This is hell, nor are we out of it
This crap again.
Scarlett Moffatt and Jodie Whitaker lead worst dressed on #BAFTATV red carpet https://t.co/NuFa4jdkXE pic.twitter.com/edfFYRFOND
— Mirror Celeb (@MirrorCeleb) May 12, 2019
The article is just a string of photos like that and the “reporter,” James Brinsford, saying why he doesn’t like each dress.
Note the ratio.
The replies are uniformly hostile.
People are so weird – sitting down in cold blood to put together a thing like this that is nothing but bullying intended to make people feel bad – women, specifically. They go to an event, they dress up the way they have to, they pose obligingly for photos, wearing their biggest smiles – and along comes ratbag to say they all look like crap. Meanness for the sake of it.
We need to stop.
Delivered by bitchy, histrionic gay men.
How strange. I really liked all the dresses he hated! The women were either having some fun, or doing something a bit different. That green dress is fabulous- the fabric! The shoes the spotty dress woman are amazing- the whole outfit was great, and she looked so happy! I bet he never liked any of Tilda Swinton’s dresses.
Lots of women are turning up to glam occasions in dresses that don’t expose their bodies; that have high necks, collars and sleeves and are comfortable to wear. Perhaps they have allergies and can’t wear dresses that need to be stuck on with glue? Or they’re fed up with clothes that are meant to be kept on a clothes hanger?
I note that the only woman he criticised who was wearing a dress that exposed more of her body was plump.
When women start wearing clothes for themselves, it undermines the principle that women are the property of others. This must always be punished.
I’m trying to work out how they all walk in those shoes.
I always feel feminist guilt when I look at photos of awards, etc but I love frocks. Women have had some influence on reporting, because there’s far fewer of these “Worst dressed” things now. Thank God.
Let us just look at the dresses and make our own commentary, thanks.
[DISCLAIMER: I hardly ever watch TV so the following statements may be inaccurate and/or ill-informed. Heh – for a change]
Scarlett Moffat is primarily famous for having down-to-Earth, kind, funny and often thoughtful opinions despite – or perhaps because of – being uneducated, working class and (until recently, I guess) untraveled and inexperienced. On the rare occasions I’ve seen her, she’s been a delight to listen to. She’s a fairly typical young woman from my neck of the woods, but kinder and more thoughtful than many people from much fancier backgrounds.
But she can fuck off because you didn’t like her frock on one occasion? I see.
I know, I know, the point is that it doesn’t matter whether she’s a nice or accomplished person or not; judging people and especially women on how they dress is always disgusting. Ignoring who people are and what they have done and sneering at them while making remarks calculated to make them feel bad and make other people say things in public to make them feel bad is an especially horrible and pernicious form of bullying. It’s all the worse because for some reason the authors have the defense that stories like this are supposed, in some undefinable sense, to be like that. Ugh. “Thicker skin”. Ugh. “Shouldn’t be in the public eye if”. Ugh.
But, oh, I don’t know, it just seems to me as though she deserves this kind of treatment even less than most people. Assuming my very limited exposure to her corpus of work is even remotely correct. Because shut up, that’s why. I’m allowed to be more on some people’s sides than others.
Also, the idea that because someone has been on a few TV shows, they should automatically have perfect fashion sense (and care about fashion) and that everyone should universally agree about the quality of that fashion sense is…. an extraordinarily bad and horrible one.
Anyway, don’t celebrities at these events wear what their agents or whatever tell them to? Don’t their agents get a designer to put together a wardrobe for them? I have no idea, of course, but it seems like the sort of thing that would happen.
I’ll stop now because I feel as though I’m in danger of Dear Muslimaing myself, somehow.
Since without fail I always break my own rules about stopping talking, here’s a clip of Scarlett Moffatt.
First, I apologise profusely for posting a clip of This Morning – nobody deserves that – but seriously, this is the sort of person that journalist chose to bully because he didn’t like her frock very much:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi0NHsx2x3g
“Note the ratio”?
Of what, to what? Not following.
madddog:
Probably the ratio of women to men on the shame list.
No, it will be the Twitter ratio, won’t it?
What’s “the Twitter ratio”?
I like this reply on Twitter, and ought to make a note of it for future use:
‘Fuck off.
Then keep fucking off.
Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying
“You can’t fuck off past here.”
Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream,
and keep fucking off forever.’
The Twitter ratio is the ratio of comments to retweets (and sometimes also likes). Basically, if you tweet something clever, a lot of people will retweet (and like) it. If you tweet something stupid, they’ll instead post a comment to tell you what an idiot you are.
Obviously things don’t always work that way (a good tweet can spawn discussion), but in general if your ratio is over 2:1 your tweet has not gone over well.
(And now of course people organize campaigns to “ratio” someone then laugh that they “got ratio’d”, so it’s less of a natural phenomenon.)
I understand what you mean when you say women have to dress that way, but what would really happen if a bunch of them dressed in comfortable clothes and just walked in without posing? Would they really get blackballed from the industry? Would people stop watching their movies?
Well, yes, they probably would. That particular industry is wildly competitive, as everyone knows, so yes, if they tried that there would doubtless be thousands of rivals ready to take their places and hundreds of executives ready to drop them. Frances McDormand can get away with it, but she has a string of awards and the Coen brothers.
She looks fantastic, but B list Hollywood women would probably not get away with it.
Sure, b listers couldn’t do it. But if they’re established at all, I’d think they could pull it off. Especially if a big group of them did it together and explained why, perhaps coupled with a clever hashtag.
(Ha ha, but what do I know? I just looked at a list of top-earning female actors from last year, and I don’t even know who half of them are, and of the ones I do know I mostly didn’t know they were in any recent big movies.)
If women really couldn’t kill this tradition of being dress-up dolls on the red carpet, then that’s yet another sad commentary on how unbelievably anti-progressive Hollywood is.
Thank you Skeletor @11.
I’m still not quite following the arithmetic. If the ratio is of “retweets + likes” to “comments,” then why is a ratio larger than 2:1 a bad thing?
It’s bad to have a lot more comments than likes & RTs because it means you’re getting yelled at. If people were commenting in a friendly or interested way, the likes & RTs would be roughly comparable to the comments.
I had no idea what people meant by “ratioed” until quite recently.
Maddog1129, you have it flipped. The ratio is comments:(retweets+likes).
Thank you, Skeletor and OB. I (obvs) am not very familiar with Twitter protocols and vocabulary. Thanks for sorting me out.
I’m hypothesizing wildly now but I would have thought that running the red carpet gauntlet counts as promoting the work, and actors might have some obligations in that area included in their contracts. I remember hearing Olivia Coleman being asked a few years back whether she enjoyed red carpet events and her answer was something like “Oh God no. I hate them. The clothes you have to wear, and the underwear? Thrush from your belly button to the back of your knees”. You’d think she wouldn’t go if she didn’t need to. Or at least wear some comfy knickers. But then she’d end up guilty of VPL, and that would probably justify a full page in the Mirror.
Oh I don’t think that’s wild at all. It’s quite clear that award ceremonies are at the very least marketing opportunities (at most that’s all they are and the “awards” bit is just window dressing). From the pov of the studios the actors are on duty, and for women in that business that emphatically does mean cleaning up as sexy and glam and noticeable as possible.
Ophelia @22,
Agreed. And while the men are “on duty,” too, so to speak, they get two key advantages that women don’t:
1) There’s a safe “uniform” for men. Just wear a classic tuxedo or dark suit. You may not get cited as the most fashionable male on the red carpet, but nobody’s going to snark on you for being “out of style” or boring. The closest equivalent for women, I suppose, is the classic “little black dress,” but even then there will be obsession about the cut, the shoes, the jewelry and other accessories, the hair… and if there’s nothing snarkworthy that you’ll just be dissed as drab and unadventurous;
2) Men can get away with some amazing shit. Men like Kevin Smith and Adam Sandler have shown up to movie premieres in a hockey jersey, cargo shorts, and sneakers, alongside their exquisitely dressed female stars, and other than a few people rolling their eyes online, there are no actual career consequences. If anything, it just cements their images as down-to-earth dudes. By comparison, an actress who declined to dress “sexy” for a promotional event would be branded as “difficult.” And that’s enough to deny women parts: Harvey Weinstein’s word that they were difficult was sufficient to cost Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino roles in the Lord of the Rings series.