@archduchesskittycat / archduchesskittycat.tumblr.com
When people bitch and moan that conservative comedians are getting “cancelled” I want to grab them by the throat and scream at them that the Director of The Matrix One of The Most Successful Action Movies Of All Time can’t get funds for another movie because she’s transgender.
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So--when I was in my mid-twenties and the Disaster Ex tried to make me kill myself, the local mental hospital didn't have any beds open in the usual ward for attempted suicides.
What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.
They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.
I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.
I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.
And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.
Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.
They were all so fucking nice.
And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.
Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.
They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.
That was in 2009. Things are worse now. I think about them still. I hope that they're all right.
And in case some people aren't aware: anorexia is deadly. There is a point at which your body looses the ability to digest food and you are no longer capable of improving.
I really hope that at some point all of the healthcare professionals willingly prescribing GLP-1s to women in Hollywood who emphatically Do Not Need Them lose their licensure, it’s utterly obscene, the entire entertainment industry is now full of people happily enduring medically enhanced starvation in the name of Beauty
it’s funny cuz it’s true
unpopular opinion but i think the film and tv industries should have better labor laws even if it makes it harder or impossible to depict certain things
i dont care if it makes it harder to produce game of thrones or whatever, acting should not leave women traumatized
Okay I know this is about acting and people are getting more traction about it (sexuality safety coordinators are a job! yell about them. demand your shows get them) but
Any person who has worked on a set for more than a few years has at least one person they know who died.
Not usually on set, but afterwards. Because we don’t have anyone shutting down production for unsafe practices when “unsafe” means 16 hour days. Or more. For weeks. Finishing a day before hour 12 (not including lunch) is considered an early leave.
I had teachers tell us not to, unless we absolutely had to, take music video gigs because they’ll work you for 24 hours and send you to drive home. And if we had to work that, pull over and nap in our car because multiple people per year fall asleep at the wheel and go over the canyons around LA.
I know you mean acting but please. Don’t forget the crew. We have a shockingly high rate of suicide because these working schedules leave us with no sleep, no time outside of work, and it destroys lives, relationships, and families. Burnout is high. Chronic illness and broken bodies are common. Cocaine use in order to get through a 20 hour day is rampant. Every single one of your reality shows is fueled by cocaine.
The number of days that are scheduled to shoot a feature has shrunk dramatically in the past two decades. Which means longer days.
Netflix shows are notorious for being poorly organized, understaffed, and long days.
There are labor laws but what they do is levy fines. Those fines are either factored into budget, people are bullied into not reporting actual hours, or crew members see them as incentive to take those jobs because more money and cost of living is high. (Also this industry has a crew culture of dick measuring by sticking your wang in a blender and boasting about how many 100 hour weeks you pulled.)
this can be applied for people working in animation as well. Like I know people who work at Pixar and they straight up work 12 hour days and go into work on weekends to meet their deadlines. The incredibles 2 made over a billion dollars and Pixar still cut jobs due to “budget”. The entertainment industry is a business at the end of the day. There here to make money and they are going to do it at the expense of workers because they know no one is going to do anything about it.
This is why I get pissy when people have a go about British TV shows only producing 10-12 episodes per season at most, instead of 24. Do you know why? Because the UK has fucking labour laws.
When I worked on BBC Causalty, as soon as it hit 5pm, everything stopped. The producer/director etc would have a quick meeting to decide if we’d go into overtime or schedule it in later in the week. And I got an extra payslip in the mail for every minute of overtime I did, even though I was paid a weekly rate.
I don’t care if it means producing less content. I don’t care if it means it costs twice as much - if treating your creatives and your crew like shit is needed to make your show, then your show doesn’t deserve to get made.
And that’s aside from the fact that actors are often exploited, neglected, coerced into doing scenes they’re uncomfortable with etc or outright abused by directors for the sake of ~performance.
No art is worth that.
