Last night, the Oscars, meant to celebrate greatness in film, reduced half of the people working in the industry to a pair of boobs whose sole purpose was as an object for men to stare at.
In the first hour of the show, host Seth McFarlane sang and danced his way through a list of actresses who had taken their tops off in various films (which, Amy Davidson of the New Yorker points out, were serious, issue-driven movies like Brokeback Mountain and the Accused). This wasn’t a single verse in a number about movie nudity: it was an entire song devoted to degrading the talented, multi-faceted women in the audience, stripping (sorry) them of their dramatic skill and reducing them to a pair of tits.
I get it – boobs are great. And sometimes the sight of them in a serious movie might prompt a fleshly admiration slightly out of line with the tone of the film. But when McFarlane and producers devote a good 4 minutes of the Oscars entertainment to a bit on whose boobs we’ve seen, they’re making a comment on how they value women in the industry (and indeed, women in general).
In the few snippets of the Oscars I watched this time around (I’ve been on a lazy boycott since Titanic won), reducing women to things that we look at seems par for the course: watch this clip of Jennifer Lawrence fielding questions from reporters after her win.
Save for the first question, dealing with mental illness, the rest of the questions were inane and unrelated to her win – and Ms. Lawrence dealt with them expertly. When asked about her fall on the way up to receive her statue, she says: “What do you mean what happened?! Look at my dress! I tried to walk up stairs in this dress, that’s what happened...I think I just stepped on the fabric and they waxed the stairs” followed by a near imperceptible look that says it all: “Really? Is this what you’re asking me after I’ve won an Oscar in a movie which deals with mental illness?”
Many people have defended McFarlane, wondering what one would expect when you have the writer of Family Guy hosting the Oscars – but that doesn’t make it okay. Making jokes that place women’s worth solely on the nakedness of their breasts during an international broadcast is entirely inappropriate. (And so was his Chris Brown and Rihanna joke: Django Unchained was “the story of a man fighting to get back his woman who has been subjected to unthinkable violence. Or as Chris Brown and Rihanna call it, a date movie.” So now we're publicly calling out a victim of domestic violence in a distasteful quip?)
I can make the worst jokes and the most inappropriate comments, but I know my audience. I know who knows my actual values and McFarlane should never have risked the kind of offence he caused a significant portion of the population – whether our tits are in or out.
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