Oh, hello there. Were you looking for another reason to love Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Of course you were! Well, here it is: he’s a feminist. A big, fat, consciousness-raising, hyphenated-surnamed, menschy advocate for gender equality. Swoon!
Gordon-Levitt opened up about his politics in an interview with The Daily Beast today:
I read that you consider yourself a “male feminist,” and you credit your parents who are educators and really taught you about the history of feminism. But nowadays, you have a lot of young stars coming out against being labeled a feminist.
Coming out against the label? Wow. I guess I’m not aware of that. What that means to me is that you don’t let your gender define who you are—you can be who you want to be, whether you’re a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, whatever. However you want to define yourself, you can do that and should be able to do that, and no category ever really describes a person because every person is unique. That, to me, is what “feminism” means. So yes, I’d absolutely call myself a feminist. And if you look at history, women are an oppressed category of people. There’s a long, long history of women suffering abuse, injustice, and not having the same opportunities as men, and I think that’s been very detrimental to the human race as a whole. I’m a believer that if everyone has a fair chance to be what they want to be and do what they want to do, it’s better for everyone. It benefits society as a whole.
The Sin City star also touched on the topic when he appeared on The Ellen Degeneres Show earlier this year. He credited his mother with making him and his brother aware of the way women are objectified and judged by double-standards:
“We would always watch Lakers games as a family, but my mom would always point out every time the cheerleaders come on, ‘Okay, so look, here’s the story that gets told: The men get to be the heroic skilled athletes and the women just get to be pretty.’ She didn’t mean any offense to any individual woman who was working as a cheerleader, but she wanted me and my brother to be aware of it because we see these images on TV, in the movies, and on magazines all the time. And if you don’t stop and think about it, it just sort of seeps into your brain and that becomes the way you perceive reality.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, you are welcome to alter our perceived reality any time.
(Photo by Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)
Related: Joseph-Gordon Levitt is Taken
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