Jennifer Lawrence Is Getting All Madeleine Albright on Our Asses

By Madeleine Davies | November 13, 2013 | 7:10pm

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Much like Taylor Swift before her, Jennifer Lawrence is the newest celebrity to express her own version of Madeleine Albright’s oft-quoted words “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” When asked by Access Hollywood about what bothers her most about the relationship between women and the media, Lawrence responded, “When girls are just mean to each other. I think that we’re just so unsupportive.”

Yo, I get what Jennifer Lawrence is saying. I definitely support what she’s saying and agree that we don’t do ourselves any favors by unfairly attacking eachother, but it’s always kind of a bummer when women get the bulk of blame for doing what the system (the PATRIARCHY) has told us we need to do to survive since the fucking dawn of Western civilization. To boil down our problematic relationship with the media to Bitches Being Catty is a touch too simple and does us a disservice.

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At the same time, Jennifer Lawrence has a job that pushes her to operate within the same media that she’s criticizing (though she does a far better job not attacking her peers than most). It’s easier and safer to say what she said — to which there are certainly grains of truth — than it is to get all Women Studies 101 during an interview with Access Hollywood.

To her credit, she sort of touches on the patriarchal precedent I’m talking about when she says, “When I watch these shows and I watch these women on these television shows pointing to [other] women and judging them and calling them ugly and calling them fat — where are we from? Why are we here? Why are we doing this to each other? Men were doing it hundreds of years ago and now we’ve turned around and we’re doing it to each other.”

She’s right. Women often treat each other like shit and we should all do our best to cut it out if we haven’t done so already. (Important: Not going out of our way to attack each other is not the same thing as blindly accepting or applauding anything a woman ever does.) But along with that, we should also learn to be a little more forgiving and remember that we’re not the real enemy here. As famous feminist theorist Leonardo DiCaprio once said, “We need to go deeper.” Also: “I killed it, Gilbert. I killed it.”

[Access Hollywood]