When people think about Hollywood, many people daydream about the star-studded parties, red carpet fashion, and the flashing cameras. But Hollywood isn’t all glitz and glamour — sometimes, it’s much darker. And that needs to be talked about.
One of the most unfortunate parts of Hollywood is the sexualization of women — especially young girls. Some of our favorite child stars, like Jennifer Love Hewitt and Natalie Portman, have opened about how men made them feel like sexual objects. And decades later, the same has happened to stars like Millie Bobby Brown, Billie Eilish, and more.
Just because this is a sad reality doesn’t mean women will stay silent about it. Many starlets have opened up about how gross it felt and how damaging it was to be sexualized at such a young age, and their stories are important harbingers of change throughout Hollywood and how we talk about young women especially.
From writing op-eds to be released to international publications to taking their thoughts to Instagram, these women will not be silenced. Learn more about what these celebrity women had to say about being sexualized in their youth.
A version of this article was originally published on Nov. 2021.
Danielle Fishel
Boy Meets World alum Danielle Fishel recently spoke out about being sexualized at a young age when she rose to stardom as a teen. “As a kid, I always wanted to be older. I always wanted to be an adult, I wanted to be seen as an adult and so getting adult male attention as a teenage girl… I didn’t think of it as being creepy or weird,” she said in a recent episode of Pod Meets World. “It felt like it was validation that I was mature and I was an adult and I was capable and that they were seeing me the way I was, not for the number on a page. And in hindsight, that is absolutely wrong.”
Fishel then went on to remember instances of men acting inappropriately toward her. “I had people tell me they had my 18th birthday on their calendar,” she remembered. “I had a male executive, I did a calendar [shoot] at 16, and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom.”
Elle Fanning
During The Hollywood Reporter’s Comedy Actress Roundtable, Elle Fanning recalled how someone said she didn’t get a role at 16 because she was “unf—able.”
She said, “I’ve never told this story, but I was trying out for a movie. I didn’t get it. I don’t even think they ever made it, but it was a father-daughter road trip comedy.
“I didn’t hear from my agents because they wouldn’t tell me things like this — that filtration system is really important because there’s probably a lot more damaging comments that they filtered — but this one got to me,” she added. “I was 16 years old, and a person said, ‘Oh, she didn’t get the father-daughter road trip comedy because she’s unf—able.’ It’s so disgusting. And I can laugh at it now, like, ‘What a disgusting pig!’ “
Anna Faris
Back in 2017, Anna Faris revealed on her Unqualified podcast, per People, that a director she previously worked with had harrassed her, slapping her bottom in front of the whole set. “I was doing a scene where I was on a ladder and I was supposed to be taking books off a shelf and he slapped my ass in front of the crew so hard. And all I could do was giggle.”
She continued, saying, “We’re conditioned to giggle. But also, if we were to do anything else, we’d be labeled a bitch or difficult. That would be the best of circumstances. I guess what I do is I laugh. It puts everyone at ease. That’s the defense mode you go into.”
She then said the director later called her agent, offering the role because of her “long legs.” She said, “I remember that same director telling my agent, who told me, that I had great legs and that was one of the reasons that I got hired. And listen, that’s a f—ing great compliment. I like my legs. But that sort of informed my whole experience with that whole project. I don’t think the male lead got hired because he had great legs. Therefore I felt like I’m hired because of these elements — not because of [talent].”
Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson recently opened up about being in the same role over again: a hypersexualized type of character, and she grew sick of it. “I got kind of pigeonholed into this weird hypersexualized thing. It was like, that’s the kind of career you have. These are the roles you’ve played and I was like, ‘This is it I guess,’” she said in a precious interview. “I kind of became objectified and pigeonholed in this way where I felt like I wasn’t getting offers for work for things that I wanted to do. I remember thinking to myself, I was like, ‘I think people think I’m, like, 40 years old.’”
Kate Moss
Supermodel Kate Moss recently opened up about a traumatic photoshoot she had at only 15 years old. According to a recent article from the Evening Standard per Yahoo, she recalled the event, saying: “He said, ‘Take your top off ‘ and I took my top off. I was really shy then about my body and he said, ‘Take your bra off ‘. I could feel there was something wrong. I got my stuff, and I ran off. I can tell a wrong ‘un a mile away.”
She’s also spoken up about how the media has tried to take her down for her small frame and trying to sexualize her when she was a teenager.
Britney Spears
Britney Spears opened up to Boston radio station AMP 103.3 in 2013, per The Independent, about how the music industry sexualized her too much. “A lot of sex goes into what I do. But sometimes I would like to bring it back to the old days when there was like one outfit through the whole video, and you’re dancing the whole video, and there’s like not that much sex stuff going on.”
She also spoke to GQ in 2003 about feeling “tricked” into the highly sexualized Rolling Stone cover of her in her childhood bedroom with her dolls at age 16: “I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing. And, to be totally honest with you, at the time I was 16, so I really didn’t. I was back in my bedroom, and I had my little sweater on and he was like, ‘Undo your sweater a little bit more.’ The whole thing was about me being into dolls, and in my naïve mind I was like, ‘Here are my dolls!’ and now I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what the hell?'”
Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman started her acting career at only 12 years old but became a household name early on when she starred in the 1990s Star Wars trilogy. In an episode of Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, Portman opened up about being sexualized as a child, and being seen as a “Lolita” figure.
“I’ve actually talked about it. I wrote a thing about it for the Women’s March a few years ago about how being sexualized as a child I think took away from my own sexuality because it made me afraid. It made me feel like how I could be safe was to be like, ‘I’m conservative and I’m serious and you should respect me and I’m smart and don’t look at me that way.'”
Emily Ratajkowski
In new mom Emily Ratajkowski’s book of essays, My Body, she opened up about being sexualized ever since middle school. She talked about how allegedly a middle school teacher snapped her bra, how Robin Thicke groped her on the set of “Blurred Lines,” and how her parents valued her beauty above everything else.
“Beauty was a way for me to be special. When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.”
“I developed very young, so I was more conscious of sexuality and being a pretty girl-woman,” Ratajkowski told the LA Times in 2015. “Having men look at you and really having no idea what sex is a very strange experience.”
Brooke Shields
Ever since the beginning of her career, Brooke Shields has, unfortunately, been sexualized, starring in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby at age 13 and The Blue Lagoon at age 14. Shields recently opened up to The Guardian about her mindset about having been sexualized at that age: “There’s something incredibly seductive about youth … I think it just has different forms and it’s how you survive it, and whether you choose to be victimized by it. It’s not in my nature to be a victim.”
Megan Fox
In an old Jimmy Kimmel interview, Megan Fox opened up about how she was sexually harassed and over-sexualized as young as 15 years old. “They were shooting this club scene, and they brought me in and I was wearing a stars and stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat and six-inch heels. [Michael Bay] approved it and they said ‘Michael, she’s 15 so you can’t sit her at the bar and she can’t have a drink in her hand’, so, his solution to that problem was to have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet.”
Mara Wilson
Matilda star Mara Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times saying, “I saw many teenage actresses and singers embracing sexuality as a rite of passage, appearing on the covers of lad mags or in provocative music videos. I had already been sexualized anyway, and I hated it.”
Wilson continued, “Before I even turned 12, there were images of me on foot fetish websites and photoshopped into child pornography. Every time, I felt ashamed.”
Millie Bobby Brown
When Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown turned 16 years old, she opened up on being sexualized since she’s been in the spotlight on Instagram. “There are moments I get frustrated from the inaccuracy, inappropriate comments, sexualization, and unnecessary insults that ultimately have resulted in pain and insecurity for me… But not ever will I be defeated. I’ll continue doing what I love and spreading the message in order to make change.”
Mischa Barton
The O.C. star Mischa Barton wrote a personal essay for Harper’s Bazaar U.K in 2021 about the lasting mental health effects of being sexualized as a teen. “The truth is that sexuality has always been a component of my career. Even from a young age, I was sexualized,” she wrote, noting she became a sex symbol at only 13 years old and that she felt pressured to lose her virginity at a young age.
Billie Eilish
Known for her baggy clothes and edgy lyrics, Billie Eilish has been extremely sexualized since she got into the spotlight. In an interview with Vogue Australia, Eilish said she wears baggy clothes to prevent being judged — and that’s exactly what happened when a photo of her in a tank top was leaked to Twitter.
Twitter sexualized her and in an interview with Elle, she told the outlet how annoyed she was about it. “My boobs were trending on Twitter! At number one! What is that?! Every outlet wrote about my boobs!”
Jennifer Love Hewitt
Jennifer Love Hewitt recently opened up to Vulture about how she was sexualized throughout her career. “The conversation for a very long time in my career was always about [my body] first — then, ‘Oh yeah, you were really great in the movie, too,’ later.” She added, “At the time that I was going through it, and interviewers were asking what now would be incredibly inappropriate, gross things, it didn’t feel that way. For some reason, in my brain, I was able to just go, ‘Okay, well, I guess they wouldn’t be asking if it was inappropriate.’ But now, as a 42-year-old woman with a daughter, I definitely look back on it and go, ‘Ew.'”
Alyson Stoner
In a video essay for People, former Disney star Alyson Stoner opened up about the sexual harassment and more hardships she faced as a child star. “Nothing was designed for me to end up normal. Stable. Alive.”
“The onset of puberty has turned my waist and bust into the main objects of attention and inspection. This will also categorize my career trajectory,” she continues. “I’ve learned that it is safer to dissociate in order to survive what my mind and body are subjected to daily. I’ll be numb for another five years, but all you will see is the ever-highly-functioning, Smiling Girl #437.”
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