A choice among what options?
And speaking of special rules for women – a conversation among some feminists on Twitter brought up the familiar issue of Why is it always women who have to wear the torture shoes or tight lacing or tiny dress in freezing cold?
Jennifer Lawrence has criticized “sexist” media coverage of her fashion choices in a new Facebook post.
The Oscar-winning actor, currently on a press tour for thriller Red Sparrow, responded to comments suggesting that the sleeveless Versace outfit worn during a photocall in London implied that she was being mistreated alongside her coat-wearing male co-stars.
“Wow. I don’t really know where to get started on this ‘Jennifer Lawrence wearing a revealing dress in the cold’ controversy,” she wrote. “This is not only utterly ridiculous, I am extremely offended. That Versace dress was fabulous, you think I’m going to cover that gorgeous dress up with a coat and a scarf? I was outside for five minutes. I would have stood in the snow for that dress because I love fashion and that was my choice.”
An article in Jezebel had the headline, Please Give Jennifer Lawrence a Dang Coat, showing the actor’s co-stars, Joel Edgerton and Jeremy Irons among them, wearing large coats and scarves.
John Phillips/Getty Images
Oh hey, you know what, there’s something else to notice about that photograph. See the tidy symmetry? Two men, then Jennifer Lawrence, then two more men. Oh hey guess what this is yet another movie with a man, a man, a man, a man, and a woman. Any hope it passes the Bechdel test?
But to her point. It’s her choice, she says – but is it, really? On a superficial level maybe it is, maybe nobody told her to wear a glam dress and glam shoes, but realistically, could she have shown up for a photocall dressed exactly the way the men are? Could the men have shown up dressed the way she is?
Come on. There are conventions about these things, and they’re not all that relaxed. Lawrence can dress the way the men are on her own time, but not when she’s doing glam duty on the job. The men cannot dress the way Lawrence is unless they decide to “transition.” It’s not a mere coincidence that the way the men are dressed leaves them able to run if they need to while Lawrence is quite literally hobbled by what she’s wearing. No doubt she does love fashion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t question the norms of what both sexes are allowed or pressured to wear.
And what sort of world is it where a woman “loves fashion” so much that she risks her own health to not put on a coat? Five minutes is a long time when you are standing in the cold. I sometimes choose to cross the street to the next building without my coat in the winter. It’s not five minutes, not even close. I usually regret it. But that actually is a choice. No one is looking at me, I am not doing any sort of glamour anything, I just don’t want to bother to put on my coat. And I pay the price.
Five minutes in the cold in that dress? I suspect that would qualify as torture under the Geneva convention if we made a prisoner of war do that – but only if he was a man.
Well, yeah, it’s her “choice,” but her choices are … “constrained” is not the right word, because in theory she’s free to dress like a shlub.. let’s say that they’re made in the context of certain cultural standards.
If Jennifer Lawrence so much as leaves her house without at least putting on makeup, the paparazzi are there to grab photos of her to be run in tabloids under headlines about how she’s let herself go. Half the websites on the internet are infested with ads promising me that I will be “shocked” to see what some actress from a hit show 40 years ago “looks like now!” Uh, like a 60-70 year old woman?
Meanwhile, of course, guys like Kevin Smith and Adam Sandler and Kevin James can show up to their own red-carpet movie premieres in shorts and a hockey jersey, and it’s just proof of how “down to earth” they are.
A ‘gorgeous’ dress? Well, it certainly made my gorge rise when I first saw the picture on ‘Why Evolution is True’ (where it appeared not as some scientific example, as I recall, but as a defence against JL’s nasty left-wing – which is to say, feminist – critics, and a clarion-call for being free to wear whatever you want, however ridiculous and whatever the weather so long as it’s expensive; though Jerry Coyne seemed to find the dress aesthetically pleasing). It makes her look like a partly shelled prawn.
I was listening to Kim Hill interviewing Farida Sultana. Farida Sultana is the founder of the New Zealand branch of Shakti which provides “culturally appropriate domestic violence intervention services to women of Asian, African and Middle Eastern origin”.Hill asked what was wrong with arranged marriage if the woman said she was up for it. Sultana’s reply was absolutely nothing was wrong with that, as long as the family and society also calmly accepted her saying at a later date that the marriage had been a mistake and was not working out and she was leaving it. Her point being that you can’t claim something as free choice if the choice can’t be made freely in the opposite manner. Parallels with to wear a hijab or not, or a western actress to wear a freezing cold dress or not.
Does she not get much chance to get dolled up? It’s such an odd image, like someone in a ball gown and tiara pushing a shopping trolley around a supermarket full of normal people.
Heh, true, it is a bit like that embarrassing sitch where you thought the occasion was a dressy one and everyone else is in jeans and sweatshirts.
Ehhhhhhhh. I have little sympathy for arguments from constrained choice. Eventually no choice is sufficiently free, and the terms become meaningless. The best we can do is ask whether a decision was made largely free of certain kinds of constraints.
As Catwhisperer noted, given what the men are wearing (tie-less shirts, sweaters, topcoats, pea coats, chinos, boots, etc.) JL’s plain overdressed. I like fashion, too, JL, but I actually care about what situations one wears what.
It makes it hard to believe that the people taking the pic would have been unhappy if she’d worn something like this, this, this, this, or this. Equally attractive, equally fashionable, while also not being totally out of place. And actually more appropriate, since they’re from the fucking movie being promoted. So I can accept that her choice was sufficiently unconstrained.
What argument do you take me to be making that you disagree with? How does it differ from one that starts with asking whether a decision was made largely free of certain kinds of constraints? It seems to me that “certain kinds of constraints” is what I was talking about.
I think Nullius was disagreeing with JL’s statement on the matter, not yours.
Indeed, Holms. My first paragraph was just eyerolling at a silly argument made by silly people.
I’ve seen this “is it really her choice” line taken to ludicrous extremes too many times, so I get a bit tetchy whenever I encounter even the benign form. In a philosophy of law class, we examined notions of consent and the effect of environment on the possibility thereof. What I took away from it was that adopting a strict view of consent makes consent impossible (because there are always external influences). The worthwhile line of inquiry shifts to what sort of influences and constraints do/don’t admit of consent.
Now, you, Ophelia, weren’t making the silly version of the argument, which is why I didn’t go into it. Because I agree with you.
Right, Nullius. Like when someone tells me I don’t really make the free choice when I decide to have mustard on my hamburger instead of mayonnaise (or vice versa). So what? I order what I want, and if that order is the result of a combination of genetic and environmental influences, it is trivial. But the choices of no coat, spike heels, plunging necklines, make up, jewelry, etc, can have major impacts on a person’s life, and claiming it as a choice free from the expectations of one’s role is just plain harmful.