Turning the red carpet black won’t solve Hollywood sexism
AmI alone in thinking that Eva Longoria may turn out to be the worst spokesman for any cause since Naomi Campbell promised Peta she’d rather go naked than wear fur and then proceeded to drape herself in mink and sable ever after.
“For years,” Longoria intoned solemnly last week, “we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colours, beautiful faces and glamour. This time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around.”
Brace yourselves then, tricoteuses, because tomorrow night a less twinkly than usual constellation of the world’s most successful actresses will appear on the red carpet at the Golden Globes for your apraisal and opprobrium. Jessica and co have indicated that they will all be dressed head to toe in black – not because of some catastrophic, internationally scaled wardrobe malfunction, but as an orchestrated demonstration against sexism in Hollywood.
The ensuing eye-rolling across social media that greeted Longoria’s statement suggests that as gestures against oppression go, this one may not be hitting the mark in the way that, say, Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her bus seat in Alabama back in 1955 did.
I understand the scorn. Yet, let’s leave aside Longoria’s deluded but probably well intentioned tangle for a moment. The all black dress code is actually part of a much broader anti-sexual harassment action plan created by hundreds of powerful women in entertainment. Christened Time’s Up and launched officially on Jan 1 2018, short of a White House directive, which seems unlikely given the current incumbent-in-chief, it’s the most serious drive yet on sex equality and includes the setting up of a $14 million action fund to help victims of harassment nationwide.
This is one of those petitions that should be watertight. No one can reasonably argue that Hollywood doesn’t need to rewrite its hackneyed script on gender parity. A line-up of all black dresses on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and entertainment websites afterwards would make for an arresting show of solidarity. But what if some news outlets slap on a picture of one of the actresses on her own because there wasn’t space for a wide angle, or the subs weren’t properly concentrating? Isn’t there a chance that the uninformed, casual peruser will think: “God, I wish Meryl would wear something other than black for a change,” or, “Euugh, Michelle looks so washed out.”
Besides which, since when did wearing black inocculate the wearer against being objectified? The right black dress, as Angelina Jolie discovered in 2012, can be so powerful that even your leg gets its own hashtag, and I don’t think any of us imagine there won’t be a little competition behind the scenes to nab the best black dress of the night.
That said, it’s clearly time to move on from the circle of shame culture that became the norm at every awards ceremony. In fact that’s already happening. Since Joan Rivers, queen of the clever but wounding putdown, died in 2014, her red carpet mock-a-thon on E! Entertainment has also been laid to rest. These days the professional commentariat
– I write as someone who’s contributed her share of “witty” observations of these events – has been edging towards a less dismissive more analytical approach for some years and most broadsheet fashion writers never made ad hominem attacks on anyone’s face or body in the first place.
Longoria’s not wrong when she says it’s the actresses’ get-ups that make billions of viewers tune into these otherwise tedious back-slapping fests. But it’s equally true that, financially at least, those same actresses have done very nicely from the transaction, working the system with the efficiency of a Wall Street wolf. Jewellery and beauty contracts, career lulls, image make-overs – there is almost no professional woe a brilliantly calibrated red carpet appearance cannot fix. None of those scrutinised seriously complained about the coverage. Some, like Kate Hudson and Cameron Diaz, even made fun of their own frock horrors. And nothing any of us professionals wrote was ever as malignant (or as memorable) as the comments on the Twittersphere.
That’s probably not the point. No one in 2018 should be using Twitter as a guiding moral light. But nor should the misdeeds of Weinstein and co, or the egregious salary inequalities of Hollywood, guilt us into becoming abject forelock tuggers.
Perhaps an interim solution, while we spend a century or so weaning ourselves off our addiction to celebrities, is to subject men to exactly the same level of scrutiny as women… although now I think of it, a colleague on another newspaper told me once that one red carpeteer did send a bitter complaint to her editor about an offending paragraph she had devoted to their Oscar outfit. Predictably, it was a male actor.
The world might well be nicer, fluffier (and duller) place if we all quit the snark, but it will also be a more dangerous one, where the self-regard and pomp of the rich and famous go unchecked. Besides which, this is not a one-way street. If actors – male and female – don’t want to be judged on their looks, surely they can’t also expect to gain from them.
Longoria is incredibly naïve if she really thinks that “instead of asking us who we’re wearing, they’ll ask us why we’re wearing black”. Or rather, reporters will ask why because that will be the only way they’ll get anyone to engage with their questions on the night. But it won’t stop everyone else from thinking, “Jesus, what’s with the po face?” and “Was that the only black dress left?”