The Mary Sue: When casting his film Widows, director Steve McQueen was initially warned against hiring Michelle Rodriguez in one of the lead roles. McQueen told Uproxx that he recalled being told, “Don’t work with her. No, no don’t work with her. But people say that about me. If you’re a white director, they call you a perfectionist. Me, they call difficult. So I didn’t pay any mind to what people say about Michelle, because I had to find out for myself.”
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The double standards that women and people of color face as they navigate through different spaces in the world is very frustrating. Women are called the b-word if they refuse to do roles that are demeaning or ask for better treatment. People of color are referred to as difficult to work with and are blacklisted from the industry. It is very important that we call out the people that perpetrate and carry on this way of thinking. The art world should be leading the rest of the world in dispelling patriarchal, misogynistic and racist values. I believe art should challenge the norm and if what is being done behind the scenes does not promote that goal, it is eventually going to show up at the forefront.
This article describes a specific example of a larger, frustrating trend in not only Hollywood, but the rest of the country as well, namely the double standards regarding attitude between men and women. Men and women can both be labelled as “difficult to work with”, but the term carries different weights. A woman who is “difficult” may have her career ended because no studio wants to work with her, while a “difficult” man often has his flaws brushed away as artistic idiosyncrasies. This double standard is not only applied in the world of entertainment, but also in most careers. A male manager can be “a strong leader” while a woman showing the same qualities is “bossy”, and guess which of them is viewed more negatively? As the article points out, this double standard applies to issues of race as well, leaving white men essentially free to behave however they want while women and minorities are forced to watch their step and be careful to not offend in order to keep their jobs. I loved hearing about how McQueen subverted these standards and wanted to hire Rodriguez in part because of those qualities, and hope that he sets an example for the rest of the industry.
Of course, we all know that anyone who deviates a cis-het-white-able-bodied-male identity is subject to all kinds of negative stereotypes and discriminatory treatment in the workplace. Anne Hathaway gave an interesting talk recently, which I will confess I only saw clips of on Facebook (in an archetypal portrait of our current news cycle), but in the clip I saw, she illustrated how our society views the identity I listed above as some kind of centerpoint around which all other identities orbit. All other genders orbit around male, all other races orbit around white, etc. Therefore, the way in which we come to understand minorities that we do not belong to is in relationship to the "center identity" and often in negative comparison. So when the power structure of an industry, and a society in general, is made up of mostly people who only belong to the center identities, those negative comparisons become the double standards that we so often seen minorities held to.
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