On the Spring Festival Gala stage,
women defined by the grandest narratives,
are the best epitome of the “invisible women” on this land.
1. Women on the Spring Festival Gala stage
——Invisible and Defined
This year’s CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the 18th program, Huang Bo sang a song “Little Brother” for China’s “delivery brothers”. “The little brother is running on the road, the road is like my hometown.” At the end of the song, the camera turned to the audience, and it was Liu Kuo, a male employee of SF Express Beijing District.
In the previous program, the sketch “Arriving Soon”, Wang Baoqiang played the “delivery brother”, shouting “As long as the customer needs it, we will go through fire and water”, and the ride-hailing car driver was also a male actor.
Screenshots of the programs “Little Brother” and “Arriving Soon” 丨 Source: Weibo
In this grand play praising the “underlying labor force in the digital economy”, “delivery brothers, takeaway brothers, ride-hailing brothers” occupy every corner of the mainstream narrative; **In this most “national” program, female takeaway workers, female delivery workers, female ride-hailing drivers… female workers are completely invisible in it.**
On the other hand, the image of women as “tigresses at home” or “good wives and mothers” has been consistently solidified in the Spring Festival Gala. The setting of the sketch “On the Hot Search” with “weak husbands” and “irritable wives” can be traced back to the “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” in 1999, where Song Dandan and Zhao Benshan played “Baiyun Heitu”.
Screenshots of the program “On the Hot Search” 丨 Source: Weibo
Stereotypes of women appeared in all aspects in the 2023 Spring Festival Gala. In the sketch “50 Seconds of Gaze”, the girlfriend is set as a person who “only goes shopping and shopping, and scoffs at the electronic devices that her boyfriend is proficient in”, while the man is always tormented in shopping, accusing his girlfriend of only consuming and dressing up; the satirical sketch “Pit” directly calls the name of the “female director” “Shengnan”, just to use the baggage of “leftover men”.
The only female tenderness appears in the duet song “Mother is Daughter”. But in this mother-daughter love, the lyrics still have to emphasize, “One day you will also become a mother“.
Screenshots of the program “Mother is Daughter” 丨 Source: Network
Women are disappointed in this Spring Festival Gala. Their labor is “invisible”, and their image is “defined”.
In fact, the number of female takeaway workers, female delivery workers, and female ride-hailing drivers is not small. In the 2021 questionnaire survey on Beijing takeaway workers by the China Women’s News, the proportion of female riders was 16.2%[1]. The “Didi Digital Platform and Women’s Ecology Research Report” released on March 8, 2021, shows that in the past 8 years, 2.37 million Chinese female ride-hailing drivers have earned income on the Didi platform.
In the delivery worker group, according to the “Survey Data on Female Delivery Workers” released by “Express Delivery 100” in 2021, more than 60% of the respondents believe that the number of female delivery workers around them is increasing. Data released by Cainiao also shows that on the Cainiao Guoguo consignment platform, the increase in female delivery workers in 2020 exceeded 20%, and the overall proportion exceeded 20%[2].
This is a huge group, a group that cannot be ignored. A group that should have, but does not have a place in the mainstream public opinion.
In the Spring Festival Gala, we can “see the minority” in various senses: art forms that have gradually moved away from the public’s view, “veterans” and “underlying migrant workers” who are rarely mentioned in social occupations… But why, “underlying female workers”, as a group that has made great contributions to society and is gradually growing, cannot leave their words at such a time of national attention?
Their stories are worth reporting. On November 27, 2022, “Female rider delivering takeaway with her baby” sparked heated discussions on Weibo. A female rider surnamed Yang in Guizhou delivered takeaways every day with her one-year-old daughter on her back. The stationmaster commented that she was “hardworking, and her delivery performance even surpassed some male riders”; and just a few days before the Spring Festival Gala, on January 19, Sina.com reported that “Debang female delivery workers have not taken a break for three consecutive Spring Festivals, staying in Xinjiang to convey the New Year’s flavor”.[3]
Debater Luo Miao pointed out on Weibo that using the word “little brother” to refer to takeaway, delivery, and ride-hailing at once, three grassroots service industries that are closely related to the people and have made great contributions—If a female practitioner sees it, she will definitely feel a huge sense of loss.
Weibo related to the song “Little Brother” 丨 Source: Weibo
This loss may be temporary, but it will continue to experience the strengthening of discourse. Because the meaning of the Spring Festival Gala to a media report and a news program lies in its high ratings, its great right to speak, its “authority” and “national character”: after the New Year’s Eve, it will be repeatedly played on TV and spread to every relative and friend who comes to visit.
This repeated loud dissemination, like a street advertisement that is constantly circulating in a loudspeaker, allows the temporary loss to continue, and allows a wrong stereotype to become the truth in the eyes of people who have not yet formed a clear cognitive understanding: “In these industries, there are no women, nor should there be.”
What makes people feel the most painful is the Spring Festival Gala’s neglect and distortion of women’s images, which is the result of the meticulous production after the review by a huge production team. In the middle, from the creation of lyrics and music, to the interlude between the two programs, and to the selection of background actors without any women… No link allows this mistake to be raised and corrected—or in the words of another commentator, it simply “didn’t take this as a problem”.
Forwarding area of the Weibo discussion about the song “Little Brother” 丨 Source: Weibo
The Spring Festival Gala is the speaker’s platform for the winners after the competition of various power discourses; it is the social subconsciousness re-enacted by loudspeakers and various artistic forms. When you are sensitive to the unfriendly nature of this stage to women, in a certain sense, you also see our real life. It refines all the discomfort in our lives, and it is a cup of concentrated coffee made by this misogynistic society, crushed and mixed.
On the Spring Festival Gala stage, women defined by the grandest narratives are the best epitome of the “invisible women” in the real world.
2. Women in reality
——Supporting roles in a male-centered world
“Defaulting humans to men is fundamental to the structure of human society. This is an old habit, as deeply rooted as the theory of human evolution.” British writer and journalist Caroline Criado Perez made this conclusion in her book “Invisible Women”.
The perspective shifts from the stage back to life: in a male-centered world, placing women as supporting roles has always been a universal social reality worldwide.
Caroline lists a large number of cases and data in the book. For example, in the military, female soldiers and male soldiers are never distinguished, and the same set of marching standards are adopted, so female soldiers often suffer additional physical injuries during the march. This has only been included in the design considerations in the past decade, and the complaint of the male leadership is: “Why can’t women be more like men?“
Caroline also cited a 2015 study that, for the five neutral words “user”, “participant”, “person”, “designer”, and “researcher”, participants tended to interpret all words as male, and the probability of four of them being interpreted as male by male respondents was over 80%, “Unless explicitly marked as female, we will understand most things as male.“
The Henry Higgins Effect: Why can’t women be more like men 丨 Source: “My Fair Lady”
Caroline commented, “Male bias is so deeply rooted that even truly neutral words are interpreted as male.”
Here, men are regarded as “universal existence”, and women are regarded as “non-standard men”—this idea not only denies all the facts that ignore women, but also attributes the consequences arising from this to women, forcing women to apologize for their “abnormality” and “atypicality”.
The way men solve problems is not to change a world that is not very suitable for women, which was born from various mistakes, but to always alienate women as legal residents into those who are uncomfortable.
The first 12 protagonists of the BBC drama “Doctor Who” were all male. When the 13th protagonist appeared in female form, the drama was boycotted by many men, who said they “lost a boy’s role model” 丨 Source: TV series “Doctor Who”
In fact, in the evaluation system closely related to “career” and “achievement”, women’s talents are always deliberately forgotten. In the citation of papers in academia, if the female scholar’s name is mistaken for male, the number of citations will be more than ten times that of the opposite situation; and in the field of economics, reporters often list male writers as the first author when the first author is actually a woman. There are also many outstanding and great female achievements that are ultimately replaced by men.
Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958) Rosalind discovered the structure of DNA, but her research results were taken by James Watson and Francis Crick, and they became Nobel laureates 丨 Source: Wikipedia
Bias excludes women from the “canon”, and to some extent, this is also the result of the lack of women’s power. However, once it comes to the struggle for power, bias will suppress women more strongly.
In the 2016 US presidential election, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton mentioned “employment” nearly 600 times in her speech, and also mentioned racism, women’s rights, and abortion dozens of times. But in public opinion, some people believe that Hillary did only one thing from beginning to end, “I am a woman, vote for me.”
Women’s real achievements are covered up under the stigmatization of “you are a woman”. Even “political correctness” is used to discredit her talents.
And even if a woman overcomes all difficulties and stands at a high place, she is still unavoidable to be treated unfairly. She will be excluded by the male-dominated decision-making level, treated as a child without self-determination, a vase with a little beauty; she will be repeatedly interrupted, questioned, and even asked to shut up when speaking.
The experience of female officials in a video conference in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russia on December 24, 2020 丨 Source: Tencent News
And the more cruel side is that the most cruel reality in women’s situation—”sexual violence”—will not even appear on mainstream stages like the Spring Festival Gala. But this is the most painful, widespread, and most difficult history to be written into the mainstream narrative of the “silent half of the population” in this world.
According to UN estimates, more than 50% of women in EU countries have experienced sexual harassment at work[4]. In China, this number is considered to be as high as 80%[5]. In the US Silicon Valley executives, the proportion of women who have experienced sexual harassment in the office is as high as 60%[6].
What’s worse is that harassment sometimes turns into substantive violence. Under the huge disparity of power and strength, the public place sheds its civilized coat, fists are swung, and blood splatters. Many women have since entered the shadow that they cannot get rid of for life.
This side is not written, and it is also difficult to be solved in real life. Worldwide, women who have suffered sexual violence are mostly difficult to obtain justice. In various countries, data on sexual harassment is extremely difficult to obtain. On the other hand, because of social norms, very few women who have been violated are willing to speak out. They are afraid of being “secondarily harmed”, being constantly attacked by public opinion such as “deliberately touching porcelain”, “victim blaming”, and “not clean after rape”. At the same time, the imperfections of the reporting and handling mechanisms often lead them to not know how to seek help, worrying about whether they can get proper treatment after reporting and whether they will be retaliated against.
When we peel open this story about half of the world’s population being ignored and silenced, we understand that “patriarchy is never an imagination.”
3. Seeing women’s existence
——Women, stand up
The invisible and solidified women on the Spring Festival Gala stage in previous years let us see how women’s real existence is erased in the social vision: from fame to humiliation.
The glaring blank created by “Little Brother” on the Spring Festival Gala stage is the epitome of the male narrative that is constantly strengthened in public opinion, and it is also the best annotation of the real world.
This phenomenon of dissemination is both cause and effect with social reality, it is a reflection of reality, and it also reinforces its existence in the opposite direction. Because, when the discourse in media dissemination gradually forms a subconsciousness that permeates the public’s social interaction, and finally operates in life, she who is invisible on the stage will eventually disappear in the real world: people don’t think of them when awarding prizes, ignore them when designing clothes and tools, and ignore them when they are humiliated and suppressed.
So, many people don’t know their existence, nor do they care how they exist.
In the workplace, women are used to bringing a blanket because the air conditioning temperature in the office is too cold for her; in the cinema, women are queuing in front of the women’s restroom, and they are used to spending several times more waiting time than men; in the piano classroom, women are playing while complaining that their hands are not big enough, and the same is true when using smartphones; in the gym, parking lot, and bus stop, women are always vigilant, a look, a whistle, a chat, may put her in danger…
This is the neglected daily life that belongs to women.
After listing these social realities, Caroline also made a call in the book: “We must increase the representation of women in all fields.” We are also happy to find that behind the stage, the female group has quietly struggled to grow upwards. They are no longer the chorus and puppets that are casually dispatched, but actively make their voices heard, and constantly strive to narrow the gender gap.
They are engaged in gender studies, making the existence of women in history and academia more and more visible; they are showing their talents in the political field, and Hillary’s 1995 declaration “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights” has become a household name…
After the Spring Festival Gala, on this land, we issue the same call as Caroline.
We expect that women can walk in the center of the stage, no longer as the subordinate identity of mothers, daughters, and wives, but as a human subject, speak their own voices, and tell their own stories;
We expect that women in all walks of life can have more decision-making power to help the female group get out of the shadow of being covered, not being defined and hidden.
We hope that one day, we can see the existence of women on the stage and see how women exist.
An interaction
In the New Year, the editorial department wants to give you gifts. What are your thoughts on this year’s Spring Festival Gala program? (Or anything else you want to say) Welcome to our Weibo @荡秋千的妇女们, leave your thoughts, and we will draw three readers in the comment area to give away three copies of Caroline’s “Invisible Women”.
“Invisible Women” (Good book!)
New Star Press 丨 August 2022
01 Section Writer 丨 Ouyang Whore 2 Qiu Qian
02-03 Section Writer 丨 Olive Rabbit Murphy
Editor 丨 Tuo Tuo Qiu Qian Whore 2
Visual 丨 Ji Ming
Swinging Women Produced
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