Love, Joy, Feminism
I’ve felt for quite some time that many men are so used to male domination that gender equality feels to them like female domination. Do you know what these men don’t have? The experience of living as a woman in a world that is in many ways still very male dominated. Just like white people frequently don’t notice an absence of diversity in a movie while people of color will generally be keenly aware of that absence, even so men are frequently unaware of just how male dominated so many things still are because, as men, it’s not something they automatically notice. For women, well, it’s something that’s hard to miss.
I don’t usually do this, but I just have to share a HuffPo article titled “‘Too Much Estrogen’: The Golden Globes, Chris Christie and Men Who Don’t Want to Share Culture.” This article uses the response to the Golden Globes as an example of these processes I described above in action.
Brit Hume thinks Chris Christie is paying for a “feminized atmosphere,” in which his naturally tough guy (read: male) behavior has been erroneously cast as bullying. Meanwhile, the NY Post’s film critic Kyle Smith’s take on the Golden Globes was that there was just “too much estrogren.” These are just this weekend’s examples of men having a hard time-sharing culture. Sounds an awful lot like my 3-year-old brother, who used to chant, “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!!!”
“Guys [like Christie] who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct, kind of old-fashioned tough guys,” explains Hue, “Run some risks.” Like being considered massive jerks. Feminists and women are ruining the fun that people have being thuggish and getting away with it. All that being required to be civil, polite, empathetic and considerate is so horribly emasculating. If only women would stop talking so much.
Smith, in the meantime, thinks that the Globes should have just been called “Girls.” Eww. The event, he explains, “was a deep dive into a pool of estrogen.” This is unsurprising, but his response is not uncommon when it comes to perceptions of gender and visibility. This is like my friend, with whom I share a great liking for many HBO series that are almost uniformly dominated by men’s stories, explaining without a shred of irony that “Orange is the New Black” simply has too many women for him to be interested in watching.
You can’t argue with the way people feel. Hume and Smith are not my dinner companions, however and you can argue against perpetuating destructive myths. Between them, Fox News and the New York Post reach tens of millions of people who have just been misinformed by poor framing and false equivalencies.
The Globes red carpet and crowd shots suggested a nice gender parity, everyone seemed to have a spouse or a date, usually of the opposite sex. There were a lot of glamorous and talented women. And they talked.
Horrors.
But, the night was a celebration of an industry in which women are remarkably discriminated against, hypersexualized, and subjected to double standards regarding how they look, age, paid and invested in. Yes, there’s that uncomfortable phrase, “discriminated against.”
First, let’s put Smith’s disgust in context.
The rest of the article contains fascinating information and is well worth the read.
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