Hypocrisy

I have an interesting story related to hypocrisy. When I taught a remedial English class in America, I loaned a movie to one of my students. The movie starred Shu Qi (舒淇) as one of the actresses. Another student, a female ABC from a Hong Kong family, saw the movie and loudly said, "Did you know she used to be a porn star!?" I said that I did, but she has moved into mainstream movies and sometimes is a good actress (although she usually makes bad movies). I also thought it was interesting that she was able to become a successful actress in a culture that's often unforgiving of women who are involved in any kind of sex scandal, etc. (e.g. the women involved in the Edison Chen [陳冠希] photo scandal).

While Shu Qi hasn't exactly helped the cause of women entertainers (because a lot of women have to use their bodies to become famous, and because many cultures are youth-obsessed to the point that an older woman can find it hard to be a successful entertainer), she was able to become successful after some embarrassing early work. Why should we continue to judge her for the past, and why should we care about her early work? No one forces us to look at it.

A year or so later I did what most bored Americans do: I went on Facebook and started to look up friends and former students I hadn't seen in a long time. I happened to check for my Shu Qi-hating student. I found her, and I saw that she posted a photo shoot that she participated in. They were common pictures one might take for fun or if a woman wanted to start a modeling career. They were provocative but not explicit, the type of picture of "spicy women" we often see in advertising. I found it very strange that this student was so judgmental of Shu Qi, yet she also would pose for pictures in a way that, like in Shu Qi's early work, are taken for people to admire the person's body. My student was proud of these pictures enough to put them online, so why did she care so much about an actress who did something similar (but much more extreme) in the past? It seemed like a type of hypocrisy.

I can think also of the many times I've criticized someone, only to find later that I was behaving in the same way. I'm most guilty of criticizing things like macho nonsense, then finding myself acting macho inappropriately. I'm also shy in many social situations, but I'll criticize someone for being too shy.

Is this a common problem? Do we often strongly judge famous people but don't think about what's important to us--how we should judge our selves and how we should judge other people?