7/20/00 4:20 p.m.
Hollywood's Gender Apartheid
We love it.

By Jessica Gavora, writer in Washington, D.C.

he Emmy nominations are out, and there are no real surprises in this year's crop of Hollywood's self-identified made-for-TV best. Americans are being told that we like Mob-glorifying cable mini-series (The Sopranos got 18 nominations) and liberal-fantasy White House drama (The West Wing also nailed 18 nods).

But what is surprising about the Emmy Awards in 2000 is that Hollywood persists in the outmoded, pre-feminist practice of separate awards for men and women. A quarter century after Mary Tyler Moore cast off the chains of the patriarchy (along with her jaunty blue beret!) and boldly entered the newsroom at WJM ; half a decade after Xena the Warrior Princess began to frighten the boys and titillate the grrls in syndication — and three years after Ellen came out in prime time, for Pete's sake! — Hollywood is still judging its best and brightest by an atavistic double standard. Think about it. There are few institutions still standing in which men and women compete separately — and even fewer that Hollywood would approve of. Sports is the most obvious (and biggest) exception. There are generally acknowledged, immutable differences of size, strength, speed, and personal hygiene that prevent most men and women from meeting on the field of athletics. And despite the "you-go-girl" publicity campaigns that have surrounded women's soccer and the WNBA, even sexual segregation in sports is a serious compromise of first-wave feminist principle. If boys and girls are the same when it comes to sports (and don't kid yourself, the law says we are) then why shouldn't they have to take their chances and mix it up on ESPN?

That said, what conceivable reason could there be for separate categories for men and women when it comes to pouting for the cameras in a made-for-TV movie? What immutable law of nature and nature's God prevents Jerry Orbach and Julianna Margulies from going head-to-head for an Emmy? Or Jennifer Aniston and David Hyde Pierce? Why doesn't the term "best supporting human" have the same fashionable androgyny as "spokesperson" or "Attorney General Reno"?

The same argument, of course, applies to the Oscars. Gender, our liberal friends tell us, is socially constructed after all. This opens the question of why Hollywood — a place so full of progressives congratulating themselves for their "courage" for bringing us the tragic story of small-town girl turned small-town transvestite Brandon Teena (Boys Don't Cry) — isn't doing its level best to fight the patriarchal, binary construct of "male" and "female." Why haven't separate Emmys and Oscars for women and men gone the way of the Episcopal priesthood and the men's and women's showers at Williams?

The answer, of course, is that gender binaryism, however oppressive, pays. David Hyde Pierce's rapier wit is no match for Jennifer Aniston's ... well, genetic endowment when it comes to keeping Bud-swilling, Dorito-crunching boys in front of the television. Those things aren't socially constructed. If they were, I suspect that David Hyde Pierce would have a pair. I know I would.

I can hear the gender feminists screaming already that of course there have to be separate categories for men and women! The theater was once so male-dominated that young boys played the female roles and Gwyneth Paltrow had to duct tape her breasts to do Shakespeare, for God's sake! Well, if that's the case, and separate awards for females and males are really a form of affirmative action for actresses, then someone should hurry up and tell Meryl Streep that she's not yet quite up to speed to go mano-a-mano with Keanu Reeves. I suspect she'll take the news well.

I say let's be honest — and demand a little honesty from Hollywood. We like our boys and girls onscreen in separate packages and judged by different standards. We dig a little gender apartheid on the tube. So the next time Susan Sarandon or someone equally gassy mounts the stage to accept a little golden idol and launches into a rant about the victimization of women, remember that she's clutching one of the last remaining remnants of the patriarchy. And she's loving it.