"I was watching something the other day which started out with five guys walking towards you and one woman, and there you go-it's still being dominated by the male society"
About this Quote
The scene Joan Severance describes is banal on purpose: five men stride forward, one woman trails behind, and the viewer already knows the script. Her point isn’t that patriarchy is subtle; it’s that it’s lazy. The domination she’s naming isn’t delivered through dialogue or plot twists but through casting math and visual grammar. Who gets to advance toward the camera - toward the audience, toward power - and who gets positioned as garnish?
As an actress, Severance is reading the frame the way performers are trained to: blocking, balance, the hierarchy implied by where bodies land in space. “And there you go” does a lot of work. It’s the exhausted shorthand of someone who’s seen the trick too many times, a cultural eye-roll that doubles as critique. The subtext is that sexism doesn’t always announce itself with a villain; it shows up as default settings.
The likely context is late-20th-century film and television, when “one woman in the group” was treated as inclusion and also as containment: the token female presence that signals modernity while keeping male relationships and male agency at the center. Severance isn’t making a theoretical argument so much as documenting a reflex. You don’t need to know the show she watched; the image is the evidence. That’s why it works: it turns representation into something measurable, almost physical, and makes the audience feel how quickly the imbalance becomes normal.
As an actress, Severance is reading the frame the way performers are trained to: blocking, balance, the hierarchy implied by where bodies land in space. “And there you go” does a lot of work. It’s the exhausted shorthand of someone who’s seen the trick too many times, a cultural eye-roll that doubles as critique. The subtext is that sexism doesn’t always announce itself with a villain; it shows up as default settings.
The likely context is late-20th-century film and television, when “one woman in the group” was treated as inclusion and also as containment: the token female presence that signals modernity while keeping male relationships and male agency at the center. Severance isn’t making a theoretical argument so much as documenting a reflex. You don’t need to know the show she watched; the image is the evidence. That’s why it works: it turns representation into something measurable, almost physical, and makes the audience feel how quickly the imbalance becomes normal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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