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Kate Hardie starred with Christopher Eccleston in the film, Heart.
Kate Hardie starred with Christopher Eccleston in the film Heart. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock
Kate Hardie starred with Christopher Eccleston in the film Heart. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

Time to make the link between abuse and film content

This article is more than 6 years old

Men continue to hold the power over how women’s bodies are portrayed on screen

Many creative men have come out since the Weinstein allegations, making it clear that they do not agree with sexual abuse. I wasn’t aware there was any doubt that sexual abuse was a bad thing, but it’s good to have it clarified. (Forgive the sarcasm. It’s been a long week.) But so far, very few have been brave enough to start a conversation about the subtler, yet no less urgent, subject of the content of their own work, to examine their own record regarding the treatment and the representation of women. The focus is quite rightly on the horrendous sexual abuse that Weinstein is alleged to have committed. But to focus on that alone is to miss the point that the portrayal of women – of their lives, their feelings, their sexuality and their bodies – is nearly always decided upon and filtered through male eyes. Nearly every actress will tell you about scripts that included scenes of female nudity that seem to have no apparent reason for being there and that are often degrading.

You only have to turn on most police dramas to find the obligatory image of a battered, naked – but beautiful – young female corpse. (Apart from the ones written by Sally Wainwright: will someone please put Sally Wainwright in charge of everything for a while?) You don’t have to be talking about consent and abuse to be mortified by many female roles.

I worked on a job last year and before the read-through I spoke to two young actresses involved: both on their first TV jobs, both playing roles that required them to be naked, both confused as to why the scenes were there, both not wanting to do them. But they were also too scared of the all-male creative team, a set of hugely powerful, award-winning men, to say anything.

I am 49, so I do not get asked to be naked any more. (That is another thing the male-dominated industry is not keen on – women over 40 having any kind of satisfactory sex life or, indeed, bodies.) But when I was 17, I had become so used to being required to appear naked that I asked for a no-nudity clause to be written into a contract. I was fired by the male director because, despite there being no nudity in his script, he felt the clause curbed his creativity should he, on a whim, decide he needed me to remove my clothes. (This director, fittingly was given his break by Weinstein.)

I knew the nudity these actresses were being asked to do was not integral to the story and so did nearly every other woman, and a few of the men, on that production. I tried suggesting to the actresses they could say no – but of course I understood why they felt afraid to. We proceeded to read the scripts; the room was full of women – a casting director and assistant director included. A male producer was reading out the stage directions, his voice hardly faltering in tone as he read out: “He rips open her shirt and we see her tits.”

When we finished, it was announced that anyone who wasn’t an executive producer, producer, writer, director or the director of photography had to leave so that those left behind could make important decisions. I watched as the room emptied of women. I wondered to myself whether any of the men would have noticed just how incongruous the nude scenes were. Or would have flinched as much as I had on hearing them read aloud and would have felt as saddened and slightly scared by the use of the dismissive and slightly aggressive word “tits”. Whether any of them understood the experience they were about to put the actresses through; whether any of them thought about how hugely difficult it was for the women to question their choices without fearing we might lose our jobs.

I wonder whether the powerful creative men making it so clear that they know that Harvey Weinstein is a sexual predator – and that sexual predators are wrong – will also take time to truly look at all the other ways, overt and subtle, in which their male power dominates our industry.

Kate Hardie is an actress, writer and director

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