Entertainment Industry Discovers Women Enjoy Entertainment

Not only that — it's become apparent that women will pay for it. Wow!

Before today’s story, a quick note about the Back Row chat: I just started a new thread so we can discuss Marc Jacobs’s new Kim Kardashian campaign! I’m dying to know what everyone thinks so please pop over there and sound off. We will make sense of it together.

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The entertainment industry learned something big this summer, and it’s being distilled frantically by media outlets as I type. You might think that discovery would be something crazy like Einstein’s theory of relativity but the entertainment industry version. Like how to end the writers’ and actors’ strikes in such a way that executives and creative talent earn 50 percent more money and are all happy and love each other. Or how to leverage AI technology without human beings losing any work. Or how to make the streaming business model super-profitable for everyone.

Well lower your expectations, because here’s the bombshell insight they are going to let you in on:

Women like entertainment. Not only that! They like it so much that they will… pay for it. WOW!

Some headlines:

From Barron’s Live.

From MarketWatch.

From Fortune.

This narrative that women are ruling the entertainment industry has slipped into stories that aren’t ostensibly about “the female dollar,” like the New York Times’s piece on “How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Conquered the World.” It reads (emphasis mine):

The other major tour this year that is enticing fans to book transcontinental flights, and to show up costumed and in rapture, is also by a woman: Beyoncé, 41, whose Renaissance tour is a fantasia of disco and retrofuturism. Like Swift, she is also a trailblazing artist-entrepreneur, maintaining tight control over her career and fostering a rich connection with fans online. Together with Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a critique of the patriarchy told in hot pink, they are signs of powerful women ruling the discourse of pop culture.

I was discussing these stories with a friend whose assessment of this narrative could not have been more spot-on:

There is legitimate news here, sure. Taylor Swift’s Eras tour is set to become the most profitable tour in all of history, surpassing Elton John. Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour is having discernible impact on the economies of the places in which she’s performing, as evidenced in part by inflation data in the U.K. and Sweden. And the Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, has surpassed $1 billion in ticket sales globally, making her the first female film director to hit that mark.

Yes, these are major successes that deserve acknowledgement and celebration but it is staggering to see the media couch this as a brand new phenomenon in which we women like entertainment produced specifically for us. In doing so, we get copy like this from MarketWatch:

And although women as a group are dominating pop culture this summer, it’s not always the same women: The audiences for “Barbie,” Beyoncé and Taylor Swift each skew differently in terms of race, age, gender and sexual identity. “Women are not a monolith,” Woodard said. “It’s extremely exciting to be able to see all of these different types of women coming into their economic power and influence all at the same time.”

The media has been tying itself in knots in effort to explain why women are spending so much on entertainment. One is that, per Axios, the gender pay gap is the narrowest it’s ever been, with full-time women earning roughly 84 percent of what male counterparts earn on average. Only, that doesn’t seem like the best reasoning given that Pew told us in March: “Gender pay gap in U.S. hasn’t changed much in two decades.” That said, a lot of women are certainly working. Per Axios, “Roughly 75% of 25- to 54-year-old women are employed — the highest share on record.” But that could also be explained by the fact that it’s really hard to get by as a one-income household in 2023, so it’s not like women are working just so they can buy extra handbags and concert tickets.

What is going on here should not merit trend stories about “signs of powerful women ruling the discourse in pop culture,” which is hardly a passing fad. Beyoncé has been ruling pop culture discourse for how long, now? She released her smash hit single “Crazy in Love” in 2003 and has been ruling pop culture discourse as a solo artist ever since, to say nothing of the massive influence of Destiny’s Child before that. Taylor Swift released “Shake It Off” in 2014 and has hardly slipped from the collective consciousness since, to say nothing of her massive prior success as a country artist.

Female-targeted movies have been hits before, too. Bridesmaids, which came out in 2011, grossed more than $300 million at the box office (on a budget of $32.5 million). Wonder Woman, which came out in 2017, grossed roughly $823 million (budget: $200 million). Twilight, which came out in 2008, grossed $408 million (budget: $37 million). And in 2015, Fifty Shades of Grey pulled in around $570 million (budget: $40 million).

And this smattering of examples only accounts for recent pop culture — but you could go back to the heyday of Nina Simone and find numerous additional case studies between then and now.

The point is, making movies and live shows for women has long been a smart business move, and the reasons Barbie, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé are doing well this summer are painfully obvious. Women like entertainment! Women like entertainment made specifically for them. Women like good entertainment. Women like going to see a show by Beyoncé or Taylor Swift and feeling awed. Women like going to see a movie that took the most banal, cloying lady IP in existence only to do something unexpected and delicious with it, instead of something that fit a pre-existing template that a roomful of male executives already understood.

Also, this is the first summer since 2020 that has felt the way summers did before the pandemic. Gathering in massive crowds is possible. Undergoing effort to be entertained feels particularly worthwhile after years during which women were saddled with more housework, more childcare, and more economic uncertainty than many had ever experienced, with these negative impacts disproportionately worse for women of color.

So not only are women eager to get out from under the crushing burden of their homes and their jobs, they are also eager to bear witness to concerts and movies that don’t condescend to them, but see them.

Since the Barbie movie came out, the monologue America Ferrera’s character delivers on modern womanhood has gone viral as quote graphics on social media and SEO clickbait on websites. Here’s an excerpt:

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.

The speech goes on in this vein, listing the myriad ways being a woman feels impossible. These ideas aren’t new — so many women have understood them to be true for decades. What’s new is that a movie studio bothered to pay a women-led team to articulate them.

This isn’t the summer of the “female dollar.” This is the summer of women having the last laugh. Because think of how much of our money the entertainment industry could have had if they had realized the importance of catering to us sooner.