The internet fell to pieces the other day after convincing itself that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the director of an upcoming Star Wars film set during the new Jedi Order era and starring Daisy Ridley, was determined to use her foray into the sci-fi franchise to make men as uncomfortable as possible.
But that didn’t actually happen; that was just a thing that the denizens of X (formerly Twitter) mostly made up and then got angry about. Indeed, the platform’s ability to strip nuance from a real scenario before bloating its remains into a grotesque source of outrage is nothing short of terrifying, and it’s high time we took that kind of power away from it.
For context, Obaid-Chinoy appeared on a Women in the World panel back in 2015, where she discussed her two Academy Award-winning documentary shorts Saving Face and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, which shed light on acid attacks and honor killings against women, respectively.
During the interview, Obaid-Chinoy off-handedly remarked that she liked making men uncomfortable, referencing the discomfort that many male viewers in particular felt while watching her films.
So no, her remarks had nothing to do with her upcoming Star Wars film, but the specific mishandling of Obaid-Chinoy’s comments has much further-reaching implications, and exposes the problematic nature of social media platforms such as X in a way that’s not always this obvious.
When observed in their original context, it’s clear that Obaid-Chinoy’s comments aren’t even meant to be taken entirely literally. Judging by her aforementioned documentaries, Obaid-Chinoy’s primary interests lie not in making men uncomfortable, but in taking an undiluted look at the heinous injustices that are enabled and permitted by society—a society that almost always operates in favor of men rather than women.
So yes, of course men will feel uncomfortable watching her documentaries, but that’s a necessary knock-on effect rather than an end goal—one that hopefully results in positive things like introspection and personal growth—and that distinction is incredibly important. Without it, the seeds for outrage are more easily sowed, and we certainly bore witness to quite the garden the other day.
But X has no time for anything beyond surface-level information; the culture it enables is one where everyone—no matter what stake in the situation or critical-thinking ability they have—gets to make their opinions loud, all with a neat and tidy character limit to ensure that there’s only space for the most basic of basics to get across. And that’s all without digging into the presence of bad actors and willful misinformation spreaders.
The quote may have been low-hanging fruit for anyone who wanted to stir up controversy, but anyone with even a smattering of peripheral vision and good faith should be able to parse those nuances without any trouble, and if they can’t, maybe they should pack away the soapbox for a bit, as it were, and engage in exactly the kind of introspection she’s talking about.
(featured image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
