Did anyone else see “Supergirl” last night? I watched a whole episode for the first time and was struck by the phrase quoted in my heading, likely to be quite familiar to dKos readers, and the context in which it was used on the show.
Supergirl in her alter ego, Kara Somebody, works for a non-evil corporate magnate, Cat Somebody(Else), played by Calista Flockhart. Cat is the target of a hostile takeover by the WEOWMP, one of her executives whom she has so characterized in a leaked email. He engineered the hack and the leak (SG hears him after he leaves the boardroom with her super-hearing, of course). So SG and her friends hack his account to prove that he did it. When Cat confronts him, he chortles (dripping with WMP, of course) that if she hacked him to prove that he hacked her, “good luck with that in court." But because she is the sole owner of the company (CatCo), his emails are her personal property and she somehow gets to have him arrested as well as fired. So it’s all good.
The first thing to note is that Calista and her character are, of course, of European descent, or “white.” And she appears to enjoy considerable economic privilege. So the implication is, as it so often is when privileged white women speak of “white male privilege,” that their own racial and economic privilege don’t actually exist. If they’re not male, they can’t really be white people, apparently.
The other striking thing is that the “walking embodiment” was played by a chubby character actor with non-chiseled features. That’s because this is a TV show, and according to the standards of the entertainment industry, it just wouldn’t do to have a Bad Guy played by somebody who was all, like, hot ’n' stuff. Because in the show’s other sub-plot SG’s nemesis from Krypton is a beautiful (also white) woman, the Hollywood Lookism here seems to be mixed with a sexist double standard. Or maybe the feminist message is that White Male Privilege enables not only (implicitly) incompetent white men to rise far above what we could achieve in a true meritocracy, but also guys who aren’t even as good-looking as Calista.