gender neutrality at award shows is weird

i did base all of this off the vma's

my biggest guilty pleasure is award shows. i eat them up every single time. i do a grammy’s bracket and try and watch all the movies nominated for best film at the oscars. are award shows pointless and dumb and don’t really have any weight in what is considered good art or not?  yes. is that going to stop me from watching them? absolutely not. i love to watch rich people hang out with other rich people. it's fascinating. this means i inevitably watched the vma’s. personally my least favourite award show (why the fuck is johnny depp there i thought i blocked and muted him on everything) but when taylor swift shows up so do i. the vma’s are run through mtv (if one more person over the age of thirty treats me like i don’t know what mtv was im going to lose it) who famously announced in 2017 that they were doing away with gendered categories. there will no longer be a “female/male video of the year” just “video of the year”. i first heard about this in vogue because where else would i get my pressing news. i literally idolize carrie bradshaw. i don’t know what you were expecting. now girlboss twitter is all over that and grade seven baby feminist with no nuance me would have to agree (i watched emma watson’s UN speech everyday for a year). surface level this is great, we are expecting the same level of greatness from men, women, and all people respectively, everyone is on the same playing field. right? wrong.

there are two main glaring issues i have with gender neutral award categories specifically within the music industry. first i want to tackle this idea of “expecting the same level of greatness”. in what world are male musicians expected to perform like female ones are. i look at so many famous, lauded male musicians and their concerts and they just kind of stand there? maybe with some cool lighting, maybe a guitar for a couple songs depending on the genre. contrast that with female musicians who have to have a set theme, multiple costume changes, elaborate set design, backup dancers, choreography themselves, and on top of that great live vocals. male musicians can get away with mediocrity (sometimes below) and still be highly successful. i offer justin bieber’s grammy performance of “peaches” as proof (by god it was that bad). men can almost always get away with a bad vocal performance too, how many jokes have been made about male indie rock bands where the singer can’t sing, or every single time a male musician can bounce back from a bad performance. female musicians spend years rebuilding their careers after one bad vocal performance (which probably wasn’t even that bad) and even then people still bring it up literal YEARS later. i will note that this tends to happen more to young women just starting out in the industry *cough*oliviarodrigo*cough*. i wonder why that could be? does the music industry hate women? more specifically young women? no, they would never treat women of equal or greater talent and success worse than their male counterparts. that's preposterous. i know i’m just taking the piss but i’m setting up for a very valid point i promise. if male musicians are kind of boring in comparison to their female peers then that would be reflected in nominations right? when female artists are consistently outperforming then you would think they would lead nominations. you would think.

because i am neurotic and refuse to let a point die, i did some math (if you know me you know this is a very big deal) there are around 14 major categories at the vma’s. 3 of which had more female nominee’s than male, another three where it was split 50/50, and 8 categories where there were more male nominees than female. now this is an issue but i’m going to assume you’re not stupid (don’t make me regret this) and i’m not going to spell out for you why men dominating 8/14 of the major categories is a bad thing. wait? what’s that sound? is that the kid in history class who wore a suit everyday and knew way too much about world war two?? oh my god it is, it's the devil’s advocate. “but mel winning is what’s important, do nomination’s even matter if you don’t win? what about those stats?” thanks so much for that question hayden, i really appreciate it. out of the major 14 categories women went 7/14. though to be fair there were zero women nominated in the rock category. 2 of those wins came from the 8 male led categories while those split 50/50 and those led by women got 3 and 2 wins, respectively. now i can’t completely fault the vma’s here (as much as i would love to, i'm still pissed off about depp) i have to recognize that some categories at the vma’s are fan voted and some are not. this makes it difficult to analyze whether or not women would win if provided the chance in a more traditional (jury/academy/guild) voting system. but it does help me with my biggest concern with gender neutral award show categories,

will women be nominated in the first place? unfortunately probably not. not in the entertainment industry which enables people like r.kelly, harvey winstein, johnny depp, and chris brown, and has shown time and time again it does not care about women. we cannot trust that when provided the opportunity, they won't snub women. “they” being the panels/jurys/academies etc. they already (very obviously) snub people of colour, what's to stop them from just not nominating women. and let's BeReal women of colour are going to be snubbed the most, billie eilish won't be that affected. the entertainment industry does not care about women and gender neutral award shows are just another way to screw women over. now i can hear hayden yelling at me again “literally no one but you cares about award shows there is no real life consequence to this”. first of all, i write cultural critiques on substack, nothing i write about has any merit. why are you listening to me? i’m getting a philosophy degree. second of all, award shows provide credibility in the entertainment world, when someone wins an oscar, everything they do in their career is backed by the fact that they have an oscar. if award shows go gender neutral and women aren’t nominated, and even fewer women win, they not only lose the nomination, they lose the credibility too. and then there are lots of people who take award show nominees and winners very seriously, not to mention the exposure that comes with award shows. women and their art could be left in the dust and it wouldn’t be surprising if it happens. all of this happening under the guise of being “progressive” for girlboss twitter and people with the same critical thinking skills as 12 year old me. i would love to say that there will be a time when we can do away with gendered categories, but gendered categories were introduced as a way to make sure women were even able to compete at all (history of the olympics baby). we aren’t in a spot culturally where we can be sure that women can be nominated based on their art and what they bring to the industry. some might introduce the idea of a quota here, nominations must be split 50/50, that immediately discredits any of the female nominees. “they’re only nominated because they’re a girl”, “they only won for optics”. the idea of forced diversity through quotas could take up an essay of its own so i won’t go into heavy detail, but we see these sentiments echoed around literally anytime a black actor gets to do something outside of playing a character where being black is part of the story. look at how people react to affirmative action, to think that there wouldn’t be a similar reaction in this situation would be very naive. 

overall, i think that gender neutral categories would be great if we didn’t live in such a shitty culture. we’re so oversaturated with media anyways, did you know the emmys happened recently? wild. stream midnights by taylor swift out october twenty first.