Being a woman makes me hyper-aware of being watched. People are constantly looking at me, up and down, observing my outfit, how much of my body is visible, how much make-up I am wearing, etc etc. I know other women will deeply understand this experience. Of pretending you aren’t aware someone is looking at you, especially when that person is a man. This is compounded when you are a young queer femme.
Queer women are judged. We are examined. We are checked out. We are scrutinized. We are searched. We are ogled. We are constantly under surveillance.
Finding balance has been an important topic for me as I have previously found myself caught in a spiral of procrastination due to my tendencies towards perfectionism, and admittedly still occasionally do.
The element that really irked me about this set was that, aside from myself, almost all the background actors were literal highschool students. They were children. They didn’t know they could say no to staying late, or stand up against anything else that wasn’t okay on that set. They were learning that this is the norm on film sets -- that unfair working conditions is the standards and that you shouldn’t say anything against it.