Last night at the Golden Globes, while people were watching how Hollywood would react to the #MeToo movement, and admiring the words of our future president, Oprah Winfrey, the real action was on the E! Red Carpet.
There, actresses Debra Messing, Laura Dern, and Eva Longoria (with the nodding heads of Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman) brought up former E! hostess Catt Sadler. Now, if you’re like me, most of you are thinking, “Catt who?”
Sadler announced to fans in December that she and her attorneys found out that her co-host, Jason Kennedy, was making double her salary. She then left the network.
Let me state an unpopular opinion here — maybe Catt wasn’t that good? Maybe Jason Kennedy, who has been working his way up the ranks at E! for a very long time, is better, more liked by the audience, and easier to work with.
So, maybe E! took many things into consideration when they determined Kennedy’s salary. Maybe the executives considered his years of experience, his relationships with celebrities, his ability to interview, and his appeal to the largely gay and female audience, and decided that he was worth more than Ms. Sadler. That’s their right. It’s called the free market.
And in an example of growing hypocrisy in Hollywood, none of the actresses who challenged E!’s pay gap mentioned Rose McGowan, one of the first women to confront Harvey Weinstein. McGowan was famously blacklisted by Weinstein and his associates for years. E! Is running a documentary about her personal journey on January 30. If the network was so anti-women and treating them terribly, why showcase McGowan’s personal plight and history with Hollywood harassment?
If Messing et al were so concerned about women in media getting work, then why did they jeopardize Rancic on live TV? For Debra Messing, Eva Longoria and others to put Giuliana Rancic and Ryan Seacrest on the spot, on E!, about their employer’s alleged discrimination, is rude and wrong. Rancic and Seacrest probably had little to absolutely nothing to do with Sadler’s salary discussions or her departure.
That’s why women like Catt Sadler, Debra Messing, and Eva Longoria make it harder for women in the workplace.
They advance the mythology that women don’t have to work hard, get smart or be talented. It’s so dumb to say on one hand, “Don’t hire us just because you want to sleep with us!” and then on the other hand yell, “Hire more women because they have a whoo haw!”
Don’t dumb things down for us wimmins. Don’t hire us just because we have lady parts. Don’t take pity on us and give us roles we haven’t earned. We don’t need it.