"Notice how they all have strong female characters at the center but everything is paranoid, violent, and sexual."

"This is what Hollywood gives me? I felt like I was dragged into the mind of one of the sexually abusing Hollywood producers. Of course, the actresses do what they are told, and I, the little person in the dark, passively sit there watching this fantasy. I'm free to leave. Why don't I?... Hollywood is sick. Evil. Corrupting our soul. "

I wrote, a month ago, when I was subjected to 20 minutes of movie trailers, 4 of which I embedded in that post, including one for "Red Sparrow."

Today, I'm seeing — via Drudge — "Jennifer Lawrence flounders in atrocious 'RED SPARROW'..." (NY Post):

The film’s unquestionable high point is Lawrence’s character bellowing the accusing line in her Boris-and-Natasha accent: “You sent me to whore school!”

Other than this “Showgirls”-esque howler and Mary-Louise Parker’s amusing turn as a drunk, corrupt American senator’s aide, there’s little to recommend “Red Sparrow” — a throwback to old Hollywood in its belief that gratuitous rape and violence are the best way to create a heroine with backbone....

"And, during this time, a female producer had me do a nude lineup with about five women who were much, much thinner than me."

"And we all stood side-by-side with only paste-ons covering our privates. After that degrading and humiliating lineup, the female producer told me I should use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet.... I asked to speak to a producer about the unrealistic diet regime and he responded by telling me he didn't know why everyone thought I was so fat, he thought I was perfectly 'fuckable.'"

Said Jennifer Lawrence, at Elle's Women in Hollywood, giving us a glimpse of the kind of female producers you get in Hollywood.

Listen up, columnists who proffer the solution of putting some more women in positions of executive power.* Women do hurt other women, and they can do it in a system in which the men are out to sexually exploit women. For one thing, some women are into sexually dominating/humiliating other women. For another, if the men are structuring the workplace around their own sexual interests, the women who rise within the power structure may be the ones who play along, facilitate, and demonstrate what tough gals they are. And then there's just good old fashioned woman-on-woman cruelty — all that envy and the burning desire to be The Woman.

_________________________

* For example, NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg, who reacted to the Harvey Weinstein story with "Put Women in Charge" (though, to her credit, she said, "Obviously, female bosses can be abusive and can create cultures where abusive behavior toward underlings is tolerated"):

Feminism’s energy has shifted left, toward women who want to dismantle the ruling class, not diversify it. When “broader female access to executive perches in Wall Street and Silicon Valley gets treated as some sort of movement-wide victory, then something clearly has gone wrong in our understanding of what feminism is and can do,” Jessa Crispin wrote in The New Republic. ...

Nevertheless, as long as we have a hierarchal society, the gender of those at the top matters....

The eclipse of the actress. When the awards categories are merged, the category will be "actor."

It's already happening at MTV.

The special word for the female actor began disappearing a while back, as if "-ess" is demeaning. We don't say "poetess" anymore.

But does that mean different categories are bad? The roles — other than very minor roles — are almost always written in gendered terms. If a requirement of equal numbers of male and female nominees and an award for both a female and a male were to end, what would happen? Given the kinds of roles that male actors play, I think it's quite likely that they would dominate — not as much as males would dominate in sports if gender separation ended — because they tend to get bigger roles, with a wider range of things they get to show off their powers doing.

Here's the full list of actors who've been nominated for Oscars for leading roles (with the winners identified), and here's the corresponding list for actresses. Try to imagine different years with the categories merged. In 2012, poor Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany Maxwell in "Silver Linings Playbook," would have had to duke it out with Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln.

And think of the fights we'd have to have. We've seen the #OscarsSoWhite criticisms of the unequal treatment of black performers. Obviously, we don't have separate racial categories for the awards, so the disparities show, though they are complicated by the unequal numbers of people of different races in the United States (and the UK). The merging of the gender categories would put disparities in a stark light, given the equal numbers of males and females in the population. There's an expectation of numerical equality, but I don't think that's what we'd see. It might be good to see that disparity and have more conversation about it.

But I think the separate gender categories for the awards are better for women, mostly because movies tell stories and the stories involve gender roles in endlessly complicated ways. We'd be distracted and confused trying to talk about what kind of equality we want, and I think the stories would suffer. Movies are bad enough already. It might be even worse than merging men and women in sports contests. At least in sports it might be possible to measure the competitors in some scientific way and assign them to different classes — weight, muscle mass, etc. etc. You can never do something like that in art.

Saks Fifth Avenue — once a purveyor of sophisticated clothing for women — shows faux-schoolgirl clothes on a model who's much too small for the clothes, so that she looks even tinier than a schoolgirl.

Seen in the sidebar to my blog just now:



Look how oversized everything is, including the very long belt that hangs down to her knees. The girl is sad and stumbling. She looks as though she can barely walk and hardly knows what to think about anything. Her lack of any capacity is symbolized by the absence of visible hands. They're somewhere inside those overlong sleeves.

How can this be how women are now invited to see ourselves? Feeble, vulnerable children.

This makes me want to show you a photo I snapped the other day at the hair salon:



I didn't go out of my way to put those 3 magazines together. That was what was arrayed in front of me: Jennifer Lawrence, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Emma Stone, all posing in thin lingerie. Stone, in particular, looks naked. These are the same movie stars who lecture us about feminism.

That time Jennifer Lawrence scratched her ass on a rock....

It's big news... because the rock (in Hawaii) is regarded (by some) as sacred and she seemed to think the story was amusing....

"You're not supposed to sit on them because you're not supposed to expose your genitalia to them... I, however, was in a wetsuit for this whole shoot so - oh my God, they were so good for butt-itching. One rock that I was butt-scratching on ended up coming loose. It was a giant boulder and it rolled down this mountain and almost killed our sound guy."

She had to apologize — not for almost killing a guy or thinking it was funny to almost kill a guy, but for calling attention to the religious significance of the rocks and then going for the humor of an ass-scratching fiasco. 

Marcia Ogasawara, from Hawaii, said she didn't find it funny, adding: "If she left the part of it being sacred out, then I wouldn't care; but knowing native Hawaiians built that for some significance and her talking like it's not a big deal, it's very disappointing."

What blinded Lawrence to the problem with her anecdote was the belief that if you are self-deprecating, there's some kind of immunity. Or so she tells it. I think it's more that if you've been given enough reason to think you are adorably lovable and you take yourself lightly, eschewing arrogance, everyone will receive what you have to give in the spirit you intended.

"Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn’t ‘offend’ or ‘scare’ men?"

"I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable. Fuck that."

Wrote the actress Jennifer Lawrence, trying to analyze why she hasn't received what seems to be comparable pay with male stars. She seems to admit that she doesn't drive a hard bargain...

“I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early,” she wrote. “I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need.”

... but she attributes her bad deal-making to the effect of the overall culture on women, the desire to be likable and not too demanding. You have to read through to the subtext here. Obviously, Jennifer Lawrence doesn't personally negotiate her deals. She's speaking as if she does to create pressure that her agents will use as they drive deals. Presumably, studios don't want the little people in the dark thinking of them as discriminating against women, and they may be willing to throw some money into that PR, even when they have the option of choosing another actress — a younger, prettier actress who'll do what you do and more and for even less, which is how you got your roles in the first place, remember?

AND: What about the invisible problem of male actors who never even get started because old, familiar actors keep getting the parts? 

"Celebrities, make it harder for hackers to get nude pics of you from your computer by not putting nude pics of yourself on the computer."

Tweeted Ricky Gervais, after a big naked-celebrity security leak at iCloud.

He's getting reamed for saying that.

A smarter tweet from Lena Dunham: "Remember, when you look at these pictures you are violating these women again and again. It’s not okay. Seriously, do not forget that the person who stole these pictures and leaked them is not a hacker: they’re a sex offender."

And: "Also sad I can’t make one joke about having shown my t*ts on purpose without a massive qualitative tit debate. Some of y’all, dang. The 'don’t take naked pics if you don’t want them online' argument is the 'she was wearing a short skirt' of the web. Ugh."

IN THE COMMENTS: John Nowak said:

I wish people would stop saying "the Cloud" and replace it with "Someone else's server."

I think that would make some decisions more clear for what they are. 

I don't think people realize that they may have their iPhone set to store photos automatically on Apple's servers. Many lovers just fool around with the phone camera. Are you smart enough to know how stupid you need to be to make the "Jennifer Lawrence mistake"?

"Today, Vanity Fair ran an article with the headline 'Jennifer Lawrence Damaged Some Of Her American Hustle Costumes With Dorito Dust'..."

"... and it made the world stop, think, and ponder whether Jennifer Lawrence is either A) some sort of Weird Science-esque experiment designed to be an intensely relatable starlet, B) a figment of our collective imaginations, or C) I don't have a third for this list I just love her."

"What Famous Person Should You Get High With?"

I got Jennifer Lawrence.

"Oh! Sorry! Dior! You asked me..."

"... and all I could talk about is armpit vaginas."



The charming Jennifer Lawrence at the SAG Awards.