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Treading new ground

Recently, a “powerful” video highlighting the gender imbalance in the movie industry has been making rounds on social media. The 3-minute piece, produced by advocacy group The Make It Fair Project, rattles off statistic after statistic in an attempt to drive home the point that Hollywood is overwhelmingly male. The video’s main draw (and most likely the reason it’s gone viral over the past week or so) is the tone in which those facts are presented: it purports to highlight the “plight” of men in Hollywood, sarcasm dripping from every claim that only around nine-tenths of those in the limelight are male. The faux-uplifting, cutesy folk of the video’s chorus takes these statistics one step further to the absurd yet unfortunately almost inevitable conclusion many have drawn (whether seriously or, in this case, ironically) — that “it’s only fair that men should have it all.”

At first glance, the reasonable reaction to this seems to be a response of, “Yes, and…?” I can’t help but find myself just a little bit annoyed by the surface-level stories on this video from sites like The Huffington Post and Jezebel, whose coverage pretty much amounts to agreeing wholeheartedly with the project’s message. Yes, of course men dominate Hollywood. We knew that in part because The New York Times, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, MSNBCand a whole slew of other news outlets have all covered that very topic in depth this past year. We knew that in part because of the related discussions on gender that this year’s #oscarssowhite movement spawned alongside the conversation on race. Put simply, it’s not saying anything particularly groundbreaking to agree with the content of this video, and it smacks of laziness to view this video as a content-repackaging opportunity above all else.

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However, what this superficial coverage fails to focus on is that the video actually accomplishes an important move in a new direction. Tucked into the end of the Jezebel story for three whole sentences, and not mentioned at all in the Huffington Post story, we find that the entire 70-plus-person cast behind this video — actors, writers, producers and everyone in between — was female. This, to me, seems huge. Not only is the #MAKEITFAIR video an indictment of the sexism of Hollywood, but it also takes tangible steps to combat that sexism. It’s one thing to complain about how terrible the misogynistic entertainment industry is, but it’s another thing altogether to actually create a concrete product that rallies around those without a powerful voice in that industry.

I bring what I view as the video’s main accomplishment forward because I want to be able to highlight what it does exceptionally right, something I feel was lost in the coverage of other blogs. I want to say this because I unfortunately see this kind of focus on message-above-all corrupted in other sites’ treatments of really cool new projects. In my experience, there’s typically something lost in translation when high-traffic commentary sites cover incredibly important issues of oppression embedded deep in our society. At some point, their think pieces and denouncements lose their meaning simply because they stop saying new things. Eventually, these sites fall victim to “preaching to the choir”: their pieces have no impact simply because everyone reading them already agrees with what they’re saying. And while this notion is true on a scale much larger than issues of oppression — we see this writ large with the increasing polarization of our news sources and, by extension, the one-size-fits-all political views which instantly follow — it’s especially noticeable when it revolves around that topic because articles dealing with deeply held bigotry tend to push less and less into constructive territory, instead opting for a “shallow but hyper-timely” format which accomplishes nothing except a small financial gain for those publishing the piece. Many of these articles don’t seem to be written in order to push forward radical new thinking or new forms of persuasion but because of precisely the opposite: because the idea is agreeable and easily shareable, the content seems worth writing.

However, in order to plow a new path through these issues, there’s a simple (if more time-intensive) solution: focus on not only what great new activism outlets are doing right, but also what they’re doing that’s new and exciting. In all this kerfuffle over how insightful or important the #MAKEITFAIR project is, we lose sight of what I think is the most important part of the video: it actually did something new. Its message is true, sure, but to me, it’s not so much about the message itself as it is about providing the appropriate vehicle for it. Lest we forget, it used its cultural power and production budget to actually create something out of the ordinary. It’s unfortunately uncommon to see anything like this project tread new ground, and as such we must celebrate the Make It Fair Project not only for what it said, but also for what it did.

Will Rivitz is a freshman from Brookline, Mass. He can be reached at wrivitz@princeton.edu.

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