“Sexism” is an ingrained structural aspect of film. Good films and bad have always centered on on portraying very attractive people in potentially erotic settings and circumstances, and women’s roles have always been customized to the characteristic fantasies of the males in the target audience. And from the beginning, the money people who run the industry have auditioned actresses with their own personal dicks.
The situation in 19th c. France was essentially the same, except that it was theater and not film. The theater was in one sense the dominant literary form in 19th c. France, because there was money in it — many of the great poets and novelists of the era made their livings as drama critics. It wasn’t because of the quality of the art — the dramas and dramatists of that time (Feydeau? Scribe?) have been forgotten. (A few of the operas have survived: La Boheme, La Traviata).
One theater director of that era said that he assumed that all of his actresses were courtesans, kept women, or prostitutes, because he didn’t pay them enough to live on. The French theater was the hub of a fully-institutionalized alternate sexual system which ran parallel to the insane French marriage system.
I don’t really skip movies on purpose — I just never developed the habit. But as someone with an almost completely non-filmic sensibility, I see films differently than devotees of film do. And my bet is that while an individual film can be non-sexist, non-sexist films will always be limited to the same niche as documentaries and wildlife films, and that sexual fantasies about actors and (above all) actresses will always be the driving force of the industry.
“X is an ingrained structural aspect of film” and “Film has always done X” are not synonyms.
Film as a neutral technology can be used to do all kinds of things. You can film cows standing in a field. You can film natural disasters. You can film animal behavior or various other aspects of reality. You can film children’s stories and documentaries. There are all these little niches.
But actually existing film (and TV) in the actual societies of this world is mostly hot men and women in erotic situations. Look at the goddamn doctor shows and lawyer shows and cop shows on TV. Without slender, busty cops and lawyers and doctors, where would they be?
OK, suppose a movie has a hot looking woman in it. Her hotness has to define her role, otherwise it throws the film out of balance. On the other hand, if you leave women out entirely, that’s sexist in the misogyist way. But if you only have normal looking women, it’s a niche movie. Why have any women at all if you’re not going to juice things up? That’s a violation of the Basic Rule. If you have a normal looking woman in a role normally played by a man, that’s a counterintuitive niche movie, sort of an anti-movie.
Like marriages, movies are one man and one woman, with enough complications to keep things interesting.
Complications: World War II, The Passion of Christ, the Depression, alien invasions, cancer. Things like that.