If women don’t want to be sexually harassed, maybe they shouldn’t “go out of their way to make themselves attractive,” actress Angela Lansbury said in an interview with Radio Times.
The “Murder She Wrote” star broke away from her Hollywood colleagues in placing blame on the fairer sex for the recent wave of allegations of sexually harassment against powerful men in the entertainment industry.
“There are two sides to this coin. We have to own up to the fact that women, since time immemorial, have gone out of their way to make themselves attractive. And unfortunately it has backfired on us – and this is where we are today,” she told Radio Times.
“We must sometimes take blame, women. I really do think that. Although it’s awful to say we can’t make ourselves look as attractive as possible without being knocked down and raped,” Lansbury remarked.
The actress also said she never fell victim to any sort of sexual harassment over her long career, which started in 1944 when she received an Oscar nomination for her first ever role in the film “Gaslight.”
Her comments contrast sharply with those made by other stars such as Rose McGowan and Uma Thurman who have both made impassioned defenses of women in the entertainment industry on social media and in various interviews. While women like McGowan and Thurman have lashed out against what is seen as structural gendered inequalities in show business, the star from “Murder She Wrote” was seeing if some women’s’ skirts were too short.
Following the initial reporting of her comments, Rape Crisis England & Wales released a statement condemning Lansbury.
“It is a deeply unhelpful myth that rape and other forms of sexual violence are caused or ‘provoked’ by women’s sexuality or ‘attractiveness’,” the group wrote.
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