Beyond Caring About Actresses: Rape Culture & White Privilege
Another Pandora’s box has opened - except that for most of us, the evils come as no surprise. Just a bitter confirmation of what we all know: our patriarchal culture thrives on rape through all forms of actual and metaphorical abuse of the female body, mind and soul. We don’t need a rapist-in-chief to realize America loves rape. Just note the disproportionate number of TV shows and films that fetishize the rape, murder, sexual assault and objectification of women, as brilliantly illustrated in Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s 2016 short film What Happened to Her (pictured above). In other words, if rape didn’t sell, we wouldn’t see it.
For three years Who Cares About Actresses has insisted that actresses matter. Our blog was created in response to disparaging remarks we received while trying to finance a feminist film about a burnt-out actress who wants to escape a sexist Hollywood. Well, now Hollywood is burning, and sadly, our point has been made. As avatars of female representation, actresses point to the larger culture’s misogyny and they’ve finally begun to speak out en masse. And despite the patronizing presumptions we make about them, it is they who finally broke the camel’s back, leading to a domino effect. It was actresses, not congresspeople, CEOs, law enforcement officials or public intellectuals who finally brought a Hollywood power player criminal to his knees, and hopefully to jail.
About a year ago, the story broke on how the infamous ‘butter’ sex scene from Last Tango in Paris (1972) was not consensual. 45 years ago, Marlon Brando, the most famous actor of his generation, simulated manual anal penetration on the young French actress Maria Schneider without her consent. She was a 19-year-old unknown actor in her first major film role before the term “sexual harassment” was even in use. The power stakes were stacked against her in this creative scheme between Brando and the critically acclaimed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. In 2016, people - including many Hollywood actresses - were appalled and outraged but the heart-breaking reality is that Schneider had never kept this a secret, and for years openly talked about the traumatic impact of Bertolucci’s treatment of her. It was not until after her death in 2011, and until a video of Bertolucci himself addressing the accusations was discovered, that her account was taken seriously. “I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on,” said Bertolucci. He insisted he doesn’t regret the film, and defended the approach to the scene because he “wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated.”
Actresses always reflect how our culture treats women, and they deserve applause for finally exposing the brutal misogyny of the industry - as there are many women who have been trying to do this for years. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Both in Hollywood, and in our country, the accounts of white, privileged cis-gendered female bodies are the only women’s narratives that generally can be heard, told or seen. We credit Hollywood actresses for risking their professional and personal lives, but the racial implications of the situation is disturbing and complex. Not only has this abuse been going on for decades, but as Jane Fonda pointed out, the only reason their stories are now being heard is because they are “famous and white.” American power structures are far more interested in protecting “beautiful” white women because frankly, those are the only women that are valuable to them.
It is not a coincidence that the only allegation Harvey Weinstein directly acknowledged and disputed was that of Lupita Nyong’o’s. It suggests that as much as we deny the rape of white women, we deny the rape of women of color even more, perhaps making it safer for Weinstein to deny Nyong’o’s experience than all the other accounts. This country was built upon a system of slavery in which black men were lynched for just talking to white women, while white masters were free to rape their black slaves. This history is still embedded in how we talk about rape today. We think of all the unnamed women who have been sexually assaulted by Weinstein and by men representing every institution of power in America. We think of these women who didn’t go on to have careers and a platform on which to speak about this, and we think of all the women of color who know that they would be treated differently than the white women who have come forward, even if their experiences were exactly the same. (And it’s not like all the actresses that have come forward have been treated so well).
Obviously, we care about actresses, and don’t want to minimize the profound service they have given us by bringing this criminal down, and the incredible trickle effect of their accusations. But until we are concerned about the abuse of incarcerated women, trans women, women of color, disabled women and poor women, and all the intersections within that, we will continue to live in a brutal rape culture. The #metoo campaign was initiated a decade ago by an African American woman activist, Tarana Burke, but only gained traction over the past few weeks after such high profile white celebrities spoke up. In order to dismantle the patriarchal machine that weaves such abuse into the fabric of our culture and our psyches, we must attend to the sexual abuse of ALL victims and survivors, not just the ones who walk the red carpet.
