These actresses open up about their battle against sexism
Every Women’s Day, there is an increased emphasis on debates surrounding equality, sexual harassment, women empowerment, so on and so forth. While some women support each other and speak up, the efforts to stifle their voices or hijacking of their narrative by men is still very much prevalent.
We bring to you 6 powerful stories of actresses facing Sexism in Hollywood:
Jennifer Lawrence
“When I was much younger and starting out, I was told by producers of a film to lose 15 pounds in two weeks. One girl before me had already been fired for not losing enough weight fast enough. And, during this time, a female producer had me do a nude line-up with about five women who were much, much, thinner than me. We are stood side-by-side with only paste-ons on covering our privates. After that degrading and humiliating line-up, the female producer told me I should use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet. I asked to speak to a producer about the unrealistic diet regime and he responded by telling me he didn’t know why everyone thought I was so fat, he thought I was perfectly ‘f—able.’ I couldn’t have gotten a producer or a director or a studio head fired. I let myself be treated a certain way because I felt like I had to for my career. I was young and walking that fine line of sticking up for myself without being called difficult, which they did call me, but I believe the word they used was ‘nightmare.’ ”
Lawrence opened up about this at ELLE‘s Women in Hollywood Awards.
Reese Witherspoon
“This has been a really hard week for women in Hollywood, for women all over the world, and a lot of situations and a lot of industries are forced to remember and relive a lot of ugly truths. I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly and I find it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings that I’ve been having about anxiety, about being honest, the guilt for not speaking up earlier.
“[I feel] true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment. And I wish that I could tell you that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly it wasn’t. I’ve had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault and I don’t speak about them very often, but after hearing all the stories these past few days and hearing these brave women speak up tonight, the things that we’re kind of told to sweep under the rug and not talk about, it’s made me want to speak up and speak up loudly because I felt less alone this week than I’ve ever felt in my entire career.”
She said so at ELLE’s Women in Hollywood Awards again.
Rose McGowan
Her name and her fight cannot be missed whilst talking about this issue today. Inspiring hundreds of women to speak up after a legal and psychological tussle with mogul Harvey Weinstein, she said, in an excerpt published on i-D, “I was literally told I had to have long hair otherwise the men doing the hiring in Hollywood wouldn’t want to [expletive] me and if they didn’t want to [expletive] me, they wouldn’t hire me. I was told this by my female agent, which is tragic on many levels. So, so evil and so, so sad,” she wrote.
McGowan continued, “Evil because I took the information from an older woman who was the mouthpiece for what Hollywood wants, and she was right. Sad because it wasn’t just the message that gets filtered down to women and girls, I got the direct message.”
Priyanka Chopra Jonas
Her new memoir ‘Unfinished’, has been the talk of the town for quite some time, owing to the glaringly honest conversations Chopra initiates. Actress-producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas has spoken about an encounter with a filmmaker who wanted her to get plastic surgery ahead of her launch. According to an excerpt from The Independent, Chopra Jonas narrated the incident, which occurred after her Miss World win in 2000. “After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him,” she wrote in her book. “I did. He stared at me long and hard, assessing me, and then suggested that I get a boob job, fix my jaw, and add a little more cushioning to my butt. If I wanted to be an actress, he said, I’d need to have my proportions ‘fixed’, and he knew a great doctor in LA [Los Angeles] he could send me to. My then-manager voiced his agreement with the assessment.”
Jennifer Lopez
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, Lopez spoke out against the ‘diva’ tag that she is often subjected to. “I’ve always been fascinated by how much more well behaved we have to be than men. I did get a moniker of being a diva, which I don’t deserve,” she said, adding that women in showbiz find themselves “labelled” after tasting success. “Or even sometimes I felt crippled to voice my opinion, especially because certain directors and the boys’ club that they form can make you feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t say anything.’ I was always fascinated by how I could see [a man] being late or being belligerent to a crew and it being totally acceptable; meanwhile, I’d show up 15 minutes late and be berated. And you watch this happen over and over and over again. Like, we’re not allowed to have certain opinions or even be passionate about something…”
Emma Stone
Stone spoke about how some of her good jokes were taken from her and given to her male co-stars during a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone magazine. “I hesitate to make it about being a woman, but there have been times when I’ve improvised, they’ve laughed at my joke and then given it to my male co-star. Given my joke away,” she said. “Or it’s been me saying, ‘I really don’t think this line is gonna work,’ and being told, ‘Just say it, just say it, if it doesn’t work we’ll cut it out’ — and they didn’t cut it out, and it really didn’t work!’”
It is great to see that more women today are choosing to speak up, inspiring others as well. Breaking the well-established norm of women being enemies, we got to uplift one another and get all of us elevated for a better world and a better life.
