Author: Kelley

… as in, what about those of us without that Special Y Chromosome? How’s it hanging for us in Hollywood?

Here’s an existential cry from a young woman in the film industry who wonders where are the women who will help her, and help her to help herself. Where are the extended hands, the mentors, the nurturing? Where are all the feminists?

I wish I could find this person and give her a hug. Buy her a beer or three. And tell her that in this, as in many things, gender doesn’t matter the way she wants it to. Women are not a Unified Front any more than writers or vanilla ice cream lovers or any other group of people. Commonality is no guarantee of understanding or support, even for people whose commonality is that they’re getting tromped on. Shared experience doesn’t necessarily produce shared perception or shared behavior.

My limited experience of Hollywood is that it’s extremely gendered in many ways — so much so that I, even with my southern background, feminist roots, media consciousness, and understanding of the history and power of socialization, am still blinking at the extent of it. I have been… hmm, surprised isn’t the right word, it’s something more like ruefully unsurprised to find that all strong women are not my sisters. And so I feel for this woman. It’s a real shock to find out that people you look up to will shit on you because they don’t know any better, or because you’re not important to them, or just because they can.

But here are two hard lessons. The first is that being a woman doesn’t automatically make someone a grownup. The second is that no one owes us help.

I think it’s almost always better to help each other: it’s a fundamental human impulse, and a good one. It saves lives and souls, and it binds us together in ways that shape history. It is a grownup thing to do. But it’s not a rule, or a right. So I give help and hope for it in return. I value those for whom helping is a value. But I don’t expect it, ‘specially in Hollywood, and I am learning not to judge others by their unwillingness to help in any individual circumstance (which is for me the harder lesson).

Most of the time, help comes to us either in some random way (anything from small generosity to emergency response) or specifically because of a personal relationship. And relationships aren’t with women, or men, or any other categorical noun: they are with people. If I were drinking beer with this young woman, I would say Find your people. And make sure they are grownups. Chronological age doesn’t matter: what is important is a perspective that isn’t simply me me me, a perspective that recognizes that there’s probably enough pie out there for all of us, and that helping someone else get their piece of pie doesn’t mean I have to do without.

Finding those people takes time, but it does work. And it’s one of the challenges of youth that when we need real, concrete help, we often don’t have the relationship web to find the grownups we need. Which is why in spite of everything I’ve just said about no one owing anyone, I’d still like to kick the ass of every woman in Hollywood who’s shit on a less experienced woman. Because it’s wrong to diminish other people, women or men, as the primary path to success (if there is any meaning left to that word when you have to leave track marks on someone else to get it). It’s wrong to spit in someone else’s pie. And it’s more hurtful when it comes from someone with whom we hope for commonality, and whom we have mistaken for a grownup.

It’s good that women are finding more power in the film business (or anywhere else) — it hurts when we don’t see ourselves reflected in the culture. And it hurts in a different way when the only role models we find are people that we’d never want to actually be like.

I’ve talked about my vision to make things a little better for women in films. And here’s a group of young women writers who are doing it for themselves. Good on ’em. I hope they’ll keep helping themselves, and each other.