“Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth!” with a side order of open-palmed physical assault, and suddenly the awards of an award ceremony becomes the least talked-about fallout from the Oscars.
And as is only natural in a country so enamoured with conflict and violence, the US split to continue the altercation after the show. Actors, actresses, pundits, and even politicians started taking sides, whether asked to by the media or decided to on their own to snatch a share of the hub-bub. The people in the wake are left talking about the propriety of jokes, the normalization of violence, and the egos produced by the celebrity film industry.
So let’s talk about gender roles for a bit, shall we, now that the US discourse and celebrity partisanship seem poised to send equality staggering backwards a few decades. What Will Smith seems to mean when he storms up on stage to “slap the shit out of” the hired roaster is that no one has the right to make jokes at the expense of his protectorate. His demesne. His domain. His woman. Even simply saying the name of “his” woman in a public setting is deemed worthy of corporal punishment, according to his later heckling.
Doesn’t this strike anyone else as a particularly medieval perspective on gender roles? That it’s somehow still a man’s duty to defend his precious Madonna from any and all slights. As if Will Smith was some deranged Don Quijote who demands that passersby submit their reverence at the Don’s lady’s feet on pain of punishment. Because while the rest of the attendants are free game for the hired comedian to make fun of, heavens forbid that a single reference rain upon the head of Smith’s property.
I get the knee-jerk reaction (even though it looks like Will’s was to laugh along until he sees his wife’s). It’s naught but natural to want to keep the people you care about out of harms way. But it’s difficult to argue that a joke (however off-colour it might or might-not be) made by a professional joker hired to professionally joke specifically at celebrity expense at an international award show is in any way dangerous. Dangerous to one’s ego, perhaps, but not in any tangible sense.
These kind of schoolyard heroics are redundant in a gender equal society. Because as far as I understood it, equality meant that women are expected to fight their own battles, non? Wasn’t that the whole point of female empowerment? That women no longer needed, or wanted, unhinged egomaniacs to “slap the shit out of” the hired entertainment for mentioning their names on stage.
Whether or not you like Chris Rock is irrelevant. Whether or not you think jokes about medical conditions is below the belt is irrelevant. All of it circumstantial and subjective. The real sick on display here is the fact that if Jada Pinkett Smith took offence to a joke on stage, then we should have seen her march up there and give Rock a five-finger broadside. But we didn’t. We saw her personal attack dog Willie do the dirty deed. Which is pretty misogynistic no matter which way you twist and turn it. Because Jada and Willie both, not to mention the celebrities who cry out in their support, have now projected to the fawning celebrity fandom that women aren’t capable of protecting their own names, but need men to do it for them.
/Sebastian Lindberg 29/3-2022
WastedWords 