When women are seen on TV being crass or funny or making jokes or undercutting someone, then you feel it's socially acceptable for a woman to do that. More women are growing up feeling, 'I can speak my mind and say what I want.'
As a working woman, thinking back to someone I'd want to see on TV growing up are women who can make something of themselves and their future.
The more messy women that we put on screen, that we put in books, the more women can feel represented and seen, then they can access their own stuff, feel it's okay, and then have the strength to speak out about things like we're talking about. About rising up.
I just want to say this. I love being a woman. I love playing a woman. I love being a whole and full woman. I am more than my parts, and we all are. And we all, as women, need to continue to change our gaze from how we are seen to how we are seeing. We are full and beautiful women, and let us live in that.
Some men don't want their women to speak up, and then other men are attracted to that very thing. But as a woman, you don't want to be just window dressing. I've probably been unattractive to some men because I do say what I feel and what I think. You can be political about it, but I don't have a red flag. I don't have a mechanism in my head that prevents me from saying what I think, or if something upsets me or if I feel like I'm being degraded. I come from a family of very outspoken women. I can't imagine living in a time when you couldn't express what you felt.
One thing that became abundantly clear right away was that the more women you have in positions of power, the bigger the opportunity you have to serve women. If a woman is not in the room to speak about what a woman needs, then those decisions aren't being made.
I feel that the thing about film and particularly about TV, actually, is it's being created now. We're living in the best time so far because there are many more women writing and women directing, women producing, and people are finally catching on to the fact that women want to go and buy tickets to see female characters and more than one in a film. So I actually think it's a very fertile time to be a woman over 40.
I've always loved independent women, outspoken women, eccentric women, funny women, flawed women. When someone says about a woman, 'I'm sorry, that's just wrong,' I tend to think she must be doing something right.
It just struck me as really odd that there were all of these conversations going on about what young women were up to. Were young women having too much sex? Were young women politically apathetic? Are young women socially engaged or not? And whenever these conversations were happening, they were mostly happening by older women and by older feminists. And maybe there would be a younger woman quoted every once in a while, but we weren't really a central part of that conversation. We weren't really being allowed to speak on our own behalf.
As women, we must speak out, speak up, say no to our inheritance of loss and yes to a future of women-led dialogue about women's rights and value.
There have always been funny women. But in some ways, it takes a while for there to be women who were watching women on television for years and then grow up and think, 'I could do funny stuff.'
Even if I wouldn't wear something myself, I think I know how women feel, how women want to look. I can really relate to women, I get on very well with women... Some women don't. I want to empower women, make women feel the best version of themselves.
When I say myself, I don't mean just as a woman of color, as a girl who's growing up in the Bronx, as people growing up in some way economically-challenged, not growing up with money. It was also even just the way we spoke. The vernacular. I learned that it's alright to say "ain't." My characters can speak the way they authentically are, and that makes for good story. It's not making for good story to make them speak proper English when nobody speaks like that on the playground.
Women are under-represented in TV comedy for a variety of reasons, the hackneyed 'fear that women aren't funny' being one of them.
I know there are certain men that hate women or don't like women, and in order to make women feel small, they tend to isolate them when they bully them. And women are often humiliated by it and feel they can't do anything about it. So my advice to women would be: there's always support around for those sorts of things and if you feel you're isolated in any way, or being bullied, you must talk to someone about it.
Women in their thirties are much more nervous about dating. They feel time is 'running out for them. They want to get married and have a family. The women I see in their forties and fifties know what they want. They are amazing, confident women with good jobs, but they are just struggling to find someone who is their equal.
You know, there's nothing damnable about being a strong woman. The world needs strong women. There are a lot of strong women you do not see who are guiding, helping, mothering strong men. They want to remain unseen. It's kind of nice to be able to play a strong woman who is seen.