Mary Katherine Ham:
How quickly can the leftist activist outrage industry take you from hero to goat? Look no further than Patricia Arquette’s last 24 hours. It all started so promisingly for her. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her marathon performance in “Boyhood,” which was filmed over 12 years. Upon taking the stage and offering a brief nod to the normal thanks, she launched into an utterly predictable, ideologically adherent appeal for “equal pay” for women and equality for women.
“To every women who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time … to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”
Meryl Streep and J-Lo, neither terribly bereft of pay, screamed with adulation.
In the immediate aftermath, conservatives criticized Arquette, rightly, for perpetuating a bogus narrative, complaining about equal pay from her millionaire’s perch, and hypocritically turning a blind eye to Hollywood’s and the White House’s unwillingness to live up to her equal pay standards. Most of us did so with a routine roll of the eyes, understanding that watching any awards show comes with such proclamations.
Mollie Hemingway lays out the issue simply for our Hollywood friends. It’s an issue from the most gorgeous, bankable actresses down to screenplay writers, suggesting perhaps Arquette, Streep, and Lopez should “turn [their] political zeal inward and fix [their] own house.”
Charlize Theron apparently found out from those hacked Sony emails that she was being paid $10 million less than her less experienced male co-star named Chris Hemsworth.
Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams — whose talent and box office draw are worth a pretty penny — were just flat out given two percentage points less of the back end of American Hustle than each of the dudes in the film…
Hollywood likes to style itself as liberal and progressive and oh-so-much better than those conservatives in fly-over country. But I’d put the hiring, promotion and pay practices of most any small business owner in the country over the general sexism of Hollywood.
But it wasn’t long before the applause ended for Arquette, and not because liberals preferred she focus her fire on the industry itself. No, it was because Arquette did not sufficiently address ALL THE GRIEVANCES in her speech, thereby suggesting the grievances of others were worthy of less attention than those of a rich, white lady who is in perfect agreement with liberal activists about the Lilly Ledbetter Act. This was an unpardonable violation of the hierarchy of grievances, and The New Republic and Slate let her know it:
From a piece entitled, “The Problem with Patricia Arquette’s Speech.” Sigh:
