Opinion: Why It’s All Too Easy to Hate Women Like Blake Lively
Last summer, it was impossible not to notice a series—first a drip, then a torrent—of negative stories and social media coverage about Blake Lively, an actress I had previously thought came across as a nice-enough person. According to this discourse, she was a diva, a b---h, a bully and a transphobe; she was vain and tone-deaf, insufficiently serious and insufficiently solicitous of her fans. Much of the criticism felt over the top, but that’s often the case online, where a hater-made snowball effect takes aim at someone stumbling under great scrutiny.
As it turns out, it may not have been organic at all. The attacks on Lively were, according to a New York Times investigation and a legal complaint filed by Lively herself, part of a coordinated campaign by actor Justin Baldoni. (Baldoni and the others allegedly involved deny these accusations, with Baldoni’s lawyer calling them “serious and categorically false.”)
Lively had objected to Baldoni’s behavior on the set of It Ends With Us, a film they shot together, and which Baldoni had directed. He had been inappropriately sexual, she said, among other issues. Though Lively’s complaint acknowledged some conditions improved after she met with Baldoni and other producers, it was clear that something was still amiss during the film’s press tour—Lively and Baldoni did not appear together at photocalls or on red carpets; she didn’t follow him on social media, and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had gone as far as to block him.
In response, Baldoni and others involved with the film hired a crisis PR team. Amid their planning, text messages seem to reveal a man who publicly claims to stand up for women’s rights engaging in a targeted smear campaign against a woman he mistreated to preempt any bad press about himself.
What’s shocking is how well it worked.
I’m not much of a celebrity-watcher. I don’t read the tabloid press, and I haven’t seen It Ends With Us. And even I saw story after story painting an unflattering picture about Lively. The negative stories were pervasive enough that I began to see her differently, gaining the general impression that she was all the things we aren’t supposed to like in women: Snappy, self-involved, difficult. And I’m a feminist writer, one usually pretty attuned to rank sexism.
These revelations don’t just indict Baldoni and the smattering of other alleged bad actors involved in the plot. They indict a culture that, even post-#MeToo, still holds women (and especially famous women) to an impossibly high standard of feminine behavior—and is absolutely gleeful when they fail to meet it.
The beginning of the end of the #MeToo movement came, in many estimations, when Johnny Depp sued his ex-girlfriend Amber Heard for defamation, after she published an op-ed stating that she was a domestic violence survivor. (Heard’s piece did not mention Depp by name.) Despite Depp’s long-documented substance abuse problems, it was Heard’s alleged drinking and drug use that came under scrutiny; Depp had acted erratically many times over, sometimes in the presence of reporters, still, it was she, the story went, who was the problem—the real danger.
It is fully in the realm of possibility that Heard is all of those things; women, being people, are also capable of being imbalanced or dishonest or addicted or abusive! What was striking, though, is the degree to which Depp’s undisputed bad behavior was forgiven as simply part of his charm, while hers damned her. Heard was smeared in the press, as were women who spoke up for her. One by one, a lot simply shut up. And as the actor eventually did in court, Depp fans (many of them also women, it must be noted) claimed victory. It seemed like just about everyone was on Depp’s side, which in turn gave the impression that he was, in fact, the only wronged party.
A playbook was born.
The campaign against Lively was waged quietly, with planted stories and vicious rumors. But again, people who don’t actually know Lively took the stories and ran. She got her Two Minutes Hate not just from crisis PR managers and unethical tabloid writers but from normie posters on TikTok and Instagram and Twitter, who were more than happy to tear down a beautiful women who had seemingly committed the cardinal sin of not being in a permanent state of kindness and grace. Lively is a gorgeous all-American blonde who stars in mass-market TV shows and films; she’s supposed to be approachable and endlessly considerate. The stories about her weren’t that she behaved criminally or even cruelly; she was mostly not nice enough. Difficult.
This story should be a lesson: About the shadowy machinations that underlie so much celebrity gossip, yes, and also about the myriad ways in which we still expect women to behave. Would it be so bad if Lively was difficult? Should that be disqualifying, if she’s talented at her craft but not always as sweet as key lime pie?
#MeToo opened up a crucial conversation about women, men, sexual abuse and power. Perhaps the next step is one focused on who we expect women to be in the first place—and why we are so comfortable demanding prominent ones be nice above all else.
