“Lessons in Chemistry” Isn’t Far Off: How It Matches My Online Social Experiments
In Lessons in Chemistry, Brie Larson plays chemist Elizabeth Zott, a woman whose intelligence is never believed. Online haters of the series think it is 100% fictional. You’re all wrong.
Online, people seem to think this well written new Apple TV series starring Brie Larson is exaggerated. Lessons in Chemistry is the first ever series I popped in and said, “This is identical to my findings in my social experiments.”
Method acting for your future successful on camera role and/or screenplay is something I highly recommend to everyone in the performing arts. Number one on that list: seeing how the world treats men versus women and your imaginary characters of different careers and financial, educational or social statuses. What I cover here barely scratches the surface, so please, do it when you can with handy fake profiles on places like Reddit, Discord, message boards for different topics and all forms of social media. Or do like me, take it a step further by applying to jobs with the same resume as a man.
Half of the folks online in my adventures in alias are nice to me and respond as respectful humans. Good people are out there! The others ruin it.
My findings on things are stereotypes are real. As a man sharing my very simple opinions, I get away with whatever I want to say on really any mainstream pop culture, career or shopping topic. Movies I’ve watched, Hollywood career chitchat, science, science fiction, products I purchase and like or dislike, products I don’t want to buy, great or terrible cities to live in, really, life and work as it is. As a woman online, saying I dislike a city or product leads to a small mob of people telling me how I must be wrong and don’t know what I am talking about, with assumptions on who I am. I must be an impoverished single mother. A lady who has never set foot in New York or LA and wouldn’t know how those worlds of entertainment or mainstream big business work. I couldn’t possibly be who I say I am when I say I am not so, or have had life experiences that were not all inferior. As a female user online, I am nothing. I know nothing at all. In a part of the web that is run like a strict HOA, the moderator allowed men to refute their opinions when people politely disagreed with them but always deleted my posts for mundane excuses so I had to tiptoe for the continuation of that social experiment’s run through. He once deleted my very light commentary on economic hardships on oh, right, responding to a thread where people discussed the economic hardships facing them in my rehashing of whatever the male users were saying. SEXISM IS REAL.
When I speak my mind online about things as simply put as “I disliked this movie,” the words frequently thrown around are “entitled,” “misinformed,” “what would you know, “unhinged.” Unhinged is the new “difficult” for the 2020’s. You will be “unhinged” for saying in one sentence you like eating vegan food, or doing anything normal. What I’ve learned from the web: all women are unhinged for existing.
As a fake online woman, every comment I post is met with doubt. People will Google things and try to post evidence to fact check my accuracy. When there isn’t anything to disprove, they post crumbling “evidence” of why what I say is sort of false in their view to the best of their abilities, because oh, it isn’t? The other half of the time, Internet users will explain the topic to me as if I am a toddler.
Your occupation as an anonymous woman gives you the options of choice A, generalised mistreatment or choice B, shaming. In choice A, you are any woman. In choice B, you are in the film and/or music industry writing about what you know. Women who are teachers, Wall Street successes, bankers, writers, novelists, scientists or stay at home parents are dumb. We’re women, right? As someone describing myself as an actress, filmmaker or any kind musician/composer/singer-songwriter online, I am exposed to obscene statements of sexism, racism and classism directed towards me and anyone or any genres I point out as exemplary. Country music and hip hop/R&B are not “real music” to many. Lyricists are not musicians deserving of their acclaim because they don’t have music degrees or the right elements of whatever being a real musician is. Mention the names of black artists and you are met with “those aren’t real songs like…” songs penned by white performers outside of country music. Because country music is for “rednecks” or foul mouthed adjectives.
As a woman, you will receive unsolicited advice in your public responses or DMs from male users on how to better conduct yourself, as if you misbehaved at a country club in 1953. My male usernames have never once gotten told they spoke out of line, were “very disrespectful,” “come off like a b****” or any of the dismissive language my female characters get in their DMs for things like saying “I don’t like this movie in the franchise that started out great” or “I dislike this product and don’t want to buy it because ________.” In my most recent social experiment I wrapped up for screenwriting research purposes, my female username yesterday received an unsolicited DM telling me how to speak to others in the forum. Yeah, like the way people on Lessons in Chemistry’s early episode speak to Brie Larson’s character. I spoke out of line by saying how I felt about a would be purchase in a discussion about online shipping for a niche product. The 2023 version of “Harper Valley PTA.” All the users start nicely until a month later after learning this anonymous lady speaks her very basic opinions on anything, when it becomes a witch hunt and my username is always finished off, burned in the town square until I delete my account(s). My fav repeated phrase: “You can’t talk to him like that.” Him, always being an “expert” in whatever it is, always knowing more than my obviously dimwitted female personas who couldn’t know anything about topics I’ve studied or what I do for a profession.
Men online always think my female usernames are lying when I talk in polite passing about my life experiences or the tiniest accomplishments, types of successful people I have met or know, my university degree itself always a question because people love believing I am uneducated as a woman. Women’s life experiences can only be real when the people they’ve met and learned from are at the supermarket or PTA, not government, Hollywood, Fortune 500 companies or anyone who is remotely intelligent and successful. Women are lying when you say you’ve done anything on your real resume. When I am a man online, people believe me. They want to know more or advice on how they can do those things.
As a man, the focus moves onto what kind of man I am. The same me being polite to everyone gets shut down if I say I like a type of restaurant for lunch online when my person is a man working in banking or on Wall Street. He gets called out for being rich, spoiled, a jerk and really foul language I cannot repeat to you friends. His existence as a successful man makes others feel inferior so they are reduced to schoolyard bullying about anything he says. My male characters who work in finance or policy are only well received in online areas where other men work in those professions. If indeed my person were a self made man in Manhattan finance, a world I know plenty about from being a fly on the wall in NYC, why is he a bad person for no reason? Why is his commentary about a movie or the joy of a video game wrong? Everything my male characters who are perceived as well to do and educated is wrong to many internet users.
As a nice, humble working class man who wanted to move to the West Coast and had his own set of hobbies, the Internet destroyed me for sharing my feelings of how I wanted my life to be when I moved and what I liked to do. My expectations of what I could do for myself were all unrealistic dreams. People treated me like I was garbage. I wasn’t allowed to imagine a life of enjoying meals by the beach and owning a home someday. That was for other kinds of people. Rich people. Without saying anything about my background, some people thought he was probably non-white or from the rough parts of some major cities they tried to guess. My poor male characters, like my female characters, are told in more polite phrase than my women’s usernames, how they couldn’t possibly understand old novels they love or know what they are talking about regarding profound conversations. Like women, they must be uneducated, and for the trolls of the web who look down on others, uneducated is a synonym for stupid.
All of my male characters are blasted out with cursing and insults when they stick up for women in things that are commonly accepted when women say them. My Reddit account from a friendly middle class American guy in his 20’s had 90% horrendous comments when I said something about women and dating.
With the job hunt, when I before tried non-entertainment industry “REAL JOB” freelance work as a man versus a woman in the more distant past, the real me, Nicole with my actual name or some variation of her under an alias has to explain every reason why she deserves consideration for the gig. “Can we see more of your writing samples?” Always, “Can we schedule a phone/video interview? We need to get a feel of you.” All focused on what I sound like, look like, am like. Before #metoo, topics were overly curious or moved into the inappropriate. My male characters don’t get asked any questions. When rejected, they are given proper human-not-A.I. penned letters explaining why, never ghosted. My male names get offers to be “asked sometime in the future,” a lie maybe, a polite one. Real and fake female versions of me get insulted, mistreated, accused of lying about my samples, wanting to know why I like the Japanese language or Spanish language after a Google search, so much about everything that has nothing to do with the freelance opportunities presented. Female me or my names will, like Brie Larson’s Elizabeth Zott, be bothered into explaining why she deserves anything, a place in the room, a job, her presence! And mocked when she explains herself. My men get booked jobs where it would turn out clearly with my female sound on the phone: no DBA alias I could ever file will do, for I am not a man.
When that happens, I resign myself to saying, “The good news is, the problem isn’t me. Nothing is wrong with who I am when people see a male name.” The irony: my luck fares best when I aim for networking in the entertainment industry, where more people welcome hearing a female voice on the phone, seeing a female name in their inboxes.
I write this as I enjoy my breakfast toast and tea. What I’ve learned for my screenwriting and acting needs could fill a set of books and never be done. It’s 2023. People treat me and my female faux usernames like the character on this show. Lessons in Chemistry isn’t a fictional work but an exposé. You can dislike it all you want but the right thing everyone needs to do is watch it and learn so we as a society quit repeating this.
The Internet’s anonymity factor empowers how people really feel. The whole “a drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts” come alive without the requirement of a good weekend at the bar. Right now, I’m probably done for life with my years of occasional social experiments because wherever I go, the variables change but never the outcomes.
