When her acting career got started Anne Hathaway was still a teenager, and she remembers one especially icky question from her very first time doing press. Hathaway recalled the experience during a Q&A panel following a screening of her new film Eileen, which is described as a darkly comedic thriller starring Hathaway as a prison psychologist who forms a homoerotic bond with the prison secretary.
“I just remembered one of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting and had to do press was: Are you a good girl or a bad girl?” Hathaway said, via Variety. “I was 16. And my 16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film.”
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The culture of misogyny among Hollywood insiders and the journalists who covered them in the ‘90s and 2000s is by now pretty well-documented. Luckily, times have changed enough that actors like Hathaway now have the power to call out some of the sexism they experienced when they were young. Kate Winslet, for instance, said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “If I could turn back the clock, I would have used my voice in a completely different way. … I would have said to journalists, I would have responded, I would have said, ‘Don’t you dare treat me like this. I’m a young woman, my body is changing, I’m figuring it out, I’m deeply insecure, I’m terrified, don’t make this any harder than it already is.’”
At the 2018 Women’s March in Los Angeles (via CNN), Natalie Portman recalled, “Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews. I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually I would feel unsafe and that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort.”
Can we all agree, for Anne Hathaway, and for all future Anne Hathaways, to stop sexualizing teenage girls now? It’s time.
