Seth MacFarlane and the Oscars’ Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night

From the New Yorker courtesy of a facebook friend:

Watching the Oscars last night meant sitting through a series of crudely sexist antics led by a scrubby, self-satisfied Seth MacFarlane. That would be tedious enough. But the evening’s misogyny involved a specific hostility to women in the workplace, which raises broader questions than whether the Academy can possibly get Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to host next year. It was unattractive and sour, and started with a number called “We Saw Your Boobs.”

“We Saw Your Boobs” was as a song-and-dance routine in which MacFarlane and some grinning guys named actresses in the audience and the movies in which their breasts were visible. That’s about it. What made it worse was that most of the movies mentioned, if not all (“Gia”), were pretty great—“Silkwood,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Monster,” “The Accused,” “Iris”—and not exactly teen-exploitation pictures. 

And

The main misogynistic awfulness was centered on the workplace. There might have been a slight dread that MacFarlane would make a waterboarding joke, but he didn’t—maybe he felt that Senator Richard Burr, of North Carolina, had taken care of that at the Brennan hearings. But since so much of MacFarlane’s humor was rote and derivative, it’s more likely that he just stopped at the idea that “Zero Dark Thirty” was about “every woman’s innate ability to never ever let anything go.” That’s what it means when a woman in the office believes in something, and presses for it? There was a joke, too, about Jennifer Aniston not admitting having worked as an “exotic dancer”—and at that point MacFarlane had already more or less called Meryl Streep one. It’s possible that the line about not caring that he couldn’t understand a word that Penelope Cruz or Salma Hayek said because they were good to look at was directed as much at Latinos as at women, since he also mentioned Javier Bardem—but that doesn’t make it any better. What are women in Hollywood for? To judge from a few other MacFarlane jokes, they’re for dating men in Hollywood, until the men decide that they’re too old.

More here.

I can place the moment when I lost interest in the Grammys: I was in high school, and they gave the new award for best heavy metal album to, get this, Jethro Tull; I was, like, these people have no idea what they're doing.  I can't place the moment that the Oscars lost all value to me, but it happened at some point in the 90s.  So I didn't watch Sunday's show.  I never watch the Oscars.  Because I feel like they have no idea what they're doing.

And hearing these reports of MacFarlane's performance does nothing to make me reconsider my stance.  Hollywood, as an industry, has no idea what it's doing.  Or rather, maybe, it knows exactly what it's doing, and I just don't like it.  Either way, the big news here isn't that MacFarlane was out of line.  Instead, it's that he told the absolute truth, albeit with jokes.  The reason so many people found it all to be unfunny was that it hit far too close to home.

Hollywood is a totally sexist institution.

It tried to back away from its sexism for a brief golden age in the 1970s, but it very quickly went back to its old tricks in the 80s, possibly because of the industry's corporatization, accompanied by a massive ramping up of its traditional appeal to the lowest audience common denominator, or possibly because the men who run the business just got sick of biting their tongues and decided to let all their chauvinistic glory fly free like the freak flag it is.  Probably both, including some other factors I'm not even considering.  But make no mistake.  Hollywood is totally sexist.

So MacFarlane didn't do anything that was a stretch.  He was just honest about the business.  I mean, to be fair, from all appearances it doesn't seem that he has a problem with Hollywood's sexism, but, at the very least, he wasn't lying about it, as so many other film professionals do.

But really, this is an awful situation when you step back a moment.  It's bad enough that a business that is so extraordinarily influential, in terms of how we think and measure our lives, presents a continual picture of women as sex objects who are not to be taken seriously as human beings.  But you have to put this into the overall cultural context: pair Hollywood's blatant and ongoing sexism together with the Republican Party's recent decision to let it all hang out as far as their scorn for women's rights goes, and we have two, count 'em, two major American institutions that express overt hostility to women on a daily basis.  Our culture is in big trouble.

Houston, we have a problem.  A big one.  And it doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon.

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