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splashd-actressroundtable.jpg

Does The Hollywood Reporter Just Straight Up Hate Women?

By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | December 10, 2015 |

By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | December 10, 2015 |



Do you remember last month when The Hollywood Reporter brought together a group of (all white, of course) actresses in one of their roundtable discussions, to talk passionately about their art and about important issues like sexism in Hollywood, and then they opened the article with this vomit:

When eight of the world’s most accomplished performers gathered in one place on Nov. 14 for THR’s annual Actress Roundtable, you might have expected some backstage drama.
At the time, I thought that might be the grossest I could find the magazine. I was wrong.

This month is the THR’s Women in Entertainment issue, and most of the focus is on their annual Women in Hollywood Power 100. But for whatever reason, they felt they had to balance out these 100 powerful women with an article titled “Why Girls Who Love Fairy Tales Grow Up to Be Film Editors (Not Directors).” Written by a “top L.A. therapist,” this piece is set on explaining to us weak-willed women that there’s not actually a systemic inequality keeping us from reaching the tops of our fields. (Or rather, there are “wary men” not helping us up, but we’re the ones keeping ourselves down.) Instead, all of our issues stem from our father issues.

As with everything else, it begins in childhood. When girls are raised to be people-pleasers, and in particular to want to please Daddy, a pattern is formed that steers grown women into jobs where they continue pleasing their boss, a Daddy substitute (and bosses in Hollywood indeed are, for the most part, male), instead of striking out on their own. Typically, these women, stuck in this early phase of psychosexual development, become personal assistants, pro­duction assistants, wardrobe assistants and stereotypical eye candy onscreen.
What’s that? Your relationship with your father is just fine and you still keep hitting that “celluloid ceiling”? Well, you must be doing your job for the wrong reasons then! If you’re in publicity, it’s because you want attention. If you’re a casting director, it’s because you’re a harpy shrew control freak. That’s why these fields are dominated by women. It’s not because they may appeal to use for different reasons, or because we all know by now it’s easier to enter into a field filled with people you naturally relate to, or to find a mentor who sees herself in you, and much harder to apply for a job in a space where you’ll be bridging a huge existing gap. Forget all that! It’s definitely just your silly lady brain looking to forget about your childless womb and find a “daddy surrogate.”

Oh, and even if you ARE doing well and think you’re emotionally stable and making your own decisions, NOPE! There’s that stupid brain again, hiding your daddy issues. Like the documentarians who “once thought she had an idyllic childhood, only to discover that much of it was built on lies… This drove her to search for the truth in everything and naturally led to investigating stories and making documentaries.” Silly woman, you thought you just wanted to make movies and tell stories out of your own personal drive and ambition instead of your broken, broken heart.

Also forget any notion that the job you may be doing is the one you actually want. If you’re not Angelina Jolie (actor, director, and married to Brad Pitt— we CAN have it all!), you’re apparently a failure in Hollywood. Of COURSE there are plenty of people whose current their jobs are a stepping stone to something else in the industry, but my god how insulting is it to assume this is always the case?

So hey, THR, on behalf of women in and outside of Hollywood…