February 2012
24 posts
January 2012
24 posts
Double Standards in Hollywood
People cast for whiteness instead of talent, people cast for maleness instead of talent, people cast for cis-genderedness instead of talent, people cast for able-bodiedness instead of talent, and instead we’re pretending that female prettiness over talent is the only problem in Hollywood? We’re pretending that casting for female prettiness is more likely to result in bad acting than casting for whiteness? That casting for whiteness over the years hasn’t resulted in a glut of talentless white actors (perhaps true, but no one ever says it)?
I don’t believe for one second that there’s something inherent to pretty women that makes them on the whole likely to be worse actors than people who were cast for any other bullshit ism-related reason, and yet I am expected to think that there is. Acting is a skill and they are just as likely to improve as actors as someone who was cast for being white, or male, or able-bodied. No one ever argues that there are no good white, male, cis, able-bodied actors even though whiteness and cis-genderedness and able-bodiedness (and often maleness) comes before talent in the casting process nearly 100% of the time.
There is definitely a double standard in Hollywood that allows men to age and grow less attractive and still have careers. There is definitely a higher bar set for female attractiveness. But that doesn’t mean that somehow attractiveness is a bigger obstacle to becoming a good actor than anything else. It doesn’t mean that the objectively lower bar set for men in general doesn’t result in a lot of sub-par male actors being cast in just about everything (I literally can’t imagine living in a world where I think actresses are generally worse than actors because I have watched television and I have watched films and you cannot tell me that modern media is just overflowing with talented men and has a paucity of talented women, you just cannot).
Basically, I just can’t deal with the idea that only actresses are being cast for reasons other than talent. I cannot.
