You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Sexism’ tag.
We are on ‘easy-mode’ today as hollywood movie posters are not exactly puzzles wrapped in mystery shrouded in illusion – when it comes to illustrating the faint glow and hum of the patriarchal superstructure of the society we inhabit.
Well here we have the standard Avengers movie poster. Everyone in their heroic pose, but something is a little different for Black Widow. It seems, somehow (*gasp*) that some of her superpowers must come from displaying a well defined tuckus to the gaze of the viewer.
Is anyone else showing off their super-tuckus? Evidently not.
Through the magic of the internet, let us witness a great equalization, and redraw our poster.
And there we have it. Butt-power for all. Now tell me again about how equal society is and how we need to move past these tired and dusty feminists concepts like patriarchy and sexism…
It must be said, we are fans of Neil Degrasse Tyson here at DWR. :)
Sure, this is a twitter conversation, but I’m confident that NDT would react similarly outside of the digital world. What are men supposed to do if they cannot be feminists? You do what NDT has done right here, you identify the sexism, call it out for what it is, and then shut that shit down.
One of the frustrations that women experience is that people don’t believe them when they point out sexism in society. So, now thanks to Elizabeth Plank and Vox we can get a newscast rundown of the sexism that pervades our society and of course, the Olympic games.
Enjoy?
As always, if you’re wondering if we are even close to equality take a peek in the comments section of the video. They will disabuse you of any sort slappy-happy egalitarian nonsense that happens to be bumbling about in your neural network.
I’m not sure if talking about patriarchy while discussing a TV show based on conspiracy theories is the best plan, but what the hell. If this sort of shit is happening to Gillian Anderson, it can (and probably does) happen to you, if you happen to be female.
“Anderson and Duchovny’s legendarily potent onscreen pairing—rife with sexual tension yet ambiguous enough that a simple embrace could leave fans swooning for days—has been the object of heated obsession for decades, ever since The X-Files, a show that transformed serialized TV and elevated the potential of genre storytelling, premiered in 1993.
Tales of alien abductions, malicious government conspiracies, shadowy figures, and a plot to take over Earth drove the series’ “mythology” arc, in which Mulder (a believer) and Scully (a skeptic) hunted down the truth about what really happened to Mulder’s missing little sister.
But it was the unexpected magnetism between Anderson and Duchovny that truly gave the show its rabid appeal.
“The chemistry was there from the first day they ever appeared together in [Mulder’s] office,” series creator Chris Carter tells me. “It was not apparent until that first day that these two people were gonna click. The chemistry you can’t manufacture. It was just total luck.”
The success of Fox’s six-episode X-Files event series, which premieres with an episode written and directed by Carter on Sunday, hinges in part on whether that chemistry—and the excitement and anguish of watching the agents, clearly two halves of a whole, engage in the will they/won’t they dance—can be reignited again, nine seasons, two movies, and 25 years of X-Files history later.”
I’m excited to see the new shows, as I was a fan back in the day. Unfortunately, here comes the P…
But while Scully asserted her authority at every turn, Anderson found herself fighting just to stand on (literal) equal ground with her male co-star. The studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet behind her male partner on camera, careful never to step side-by-side with him. And it took three years before Anderson finally closed the wage gap between her pay and Duchovny’s, having become fed up with accepting less than “equal pay for equal work.”
“I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick,” Anderson says of Fox’s curious no-equal-footing rule. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!”
She laughs again, this time at the absurdity of the notion of Dana Scully as anyone’s mere sidekick. “I have such a knee-jerk reaction to that stuff, a very short tolerance for that shit,” she says acidly. “I don’t know how long it lasted or if it changed because I eventually said, ‘Fuck no! No!’ I don’t remember somebody saying, ‘OK, now you get to walk alongside him.’ But I imagine it had more to do with my intolerance and spunk than it being an allowance that was made.”
The work Anderson put into securing equal pay back in the ’90s seemingly came undone when it came time to negotiate pay for this year’s event series. Once again, Anderson was being offered “half” of what they would pay Duchovny.
“I’m surprised that more [interviewers] haven’t brought that up because it’s the truth,” Anderson says of the pay disparity, first disclosed in the Hollywood Reporter. “Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.
“Even in interviews in the last few years, people have said to me, ‘I can’t believe that happened, how did you feel about it, that is insane.’ And my response always was, ‘That was then, this is now.’ And then it happened again! I don’t even know what to say about it.”
She stammers for a moment, at a loss for words. “It is… sad,” she finally says. “It is sad.” (Sources told the Hollywood Reporter Anderson and Duchovny ultimately took home equal pay for the event series.)
Yeah, 2015 and sexist bullshit is still flying high in Hollywood. Awesome.
Nope. No extra barriers, playing field even, no systemic problems to see here…
‘Of course she would have to avoid stereotypical female behavior, and so she could never cry. She would work long hours and hide her pregnancies and her preschooler’s art. One of my co-workers even hid being married. When confronted, she practically swore never to reproduce, and she never did.
I did not mention my first maternity leave, from which I returned to find a curly-haired stranger sitting at my desk, his feet propped on a cardboard box with my client account list packed inside. I had to re-earn the contents of that box, starting that morning. I also didn’t mention the “moo” sounds that traders made when I headed to the nurse’s office with a breast pump, or the colleague who on a dare drank a shot of the breast milk I had stored in the office fridge. I thought of the guy known for dropping Band-Aids on women’s desks when the trading floor was cold because he didn’t “want to be distracted,” and the many times I had heard a women share an idea at a meeting, only to see later that same idea credited to a man.
But I didn’t bring up any of that. Women like me were “team players,” and I was often complimented on my thick skin. Like members of a dysfunctional family, we kept our secrets to ourselves.
Instead, I kept the conversation light. I shared a funny story about my first day on Wall Street, when I opened up a pizza box to find condoms instead of pepperoni slices. Unwrapped. I was “the new girl,” and the guys just wanted to see me blush. I did blush, and I lived.
“It’s not that bad anymore,” I said with a laugh.
She was horrified. “How could you stand that?”
“Stand what?” I thought to myself. I remembered one guy telling me that we should hire only “women who have brothers.” I asked if she had any brothers. The pizza incident was nothing compared with everything else she was about to experience. I truly thought we were offering her the job of a lifetime if only she could let the bad stuff slide.
At that time, women on Wall Street were earning 55 to 62 cents to every dollar a man in the same position earned. Afterward, Bear Stearns imploded in the mortgage market, and while I stayed close to the markets and the people who worked for them, I left. Children gave me perspective about the price of money. The women labeled stellar successes were giving up more than I was willing to part with. With the benefit of some perspective, I began to think more deeply about what I and my female colleagues had experienced.”
Extra ‘bonus’ features of not being the default normal in society. So when you see women achieve you know that, most likely, they know their shit because they’ve had to work twice as hard as a dude to get similar results.
‘When women display the necessary confidence in their skills and comfort with power, they run the risk of being regarded as “competent but cold”: the bitch, the ice queen, the iron maiden, the ballbuster, the battle axe, the dragon lady… The sheer numbers of synonyms is telling. Put bluntly, we don’t like the look of self-promotion and power on a woman. In experimental studies, women who behave in an agentic fashion experience backlash: they are rated less socially skilled, and thus less hirable for jobs that require people skills as well as competence than are men who behave in an identical fashion. And yet if women don’t show confidence, ambition, and competitiveness then evaluators may use gender stereotypes to fill in the gaps, and assume that these are important qualities she lacks. Thus, the alternative to being competent but cold is to be regarded as “nice but incompetent.” This catch-22 positions women who seek leadership roles on a “tightrope of impression management.’
— Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…