The topic of gender labels and sexuality is a hot one at the moment. Actress and women’s rights activist Susan Sarandon elaborated on her opinions about gender roles and how society’s perceptions are changing on the cable series, Oprah’s Master Class, which airs on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
“I’m so excited these days by the fluidity of gender that’s happening,” she says in the above video. “I think once all those ‘boxes’ are gone, it’s going to be so much more interesting and so much less energy spent on those ‘boxes.’ We can get down to the nitty-gritty of, really, what a person is.” Sarandon explained.
Miley Cyrus recently told Out magazine “I didn’t want to be a boy. I kind of wanted to be nothing. I don’t relate to what people would say defines a girl or a boy, and I think that’s what I had to understand: Being a girl isn’t what I hate, it’s the box that I get put into.”
Sarandon has appeared in several films exploring gender fluidity. In the 1975 cult classic, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Sarandon’s character enjoyed a roll in the hay with the transsexual character Dr. Frank-N-Furter, played by actor Tim Curry. In the 1983 film The Hunger, Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve shared some intimate sexual scenes.
More recently, in 2012, Sarandon appeared in the sci-fi film Cloud Atlas which explored gender fluidity, “Everybody plays different genders and different colors and [in] different time periods, kind of suggesting that the essence of a person is so much more than whatever a person is wrapped in,” Sarandon said. “I love that notion.”
She added that as a parent, she would love to see the gender stereotypes eradicated and specified the different societal expectations of the sexes. “I always knew what I had to do for my daughter to give her a fair shake in the world . . . But the socialization problem for guys is so ruthless. Having two sons just made me experience that so much more. Guys just can’t feel and can’t cry and all this stuff just gets pounded out of them. It’s just not fair that you tell little boys that they can’t be these other things.”
One of the things Sarandon most appreciates about show business is that the jobs aren’t gender-designated. She loves that women wear tool belts and men paint scenery. “I think that it’s a much more interesting world when people don’t have such narrow ideas of what they can be. We’re heading that way.”
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H/T to AOL for the video:
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