In 2018 The Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood was quite different from the previous years. This year most of the celebrities showed up at the at the red carpet wearing black clothes as a statement. The Golden Globe Awards are really meant to honour the best in American television and film, but this year the celebrities dressed in black took the main focus. They were wearing black clothing to mark the MeToo movement and to show their solidarity for the women who have been harassed and assaulted. Almost all the celebrities showed up in black, both men and women. This evening the journalists did not ask about their designer dresses as they normally do, but they were asking some of the celebrities why they chose to dress up in black.
By doing this the celebrities used their clothing as activism with a symbolic meaning about change. As it happened at The Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood it got a lot of media coverage all around the world - which caused the message to spread very effectively and widely.
It is quite remarkable that this stunt created so much attention worldwide, only by wearing something so normal as black clothes. If they did not tell why they were wearing this color before the award show, you would not notice it was intended to show solidarity for the women who have been victims by sexism. It can be seen in a positive way that the celebrities and other social media influencers can create so much focus on a debate like Me Too or other issues in our society. But you can be left wondering if all the celebrities actually did support the MeToo campaign or did they just do it because everybody else did?
The British social-media figure and author Layla F. Saad use the term tokenismwhich is defined as the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing - and according to the celebrities wearing black, I think for some that the statement can be seen as typical tokenism, since a lot of the celebrities showed their support and solidarity only by their choice of clothing and not by expressing themselves or changing their actual behavior.
Some of the actress at The Golden Globe Awards invited activists to the award show. An activist called Tarana Burke joined the actress Michelle Williams at the award show. This woman is very special in addition to MeToo, since she is the founder of the MeToo movement. She was the first to mention the phrase “Me Too” back in 2006 with the purpose to raise awareness of women who had been sexually abused. She mobilized the MeToo campaign on MySpace, which is an American social networking service. But it was first in 2017 that the importance of the movement really got recognized. The famous actress Alyssa Milano posted a tweet where she encouraged people to write “Me Too” as a reply to her tweet if they have been sexually harassed or assaulted. Alyssa Milano was one of the women who accused Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault.
Celebrities on social media have a lot of followers and a great network, and therefore it is easy for them to get their voice heard. The tweet above shows how Alyssa Milano created the foundation for the beginning of Me Too. Tarana Burke started the campaign back in 2006 and did not get that much attention, but for Alyssa Milano it was possible to get 55.000 replies to her post after only one day and further the hashtag #MeToo was trending as number 1 on Twitter and quickly it became an international phenomenon. This shows how social media have made it possible to spread the word, especially for celebrities with a lot of fans who follows them. If Alyssa Milano did not mention that she was not the founder of the MeToo movement but Tarana Burke, most people would not be aware. Without this tweet the MeToo movement probably wouldn’t have had the same attention.
Today around 2.7 million people have posted an image on Instagram with the hashtag #MeToo, but do all this focus on Me Too actual lead to change?
By Regitze
Sources:
Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor (2020)
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