#17: Strictly
A guest post by Emily Collins on how Maisie Smith's treatment on the dance show has bucked reality tv trends to make a villain of the confident, bubbly young woman.
When 19-year-old EastEnders actor Maisie Smith found herself in the bottom two of Strictly for the second week in a row, despite an incredibly ambitious Salsa and a high score to match, I couldn’t help but notice a hidden message in Craig Revel Horwood’s words of advice to her. “You are an amazing dancer so you don’t have to worry about that,” he said. “The funny thing is, in this show odd things happen. It sometimes takes a long time to win the hearts and the minds of the nation.”
To me, this was a TV friendly way of saying ‘Darling, it’s not your fault the public are fucking sexist.’
It should come as no surprise really. For as long as reality TV has been around, there has been an exclusive hatred reserved for talented, confident young women who compete in it. Alexandra Burke, Faye Tozer and Ashley Roberts have all been victims of backlash on Strictly for being too good or too experienced in dance (despite the fact that learning ballroom when you’ve only done pop routines is the same as learning Italian when you only know French: it helps, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easy). In other reality shows like the Great British Bake Off, Ruby Tandoh was famously accused of flirting with Paul Hollywood to stay in the show, while 2016 Winner Candice Brown received rape and death threats for the way that she pouted. A combination of success and confidence in female reality TV contestants seems to provoke something vicious and antagonistic in the British public: a drive to teach them a lesson and make them pay for having the audacity to believe in themselves.
This year, Smith was no exception. Looking on Twitter, my eyes rolled into the back of my head at the comments: from the vague ‘I just don’t like her attitude’ to the genuinely gleeful ‘that’ll wipe the smug smile off her face’ when she was announced in the dance-off, like she was a high school bully finally getting her comeuppance. And digging deeper, I do think that’s part of where this unconscious hatred comes from. Think of how many teen films, tv shows and books teach us that if you meet society’s standards of pretty and you’re confident, you probably have a horrible personality. Mean Girls, Heathers,A Cinderella Story: I could list these for days. When we see a stereotypically beautiful and talented woman who knows her worth and we have been trained by media to think: bitch. Our heroines can be talented and stereotypically beautiful, but they can never know it. If they know it, it makes them unlikeable, we can’t connect with them on a human level. This is a dangerous message to send out to women, leading to a culture where they are taught it is more important to make others feel comfortable than it is to feel comfortable inside ourselves. Combine that with the way our brain projects hatred onto others who we see as more successful when we’re disappointed in ourselves, and girls like Maisie don’t stand a chance.
Because she is not a bitch. She’s not arrogant, cocky or any of the words she is pinned with. She’s a NINETEEN YEAR OLD having the time of her life and working hard to keep doing something she loves, which this year’s cast weren’t going to let us forget. The week after she survived her second dance off, the entire studio started chanting her name once she had finished her quickstep, easily her best dance to date. You could feel the entire room completely behind her and showing her how loved she was, despite what some of the public may think of her. Similarly, when she found out she had escaped being in the dance off for the third week in a row, the whole room stomped with joy. The cast may not have outwardly been able to call the public sexist, but it felt as loud a fight back as they could demonstrate on a programme the license fee pays for. Compared to previous years, this felt anarchic. A cry for her critics to take their sexism, both outward and internalised, elsewhere.
Now as we’re heading into the final of what has been a wonderful year for Strictly, Smith has not been in the dance off since. Maisie’s second dance off stint led to a flurry of articles picking at why society tends to hate confident young women, and the public do seem to be digesting a more realistic, human image of her. While I’m very grateful to have had Strictly filling up my Saturday nights for a lot of reasons (escapism, fun, Bill Bailey dancing to Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang): one of the main joys has been seeing this overhaul happen. I’m sure it’s not quite the end of sexist reality TV tropes just yet, but maybe the end is in sight.