THE OSCAR SLAP!
Denzel Washington’s message to Will Smith after he hit Chris Rock at the Oscars.
By now all of you readers will have read/seen Will Smith smacking Chris Rock in arguably the most televised event in the world. For making a joke about Jada Smith's loss of hair, which is a medical condition.
The internet is breaking with arguments and counter-arguments about the behavior of the people concerned. Some are defending Will for defending the honor of his wife, and others are calling him out for choosing such an imbecilic way to call out what was objectionable in Chris Rock's behavior.
And now, right now, some are saying it was all staged. Somehow (and it's proof if you needed any, of how shallow I am) the third option makes me the saddest. If this is staged, then we have hit so low as humans we can get oil now.
Let's look at how things happened.
Guy 1 cracks a bad joke. Guy 2 laughs along. Guy 2 then takes a sidelong glance at his wife, the target of Guy 1's bad joke. Guy 2's wife has not taken kindly to the bad joke. Guy 2 does a 180° turn on a dime, upends his smile to its opposite, and decides to muscularly defend his wife. So, Guy 2 walks all the way to and climbs the proscenium, where Guy 1, unsuspecting and in camaraderie with Guy 2's enjoyment of his bad joke, is going hurr hurr hurr. Guy 2, now all righteous and over-spilling testosterone, punches Guy 1 in the face. Then, he spins around and leaves. Defending wife's honor, done and dusted.
The (Hollywood!) audience is shell-shocked, reduced to silence at this violent interplay of machismo. The camera cuts to another well-known alpha male, Javier Bardem, who is grinning and clapping delightedly at two men who've made right proper idiots of themselves (as has he, Bardem, himself).
What among any of this is defensible?
Hello, all of you women (and men) drooling and fawning over Will Smith hitting Chris Rock over his ''joke'' on Jada, glorifying it as some sort of ''stand up for your partner'', please ask yourselves if a man cannot stop himself from using his fists in front of a million people when triggered or provoked, tomorrow if he is triggered or ''provoked'' in the middle of an argument with you or your kids, do you think he will be able to stop himself from using his fists behind closed doors? What is this patriarchal notion, reinforced even in his Oscar acceptance speech, that ''love will make you do crazy things'' and that a man is someone who protects his family at any cost? Couldn't Jada herself have stood up for herself? Why didn't she? Does a woman always need a man to protect/defend her? Did Will, in fact, take some perverse satisfaction from seeing his wife being made fun of, and only got up to hit Chris as some sort of damage control because he realized it would have been bad for his image as a ''perfect husband'' to be seen laughing at his wife's expense?
Why do women themselves not see toxic masculinity for what it is?
We teach even kindergartners to ''use your words, not your hands'', and get 3-year-old kids, whose brains are only just developing, to apologize to another kid if they hit them. But we clap and applaud when a grown man hits another? Why do we expect more impulse control from toddlers than from adult men? Why is it when a grown man hits another man, suddenly it is seen as being macho, ''oh he's standing up for his partner, awwww'' but when it's a toddler hitting another toddler, even though in that little kid's developing brain, there might still have been a good enough reason to do it, we use it as a learning moment and expect accountability from them?
What could he have done instead?
How about if he had snatched the mic from Chris Rock and made a powerful statement about how wrong it is to make fun of a person with a medical condition and school Chris Rock, speak up for mental health too, on a platform live-telecasted and watched by millions? Imagine what a moment that would have been if he had done that. Used the opportunity to sensitize the audience Millions of boys and men would have seen a newly evolved kind of masculinity. Not that of the caveman.
The only way we can eradicate domestic violence, murders, rapes, wars, and all kinds of abuse against women and children, for which men have been predominantly (not always, I assert) responsible throughout history, is if we as a society start showing zero tolerance for all violence, from men, women, everyone.
Use your words, not your hands.
Edits after a night of thinking over this:
What do the current narratives and communicative processes around that Oscar moment reveal beyond what is said? I have thought about it quite a bit, as you can imagine, even after posting the above.
I am fascinated and a little annoyed by the way alopecia is being framed in the wake of the Smith-Rock drama. Alopecia is a general term for hair loss. There are several different kinds of alopecia; some of which are related to medical treatments or health conditions. I don’t know the cause of Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair loss. But, heritable pattern baldness is the most common form of alopecia. Male pattern baldness is so common among men we don’t give it a second thought. It’s generally seen as an ordinary part of aging for men; one many consider an attractive feature rather than a bug. And, of course, jokes around male pattern baldness abound.
When female pattern baldness occurs, there’s a double standard for women. Impossibly narrow, sexiest, normative expectations of beauty make it into a more serious “condition” to be pitied rather than a normal part of growing older or just a normal part of being human and having hair for millions (if not billions) of humans. So that's another reason to get irritated.
The implication I find in much of the commentary around Pinkett Smith’s alopecia is that Chris Rock “deserved” to be slapped in the face for belittling someone who “suffers” (suffer has been used repeatedly to characterize Smith’s hair loss) from alopecia. A word that, again, is a general term that is hyper-medicalizing and mystifying what should be understood as an ordinary physical change in the course of life.
It seems to me that this slight of hand(perhaps carried out by a clever Hollywood publicist) is, in and of itself, a form of ableism; one that obscures toxic masculinity, glorification of violence, intolerance of even the most common forms of physical difference, and the interwoven workings of patriarchy and ableism more broadly.
Whatever the cause of Smith’s hair loss, whatever form of alopecia she may have, I think it is worth noting that the suffering that may come from alopecia stems from social structures, expectations, and norms; not from any medical or health condition.
I am not defending Rock’s lazy, bad joke or trying to self-righteously criticize Will Smith. I simply want to express my view that there needs to be a larger conversation about ableism, ageism, sexism alongside other important conversations about gender, race, fame, beauty, greed, power, representation, accountability etc, etc."
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