Forget the MeToo sisterhood – Hollywood actresses still hate each other

As White Lotus star Sydney Sweeney has discovered, behind the faux female empowerment culture it’s as ruthless and competitive as ever

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Not one of the women in my close circle of friends could say the words “female empowerment” with a straight face. Now there’s a weird fact. A sad fact. It’s obviously a concept we all believe in and strive towards, so why the eyerolls? Why the sneers?
Because, like so many well-intentioned words and terms – “mental health”, “inclusion” – this one has been devalued by over-use and fraudulent use. Because, as actress Sydney Sweeney has pointed out in a hilariously ferocious attack on the phoney Hollywood sisterhood, when we hear certain people and sectors talking about “female empowerment” it comes with a pungent odour of bilge.
“This entire industry, all people say is: ‘Women empowering other women’,” the outspoken White Lotus star has told Vanity Fair. “None of it’s happening. All of it is fake and a front for all the other s— that they say behind everyone’s back.”
That the showbusiness world is full of virtue-signalling back-stabbers is hardly a smelling-salt-shocker of a revelation. (And by the way, the men are as bad as the women.) These people put on a show for a living. Conjuring up fictional lives, pretending to be something they’re not: that’s their nine to five.
And as rare as it is for anyone who isn’t washed up, bitter, or in their nineties to break ranks about this (Sweeney is just 27 and at the top of her game), the Euphoria star has experienced that lack of sisterliness in a very public way.
You may remember that last April, an older Hollywood producer named Carol Baum – who clearly hadn’t got the “only ever say nice things about other women” memo – told an audience at a film screening that she “didn’t get” the hype about Sweeney, who “is not pretty” and “can’t act”.
Cue general outrage and a wonderfully serene response from the actress’s representative, beginning with what’s always the most effective put down: “How sad that…”
“It’s very disheartening to see women tear other women down,” Sweeney went on to tell Vanity Fair this week, “especially when women who are successful in other avenues of their industry see younger talent working really hard – hoping to achieve whatever dreams that they may have – and then trying to bash and discredit any work that they’ve done.”
Yes, we might have imagined that after a certain revolution started in Hollywood in 2016, the whole solidarité feminine thing would have become a little less of an empty slogan there, of all places.
Nothing bonds quite like a common enemy, after all, and in this case the enemy was very much male. But that turned out to be a naïve assumption. Pins were worn on red carpets, T-shirts bearing sisterly slogans flaunted for the paparazzi in the street, and a singleness of feminist purpose expressed time and time again in interviews, where women were encouraged to preface every sentiment with: “As a woman…” But that didn’t change the way they all talked about one another in private.
As someone with a lot of friends in that industry, I can tell you that they’re as ruthless and competitive as ever. As ruthless and competitive as women in a lot of cut-throat industries where there isn’t actually yet “room for us all”.
If you believed what you read on social media – and nobody does – women would all be revelling in each other’s successes. Tickled pink by their competitor’s triumphs. But I suspect the truth is closer to Clive James’s brilliant poem on writing, which begins: “The book of my enemy has been remaindered, and I am pleased.”
Take hypocrisy out of the equation and there is nothing wrong with this. We’ve been raised in a culture that stokes this sense of competition, allows men to be openly competitive, but “as women” we have to adopt some sort of lofty collective mindset.
Four years ago, I had the honour of interviewing Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State and author of the famous quote: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women”.
When I asked the then 82-year-old whether the ultimate feminist triumph wouldn’t be when her quote seemed outdated, when women aren’t under pressure to support one another any more than the next man, because they are no longer the underdogs, Albright gave the best response.
“I hope it will be outdated one day soon,” she agreed. “And I do think it’s appropriate for us to compete, definitely.” Here, she paused.
“But I think that we are always better off if there is more than one woman in the room.”
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