book “ On Becoming Fearless ” that in real life, women are “still required, first and foremost, to be sweet and adorable. “A man who doesn’t toe the line is not only tolerated but even hailed as an appealing scamp or rogue, but an unconventional, self- assured woman is far more likely to be seen as a ball-busting bitch… who needs to