Shiza Ali Maham Javaid SS 100 20 March 2017 The inaccurate and biased portrayal of women in Hollywood movies Have you ever realized that most action movies watched contain the same pervasive cliché: A stoic superhero rushes to save a damsel in distress as soon as the villain drops her from a skyscraper and the day is saved. Spiderman saves Mary Jane. Batman saves Martha. Iron Man saves Heather. Such scenes imply that women need to be saved. They cannot save themselves. They need men. Not only movies, but other forms of media in Hollywood also portray women as weaklings. When it comes to women, the picture painted by Hollywood is stagnant and therefore, has a huge influence on how women are viewed and how they view themselves. Moreover, this unfortunate representation is exacerbated by our patriarchal society propagating a feeling of unworthiness amongst women. This paper contends that the portrayal of women in Hollywood leads to lower self-esteem amongst women by inducing in them the feeling of being weaker than men, by haunting them with ideals of beauty and by stereotyping their roles in society. One cause of low self-esteem among women is the illusion that women are emotionally and physically weaker than men. Coming back to superheroes, the earliest of fantasies for most children is to become superheroes and they grow up influenced by these characters. This influence, however, for women is not always positive. Consider, for example, superhero movies like Spider-man or