I watch a lot of Discovery Channel shows, and one of the things that’s always bugged me is the dearth of women on them, especially as they indulge their hardon for Manly Men in Manly-Men occupations. Mythbusters has broken my heart by getting rid of Scottie and interns Christine and Jess, a welder and two engineers, and keeping Kari. Who, while she pulls her weight and does a good job blowing things up, seems to have passed the producers’ test because of her looks rather than her skills. The message seems to be that you can be accepted as the exceptional woman in the boys’ club by being hawt.
But now they have a new show, Time Warp, which seems to be quietly challenging that male dominance. The basic premise of the show is to do various things and film them with high-speed cameras so that they can be played back very slowly and you can see what’s going on. They’ve slowed down water droplets, wet dogs shaking off, a pole vaulter, car crashes, etc. I started watching because some of the slo-mo over the credits looked really cool.
The hosts are two guys, Jeff and Matt. Matt’s the high-speed camera guy, and Jeff is some kind of unspecified scientist and artist. The show is based in Boston, and they use a lot of local experts to do various things or explain various things for the cameras.
But here’s the cool part: a lot of those experts are women. The pole vaulter, for example, and two archers (who were actually girls, since they were Junior Olympians), a pool player, a woman who was doing something with nails and steel-toed boots (I just caught the end of it last night). And there are more pictured in the credits, but I haven’t seen all those shows.
I have to say, I’m impressed (I’d be even more impressed if there were more people of color included as well). Given that the default expert is almost always male unless it’s a particularly “female” area of knowledge, the fact that they use women as experts for things that men do as well is very encouraging to me. And they don’t make a big deal of it, either, it’s just, “So-and-so is a nationally ranked pool player who has won this and that title,” “Frick and Frack are archers who compete in the Junior Olympics,” “Thus-and-so is a pole vaulter on the University of Massachusetts track team.”
It’s a small thing, but it matters. It matters because it shows women having skills, being expert at those skills, and being recognized for that expertise. It shows that women can be accepted as authority figures.
And as for Mythbusters, they’ve gone from having a cast that was half female to doing a Kill Bill movie myth that was specifically about a woman (Uma Thurman being buried alive and punching out of the casket) and then using a male martial arts expert to determine whether “you” could punch through the casket and how much force could be generated. Boo.
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