From wage inequality to dominating the management, nudity exploitation and the infamous casting couch, men always have taken advantage of women in Hollywood.
“It is specified in scripts that guys take their shirts off all the time.”
There have been women with power in Tinseltown — Mary Pickford co-founded United Artists with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks in 1919 — but for the most part it has been a notorious men’s club.
But a new generation of female directors, women such as Penny Marshall, Jodie Foster, Nora Ephron, Kathryn Bigelow, Angelina Jolie, and others are changing all that.
The Hollywood Reporter recently gathered seven Hollywood starlets to talk about the role sexism played in their careers and asked them, among other things, “What have been the most overtly sexist things you’ve experienced in your careers?” Actress Kerry Washington cited her boss, Shonda Rhimes, as a person doing “overly sexist things” — to men.
“I’m in this very surreal environment right now having Shonda Rhimes as my boss, where it’s almost the opposite,” Washington said. “It is specified in scripts that guys take their shirts off all the time.”
Rhimes is one of television’s most successful writers and executive producers, responsible for “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal,” and “How to Get Away With Murder.”
“The guys are naked all the time,” Washington said. “And she has said to all the women on the show: ‘You want to do a love scene in a parka? You just let me know.’ So it’s this weird, like, reparations moment where the girls get to do what they want to do, and the guys get to do what they want to do. But they know what Shonda wants them to do.”
Rhimes makes it a point in her shows to have weak men and strong women, where men are the sex objects and women dominate the strong parts.
She admits that “Scandal’s” leading male character, President Fitz Grant, “plays the damsel in distress a lot.” And Olivia Pope, the lead character played by Washington, is strong, decisive, and a quick problem solver.
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“It’s a very interesting gender switch that we purposely have done,” Rhimes told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 2014.
At The Hollywood Reporter roundtable, Constance Zimmer of Lifetime Channel’s “UnREAL” gushed about her female-dominated show, both on-screen and behind-the-scenes.
“We have two female leads, female show-runners and writers, and it’s very driven toward us being empowered, which is definitely different,” Zimmer said. “We can treat the men a bit like how we may have been treated earlier in our careers or just as women in general. It’s fun to watch the tables be turned and to see the guys on set eating lettuce.”
If Zimmer and Rhimes delight in watching “the tables turned” on men, actress Geena Davis has made the issue of Hollywood sexism her personal crusade.
“We can’t snap our fingers and suddenly make Congress half women, but they can be half women in the next movie someone makes,” Davis told USA Today. “First, before you cast your movie or show, cross out a bunch of first names and change them to female. Second, wherever the script says, ‘A crowd gathers,’ write in the script, ‘… which is half female.’ Bam! You suddenly have a balanced cast.”
The women of Hollywood have learned quickly. They’ve adopted the very sexism they decried for decades. Making men naked all the time, shutting them out jobs on- and off-screen, creating weak male characters and purposely filling roles with women over men are examples of feminist malice toward men.
We lose our sense of fairness when we try to keep score and take wholesale revenge against an entire gender. What is gained in society when we pay grievances forward to people who likely had nothing to do with the original act of discrimination? Will we ever be even?
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