Proof that Seth MacFarlane's sexism is anything but harmless

Nobody told me it was National Sexism Week. I would have bought a badge or something. First came Seth MacFarlane's boob-centric stint as Oscars host, then everyone piled in to insult a 21-year-old American actress walking down the street for not being as attractive as a comic-book character. I don't know about the rest of you fellas, but I'm feeling pretty ashamed about my own penis right now. Moreso than usual.

This particular train of thought started chuffing yesterday when I saw a tweet about Den Of Geek editor and handsome devil Simon Brew removing a post on his website because he didn't much like the kind of comments it had attracted. Intrigued, I read on and discovered that Brew had originally shared some Just Jared paparazzi pictures of actress Shailene Woodley arriving on the set of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, in which she would be playing Mary-Jane. Upon discovering that a handful of his users had taken this as an opportunity to physically devalue Woodley and make misogynistic comments regarding her appearance, Simon – in a real integrity move – took a stand. Kudos, sir.

Later that day, Twitter user @JamesHunt directed me to the Bleeding Cool forums, where users were posting similarly derogative comments relating to Woodley's appearance. Here are some of the photos from the set.



It's an unflattering series of shots, perhaps, but I should point out that Woodley, 21, was not wearing any make-up and had been photographed without permission. For what it's worth, this is what Shailene Woodley looks like under a more forgiving camera lens.



She's beautiful, I'm sure you'll agree, but it matters not a jot. Ostensibly, the Just Jared pictures are photographs of a content, happy young girl, probably walking from wardrobe to the make-up department on the first day of the biggest job of her life. Yet Bleeding Cool users like 'Doordoor123' and 'spider-rob' saw fit to make comments like this.

I figured that Bleeding Cool probably weren't the only site to cover the pap shots of Woodley, so I checked out the other film sites I regularly frequent. Sure enough, they'd all run the pictures, and at the foot of every page – in the hive of scum and villainy that is the comments section – I saw a pattern repeating: young men disgusted by an unflattering photograph of an actress they deemed not attractive enough to play a comic-book character that exists only in pen and ink.
From Slashfilm:

On Collider:

Over at IGN:

And at the alpha male playground that is Ain't It Cool News:

There are more. A depressing amount more. I didn't even post the most offensive ones as I didn't want to give them the oxygen of publicity.

Frankly – and call me naïve if you like – I was pretty appalled at what I found. I hate internet comments. I have half a mind to turn them off on The Shiznit, except – apart from a few amusing and odd exceptions – we attract a small but good-natured crowd. This is clearly not the case everywhere else. Comments are the arse-end of the internet. Anything worth debating properly has never been resolved in an online forum.

However, I had no idea that sexism was so rampant in online film communities. When I posted an outline for this feature in our admin system, tech director Luke posted a note: "Do you ever read game reviews? Infinity times worse." As a gamer, I am well acquainted with the inherent misogyny in the gaming community – the Anita Sarkeesian case, Borderland 2's 'Girlfriend Mode' etc – but while I obviously can’t endorse it, I do understand it to a certain degree. Gaming is an active hobby in which users participate and compete: it's natural, though not acceptable, that it breeds aggression. I have been called 'faggot' on FIFA more times than I'd care to admit; I dread to think of the abuse that female gamers receive at the hands of the same idiots.

Film appreciation, on the other hand, is passive. No one is in competition with anyone else: men, women, boys and girls, we're all on this side of the screen. Abuse like the comments directed at Shailene Woodley are born out of a mixture of grotesque entitlement ('Why isn't she being played by X like I want her to be?') and the incapability of certain young men to relate to women – from fellow film fans to well-paid actresses – as human beings. I can think of no better way to sum this up than by directing your attention to this comment from AICN:


There are young men growing up in the age of the internet that already have trouble personally relating to women thanks to the unrealistic ideals of porn. Should we be worrying that they're comparing flesh and blood young women to their caricatured comic-book counterparts even earlier in their adolescence? I have news for you, 'SuperJayTNT': there's no one on Earth that looks like the girl in that panel.

Turning to Twitter upon making this uneasy discovery, I asked my female followers if they had ever experienced sexism first hand on any comments boards they had frequented. The responses were telling. Said Flick Filosopher writer MaryAnn Johansson: "[It] would be easier to ask where sexist behaviour *hasn't* happened on the film-fan web." Says Empire's Deputy Online Editor Helen O'Hara: "When I give action movies a bad review, it's because I'm a girl," before linking to abuse she received after daring to suggest Wrath Of The Titans might not be an Oscar-winner. Other Twitter users, like @MarieMJS and @evilnoodle, claim the abuse they'd receive in forums and comments was so commonplace, they'd just stopped bothering going south of the page-fold.

You would assume – and maybe hope – that the majority of these moronic comments were from children, or at least ill-informed teenagers. If an 11-year-old Spider-Man fan told Shailene Woodley that he thought she was too ugly to play MJ to her face (granted, this is a scenario of complete fantasy), it'd likely be laughed off. The veil of anonymity that the internet allows, however, is what makes the comments sting – and the internet is written in ink. Is our charming friend 'spider-rob' from earlier really just a pre-pubescent boy as it seems, or could he actually be an adult male; a man with a genuinely loathsome and potentially dangerous attitude towards women? That's what's so unsettling about these comments – the relaxed, entitled attitude with which they're posted. There are girls who have become so numb to this kind of abuse that they've tuned it out – or worse, stopped participating entirely.

That's where I come back to Seth MacFarlane and his queasy stint hosting the Oscars – a routine that gets uglier the more you dissect it. Seth MacFarlane and I have a love-hate relationship – he loves himself and I hate him for it – so I was never going to be his biggest fan on the night, but even I was surprised at how flagrant his misogyny was. One sexist joke – perhaps his mildly amusing quip about Zero Dark Thirty being a film about "every woman's innate ability to never ever let anything go" – and you'd maybe let it lie. But a whole set-list of sexist material? That's indicative of a major underlying problem.

Even if they were fully aware of MacFarlane's 'brand' of comedy – for the uninitiated: that's lazy, lowbrow, first base humour based around the belittling of any group that's not rich, white or middle-class – the Academy gave the green light to MacFarlane's entire routine. So, that's a song called 'We Saw Your Boobs' (which gleefully lists the celebrity breasts that MacFarlane has seen on film, including four from rape scenes and – LOL – the leaked candids from Scarlett Johansson's phone); a bizarre joke that sexualised nine-year-old nominee Quvenzhané Wallis (suggesting that she was not yet old enough to get nailed by Clooney); some shtick about the women in the audience throwing up to fit into their dresses for the evening ("It paid off… looking good"); and an intro to Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz that literally included the phrase: "We have no idea what they're saying but we don't care because they're so attractive."

Oh, and a fucking Chris Brown/Rihanna joke. Not just one in which Chris Brown was the punchline (still not okay), but one in which Rihanna was too. That's right: the biggest names in Hollywood deemed a joke that made light of domestic abuse fair game for the most high-profile night in the entertainment calendar.

That's the extent to which sexism is now commonplace in the film industry. If there's a hugely successful comedian on TV telling the world it's okay if we only appreciate a woman because she has huge tits, why wouldn't there be pre-teen kids calling a 21-year-old actress "ugly" because she doesn't fit their ideals?

And no, it's not just harmless fun. I am not humourless; I laughed my ass off at The Onion's infamous Quvenzhané Wallis tweet (context here) because it was absurdly clear it was satirical in nature. But Seth MacFarlane wouldn't know good satire if it had a pair of boobs strapped to it. If, as his defenders have claimed, his sexist material was meant to be a satirical point about the male gaze and how others interpret women in Hollywood, then it utterly failed on all counts. The idea of satire is you mine humour from something while making a salient, subversive point. I must have missed that verse from 'We Saw Your Boobs'.

MacFarlane has never been clever enough to skewer such hot-button topics with any degree of accuracy: for him, just pointing them out is enough. He is smart enough, however, to know that he can use the excuse of 'satire' as a shield to hide behind, while at the same time, accepting the applause from those who took 'We Saw Your Boobs' at face value. It's the perfect crime, isn't it? Belittling women for yuks, then pretending it was all done as part of some ingenious, satirical sting?

I've had conversations with friends this week who spoke of the "faux outrage" over MacFarlane's routine; those that didn't understand the anger. No one is saying you're a bad person for finding any of it funny. Yes, the entire Oscar spectacle is one gigantic, shimmering contradiction – and yes, of course we should be equally angry about the hour-long Oscar pre-shows dedicated to inspecting every burst seam in the female contingent's dresses. Given the length of this post, I'm surprised I didn't already touch on it at some point. I just deleted a paragraph about the Iraq war.

But it's the insidiousness with which MacFarlane's routine insults and degrades women that offends – because it's presented under the guise of entertainment. That's way more upsetting than some shock jock with a headline quota to fill, or whatever withering put-down Joan Rivers has written this week. Bigotry begats bigotry: I've seen the distressing evidence of systemic misogyny myself online this week, and I doubt things are going to change if we continue to give men like Seth MacFarlane a platform.