I recently got cast to play the wife of a well-known actor on a network TV show. Good news, right? But then I saw the script, which said that the fake hubbie and I had been married for “24 years.”
In real life, I am in my early 30s. This means that I married this 50+year-old actor when I was less than 10 years old. WTF?
Then I showed up to set and learned that they had cast a 26-year-old woman to play my daughter. So I got pregnant when I was in kindergarten? Double WTF!
What was going on? Sexism with a capital S, that’s what.
I should mention that this was a “background” role, which means that I didn't speak and got cast purely based on how I look and not on what I brought to the part. It’s possible that I look older than my age, though I doubt that this is the case. In fact, when I lived in D.C., I was often told that I looked “too young,” to have the professional job I had. (This, too, is a form of sexism, as I doubt a man would ever get that comment.)
All day, I was angry about this casting. I still am. Because casting like this sends the message that women over the age of 35 don’t deserve a place on television or in our culture. And that is wrong and insulting to 51% of the American population.
I’m not the only one who’s noticed this. Recently, Oscar-nominated actress Maggie Gyllenhaal was told that, at 37, she was too old to play the lover of a man who’s 55. Comedian Amy Schumer also raised this issue in her hilarious sketch “Last F*ckable Day,” and writer Kyle Buchanan just wrote an article called "Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, and Scarlett Johansson have an Older-Man Problem." His article compares the ages of these women to that of their male love interests and documents a significant age gap (click here to see his nifty charts for yourself). He writes that:
"while we don't necessarily look to the movies for realism, steering these young actresses toward near-constant May-December romances is wholly out of step with what's actually going on in the culture. According to the 2013 census, nearly 60 percent of heterosexual married couples are within two to three years of each other; a union separated by 15 years, like the one between Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook, comes up only 1.6 percent of the time, and some of Emma Stone's recent screen romances with men who exceeded her age by 20 years are reflected by a mere one percent of actual couples."
Sexism in Hollywood goes well beyond age gap issues. In 2013, female characters made up just
15 percent of protagonists and
30 percent of all speaking characters in the top 100 grossing movies. Even when women are allowed to speak, they make significantly less than their male counter-parts. Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams made about 23% less than the male leads in American Hustle, even though Lawrence had both an Oscar and blockbuster franchise at that point and Adams had more Academy Award nominations than two of the higher-paid male leads
combined.
Sexism is also rampant behind the camera (see, for example, the blog Shit People Say to Women Directors). Only 11% of Hollywood writers are women. In 2014 only 7% of the directors of the top-grossing Hollywood films were women – a 2% decrease from 1998. And last year, nearly a third of network TV shows had no women director at all (many shows switch directors from episode to episode). One woman director told the ACLU that she was told she couldn’t be hired because they had "already hired a woman this season.”
Fortunately, the ACLU recently filed grievances with several state and federal agencies requesting investigations into “the systemic failure to hire women directors at all levels of the film and television industry.” The organization claims that "the failure to hire women directors in film and television cannot be attributed to a lack of qualified or interested women. Women are well represented in prominent film schools such as USC, NYU and UCLA; while hard numbers are hard to come by, estimates place the number of women students focusing on directing as roughly equal to the number of men.”
Something has to change here. I believe that the stories told by Hollywood matter and that they impact our culture. And until Hollywood stops being a good ol’ boys club, with little gender or racial diversity, our culture will be negatively impacted. As actor Geena Davis said,
"we are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space. Couldn't it be that the percentage of women in leadership positions in many areas of society — Congress, law partners, Fortune 500 board members, military officers, tenured professors and many more — stall out at around 17 percent because that's the ratio we've come to see as the norm [in the media]?"
And maybe if Hollywood didn’t tell such sexist, ageist stories, I wouldn’t hear 75 year-old men say things like “Well, I haven’t had any kids yet, but I’m looking for a young woman to give me one.” (A grizzled old man said these exact words to me on set last week). First of all, ick! Second of all, find a lovely woman your own damn age. There are many of them out there, even if you never see them on TV.