Video - Is Marc Guggenheim a Misogynist?

[JDBentz]

I explore this based on what we have seen over the course of two seasons and public comments Guggenheim has made not only about Arrow, but about another popular IP (this one a Marvel one).

It's a long one.

Basic Verdict: Absolutely.

[Aurora Moon]

Interesting video. But may I offer a counter point of sorts? Just let me play devil's advocate here for a little bit.

I think it's not just Guggenhiem, but the culture in Hollywood and TV in general. Most women and men typically don't see themselves as misogynists, but there's a lot of internalized stuff going on when you work on TV and movie productions... so as an result they may unintentionally come off as sexist. Especially in cases of poor writing, when they have no idea what to do with a love interest other than to use her as a vehicle for melodramatic storytelling. The over-dependent use of tropes inevitably leads to our female lead characters being boxed into roles, etc....

With TV shows in particular, they have deadlines to meet so Guggenhiem can't exactly sit down with writers who's having problems with their poor writing and help them fine-tune everything. Sometimes he might have to approve an TV script that he knows is ****, simply because they don't have time to do a rewrite. Besides, it's TV, people typically forgive them for one badly written ep if it's followed up with some good stuff.
It's not like movies in that respect.

Okay, I'm done being the devil's advocate. Just had to throw this out there for some discussion.

[JDBentz]

Good points, Aurora. I myself am trying to break into Hollywood and I know that this is the case. I think I even mention this very briefly (the ingrained element of misogyny within the Hollywood and television system). The problem I see is that Guggenheim isn't some distant overseer, like Berlanti is. He is right there, in the writers room with them, when they come up with this stuff. He could shoot it down then. He could say, "Hey, I said when defending us killing Laurel that we had no more stories for her, and those who aren't bringing up her 70 years of comics stories are saying we never got the whole 'vigilante by night, attorney by day' thing. If we do this with a man, we're gonna get labeled as sexist. Let's try something else, yeah?" And even if HE didn't, Wendy Mericle could have (and she has a heck of a lot more experience as a TV writer from what I've seen).

Well... the problem with them 'following it up' with an excellent episode is the next two episodes promise to be Felicity or OTA centric, and those episodes haven't really done well in the past.

[Aurora Moon]

That's the thing about internalized sexism. Sometimes you don't see certain things as being sexist at all, because it's been so normalized in everyday life. so you don't even see it on your radar, until somebody points it out to you. And sometimes you might see it differently due to the fact that men simply have different experiences than women do.

Take the catcalling culture for instance. Men very rarely get compliments on anything, so getting an compliment of any kind, even when it's super sexualized, means the world to them. To most men, they would LOVE to be catcalled because to them that just means getting compliments.
So they typically don't understand how bad it can get for women... or why women distrust catcallers so much. So some might say things like: "So you were upset by a cat caller. They were just complimenting you!"
They don't see the "complimenting" men suddenly turning nasty afterwards if the women don't act in a way that they wanted the women to act. And how "Nice tits" are always followed by "*****" under the men's breath. They don't see the few creepy men deciding that just because the women made eye contact with them during the catcalling progress, that means that the woman must really want them. So they start following her around, etc. So they don't understand that catcalling can be quite a nasty business, and and sometimes can spell danger for the woman.

The men almost never see any of that, so they think that maybe the women are just over-reacting when women say they hate being cat-called, and how they feel threatened by it. After all, if they've never personally experienced it or never saw it happen in front of their eyes then it means there's no such thing as dangerous cat-calling!

Anyway, that's just a example.
In Hollywood, it's been normalized for women to get lesser roles, etc... so to directors and writers, they don't even think twice about characters like Laurel.

[JDBentz]

Well, there is one other aspect of this: first couple of seasons, this wasn't a major issue. And all other Berlanti shows have treated women fairly good, and not 'fridged' them. Even w/Supergirl, where they are having to get rid of Cat Grant thanks to Calista Flockhart not moving to Vancouver, they're doing it in a way that fits the character when they could've just had her die during one of the Metallo attacks. This seems to be something that only occurred with Arrow in the aftermath of Guggenheim being promoted to the chief showrunner for the series once GB and AK left to develop Supergirl and run The Flash.