Separating Reality From Fiction Is Impossible To Apply To Women, Apparently

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Are we not sick and tired of belittling women on every platform?

Why are we always harsher towards women, even when they’re just doing their job and pursuing their craft?

Related: 5 Questions We Have For People Who Can Just Openly Insult Others On Public Platforms

Ever get put off at a comment section of a Facebook post about a film with a Filipino actress in it doing something a little risqué? Let us tell you right now that so many of those posts often have one thing in common: audiences policing women for making risqué choices in film, and conflating their whole being with the characters they play.

Whether it’s as simple as being annoyed at Victoria Justice for doing things when she was Tori Vega in Victorious, shaming Kathryn Bernardo for doing romantic scenes in Hello, Love, Goodbye (2024) after she broke up with her ex-boyfriend, or making suggestive jokes at female actors IRL because they play sexually-confident women in movies or series, plenty of people are way harsher on women for doing their jobs and pursuing their craft. And as with the latter examples, a lot of it involves slut-shaming and a lot of bringing the personal into the professional.

DOUBLE STANDARDS MUCH?

Just at the tail end of last year, multiple posts about Kathryn in her HLG role circulated on social media, and there were several posts of her romantic scenes with Alden Richards that were pretty misogynistic in the way they implied she broke up with her ex-boyfriend just because she wanted to do more mature scenes with other people.

In Filipino pop culture, we see so often how female actors who take on more extreme roles are degraded, shamed, and made jokes of—particularly if they’re not the “type” of actor to do those things. You don’t see as much shaming directed towards men, though. Of course not.

Even online, when men play roles that have them romantically play alongside women, people praise them or make jokes about these actors “winning in life.” Meanwhile, women are slut-shamed and made to feel bad about taking on roles because people conflate their acting with their real-life situations. If a woman takes on a mature role, people are quick to make suggestive jokes or references at their expense, sometimes even lamenting why they “had to go that far,” as if it’s such a lowly, shameful thing to portray sexuality on screen.

Public perception of sexuality in media still has a long way to go before being open and accepting, but it’s bare minimum to not shame women for doing their job and to separate fiction from reality. Although telling the story, choosing the role, and doing what they do with it do involve some personal introspection and judgment from an actor, something like two actors kissing on screen for the story they’re working to tell is not an act of infidelity, nor is it an implication that all an actor wants to do is make out with other people. People are not their characters.

Pareho naman silang single,” as a rebuttal to these comments also doesn’t hold as much weight as some people think it does, because, again, they are actors. Their real-life relationship status has no bearing on the jobs and roles they take unless that’s a choice they consciously make. And if they’re in a controlling relationship that does not allow them to do the work they want to do…well, that is a whole other problem.

RESPECTING CRAFT

To be fair, plenty of actors fall victim to only being seen as a character they played. It’s not exclusive to women. It’s also a testament to how well they played these characters, which is why actors who are more “versatile” are praised more often. But we digress. It’s just that the shaming and mocking of women is much more prevalent, and a lot more harmful.

The way these posts, comments, and perspectives go around on social media, inviting barrages of gross and frustrating comments toward an actor who’s just doing their job is yet another manifestation of the patriarchal systems that only reinforces how women always get the short end of the stick, in media and in real life. And it’s arguably more present in Filipino society than, say, in Hollywood. We’re seemingly a lot more conservative and judgmental when it comes to these things. It’s not hard to separate an actor’s personal life from the work that they do—and to not shame them for pursuing their craft.

However, it doesn’t stop there. Even if you’re able to separate an actor’s role from their actual being, shaming women in general for pursuing and acting on their desires is something we need to unlearn as well. There are whole other conversations to be had about the systems of patriarchy, “true agency” under capitalism, sex and sexuality in media, but for this, for now, it’s simple: actors are not wholly their characters, and shaming actors, particularly female actors, for doing their job, only perpetuates the misogyny they already face.

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