Meryl Streep disappointed a lot of women last week when, asked point-blank by Time Out London if she was a feminist, she played the "I am a humanist" card.
All evidence up till then would have pointed to her answer being a simple "yes, of course," but...no. Meryl reached into her bag of tricks left over from The Iron Lady and went for diplomacy. Because why, she didn't want to offend... men?
She does know that it's largely women who look up to her, right?
Not that it's a terrible thing to not want to be labeled, or to say that one is a humanist, someone who respects the value of all human beings. But it was startling when the three-time Oscar winner, who recently re-pitched the long-dormant Equal Rights Amendment to Congress and who gleefully supported Patricia Arquette's Oscar-night call for equal pay for women, stopped short at allowing herself to be called a feminist.
"I'm for nice, easy balance," she added.
And so we're wondering if last week's sidestep from solidly identifying with a certain social movement contributed to the outrage this week over a certain T-shirt.
The Time Out London sit-down has kept on giving in the form of backlash over the T-shirts that Streep and Suffragette co-stars Carey Mulligan, Anne-Marie Duff and Romola Garai sported for a photo shoot with the mag, shirts that read, "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave"—an excerpt from a real-life remark made by Streep's Suffragette character, Emmeline Pankhurst.
The full quotation is: "I know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave."
What were they thinking, indeed?
First of all, Streep, Mulligan, Garai and Duff were handed these shirts and told to pose. Secondly, if you know that they're in a film about women fighting for the right to vote, you might guess that the message is that the person who said that would rather be considered an unruly outlaw than a slave to laws created by men for the benefit of men.
(You know, 'cause Pankhurst was a feminist.)
However, let's say you'd never heard of the film. Don't you still have to go out of your way to think that Streep and the rest willingly donned clothing that hearkened back to a Civil War-era, Confederate mindset? (Time Out London stated, in defending the photo shoot, that they have received no complaints from within the U.K.)
But even Meryl Streep is only so much meat dangling before a hungry Internet. And since racial injustice and inequality still rage at a heartbreaking level to this day (the Confederate flag was only removed from the South Carolina capitol building in July, for Pete's sake), whoever took issue with the shirt had perfectly valid reasons to despise the message they thought it sent, or the image they thought it conjured.
Beloved:Regarding Meryl Streep's T-shirts: "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave." Some folks are arguing that since...
Posted by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers on Tuesday, October 6, 2015
But if you just glance at the headlines, it also seems that Streep is the one taking all the heat for the shirt. In a few, her "co-stars" are mentioned, but she's become the prime target. It's "Meryl Streep's Suffragette T-Shirt Disaster," not the magazine's or the other actresses'.
Then again, when asked point-blank if she was a feminist, Carey Mulligan answered, "Yes."
So perhaps the twitterverse and other critics still had a bone to pick with Streep and the unfortunate incident of the T-shirt was a good opportunity to keep picking. The debate raging over whether the word "slave" was used appropriately (many agree that it was when you consider the utter dearth of women's rights at the turn of the 20th century) also re-sparked the conversation about whether Streep 's seeming rejection of the term "feminist" was yet another blow to the cause.
Though it remains its own form of travesty that celebrities pretty much can't say anything without getting lashed back upon, Streep refusing to go there with the feminist question really was just a big wet-blanket bummer.
Because if Meryl—the oft-au-naturel, earth-mother queen of Hollywood—doesn't want to be labeled a feminist, and couldn't just say "yes, but" if she wanted to explain her position further, then what does the word even mean?!
And her answer just served to further remove her from real-world struggles, making her more of a candidate to be singled out for wearing a T-shirt that could be interpreted as invoking the pro-slavery Confederacy and being wildly insensitive.
Last we checked, there is no "nice, easy balance" when it comes to these issues.