For tonight’s Academy Awards, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Regina Hall were the ones chosen to host ceremony that is increasingly losing its audience. Though they took a difficult task, they have brought some freshness, being critical about the Awards and Hollywood industry.
However, a joke made by Regina Hall showed exactly what is one of Hollywood’s biggest problems to this day: sexism. Why? She objectified four actors on stage, something that if it had happened with actresses, it would have been a scandal by now.
Here’s the scene: Regina Halls appears on stage and says that some of the covid tests were lost; she was going to call on the names of the ones who needed to take another test backstage: Timotheé Chalamet, Bradley Cooper, Perry Ellis and Simu Liu. She called too Will Smith given “that Jada allows it”, but he refuses to go on stage and Jacob Elordi now that he “is legal”.
Can you see the problem? Regina picked single and attractive men to go on stage to talk about their looks. Moreover, she explicitly said that the PCR test she was talking about consisted on going deeply into their throats with her own tongue.
It was clear that the ones chosen by Hall were uncomfortable with her sayings.
According to UNICEF, sexim is “prejudice or discrimination based on gender.” And, in this case, everyday sexism includes sexual harassment amongst other forms of sexual violence.
In this case, she was referring to the looks of their bodies, objectifying them and stripping them of their value as actors.
According to Sally Haslanger, Ford Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the MIT, one of the four conditions necessary in order for one person to objectify another is if “person A views and treats person B as an object for the satisfaction of A’s desire”, something that Regina Hall did.
Of course, this joke made some social users to point out the problem with it and how, it it were actresses instead of actors, it would be a huge problem.
