Can girlie girls be smart too? Of course, duh — and Zooey Deschanel has had enough of the mistaken idea they can’t.
Is a woman’s worth any less because she wears pink frills? Of course not — but Zooey Deschanel has taken a lot of heat from self-professed feminists for being unintelligent because she’s a girlie girl. Now the New Girl star is saying enough is enough!
In an interview with Marie Claire, Deschanel takes great exception to the idea that to be considered smart and savvy you have to strip yourself of femininity.
Star spotlight: Zooey Deschanel >>
“My theory is that people in this day and age want to dismiss things,” she told the mag. “So they want to be able to dismiss you. They say, ‘You don’t belong, you don’t deserve this because here’s why, and let me find an intellectual argument for why you wearing pink or cuff sleeves or a bow makes you not worthy of your accomplishments. Everything you’ve done doesn’t matter because you wore the wrong thing or you speak in a way that’s feminine or you identify yourself as feminine.’ And I just think that’s bulls***. And smart people are doing it, and that’s surprising to me. I’ll give them being smart, but they’re being very shortsighted.”
“It’s just attacking who I am,” she continued. “A lot of times it doesn’t have to do with what I get paid to do. It has to do with, ‘Oh, you stupid person.’ Even I get slammed and overwhelmed by how negative the Internet can get, and I’m an adult. I don’t pay any mind to it, but it’s pretty shocking how when you give people anonymity — it’s like the worst of human nature.”
Her critics even nitpick the smallest items, like her speech patterns. “I became aware that people were criticizing the way I speak, which seems weird to me. I speak the way I speak, and I am an intelligent person. Sometimes I lean into California-speak more for entertainment value. It’s not that I can’t live in a world without the word like.”
And all the haterade thrown her way is why the Emmy-nominated actress decided to start her wildly successful website HelloGiggles.com. “I just felt it’s important to teach young girls to be strong people, to not think, I can’t do this because I’m worried about what people will say,” she explained. “There are worse consequences, but online negativity stops people from being creative, part of which is having bad ideas as well as good ideas. When somebody says, ‘That idea’s stupid,’ you stop your flow of ideas. We can’t have the next generation be so afraid because they have been attacked.”
For our part, we straight up love Zooey and her cute dresses and her killer bangs and her wickedly smart brain — all of it, in one fabulous package!
Read the complete interview with Zooey Deschanel in the September issue of Marie Claire, available on newsstands Aug. 13.
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