The legendary Lily Tomlin talks to PrideSource about Beyoncé selling sex to toddlers and calling it feminism. Ouch. Even more cutting: The fact that she says she just doesn’t care enough about Beyoncé to be conversant about her. Read the interview after the jump.As a feminist trailblazer, what do you think of modern examples of feminism, like Beyonce and “Girls,” for instance?
Well, how do you represent that? What does that mean to you?
Yeah, well, I guess that’s what I’m asking you.
(Laughs) You mean Beyonce’s total use of her body? Is that what you mean?
Yeah, a lot of people think of Beyonce as a feminist, as somebody who embraces herself as a powerful woman – she’s even called herself a “modern-day feminist” – and I was curious to know your thoughts on that.
Yeah, well, I think that’s great, and what can I say? She is a pretty popular woman and she’s married to a very powerful man, but she’s still selling sex. She’s selling a lot of sex to teeny-boppers. I don’t know. Who are her fans? Everybody?
Everybody loves Beyonce, Lily, and if you don’t there’s “The Beygency,” which is, according to “Saturday Night Live,” a secret government agency who takes down anyone who doesn’t.
Oh, shit. I like her! I don’t dislike her! But I don’t pay any attention to that because – I mean, she’s fantastically beautiful and dances, but, you know, it’s very suggestive. If I was a 10-year-old, I would try to emulate her like most 10-year-olds do.
For me, young girls are too sexually available! I got in trouble with the show “Girls” because I was doing a junket and 80 people come through from different publications or networks or whatever to interview you. So, this girl comes in and she goes, “What do you think of ‘Girls’? I said, “I haven’t really watched it that much.” That was the truth!
So, I shouldn’t even talk about Beyonce because, hard as it is to believe and as much as she is present in the culture, I’m not terribly conversant with Beyonce. If you played her songs, I wouldn’t necessarily recognize them. I’m familiar with her image and how incredibly vivacious and sexual she is to watch, so I just chalk it up to the culture. I don’t pay any attention to it anymore.
The culture is so sexualized with girls and women. I was in a recording studio and a little girl who was about 4 years old was watching TV, and somebody’s dancing on the TV in very elaborate sexually overt dance steps and the little girl goes, “Oh, she’s hot.” I’m thinking, this is a 4-year-old!
She should be thinking about playing with her Barbies – wait, no, even Barbies are sexualized, so never mind.
(Laughs) She should be thinking about penetrating the Barbie or something, or bringing Barbie and Ken – I don’t know what she should be thinking about! But stop it right now! You’re gonna put words in my mouth! The whole Beyonce thing is gonna come after me. They’ll send Solange after me. I’ll be in the elevator and they’ll beat the hell out of me.
Jay-Z and Beyonce are their own thing. I mean, they come swathed in a culture that is wide and deep, and that’s great. They make a lot of money. I don’t know what else they do. I don’t know about them.
Listen, I was one of those people all through the ’60s. Because rock ‘n’ roll was a male-dominated culture, as a feminist, I railed against it. I railed against the fact that girls were used sexually, that they would just follow guys all over the planet. I cannot defend my state of my mind, that’s what I was thinking at the time. Look, when the Rolling Stones had that album “Black and Blue And Lovin’ It” – whatever it was called (editor’s note: it was called “Black and Blue”) – it showed a woman bound, sitting on a chair with her hands behind her back. She’s black and blue, she has bruises all over her. I mean, this was part of marketing!
I got into a big fuss with someone. I had a hairdresser on a movie and she started railing against these teenage girls, the way they went around and behaved. I said, “They’re an effect of the culture. Why do you support a culture?” She threw a hairbrush at me. She got so mad. She was mad at the girls, she was blaming me, the victim, the subject. I said, “How do you like the idea of a little 12-year-old girl down there at Tower Records going through those bins and seeing this cover with this girl bound and black and blue? The Stones, a very powerful group, is extolling this as the ideal feminist image, like, “Yeah, yeah, this is how she should be: black and blue and loving it.”
What’s the ideal feminist image to you?
There is none. I’m totally existential. I have no investment in the society or anything. Anything that could happen – I’m way too beyond that mark to think that I’m gonna change it.
To read the complete article, go to PrideSource.
The post Lily Tomlin Talks About Beyoncé’s (Quote Unquote) “Feminism” appeared first on World of Wonder.