Jennifer Lawrence Hurting for Cash

Before rising on the stump to complain about your pay, maybe check to see if you took in $96 million in the past year. You’re inherently a horrible spokesperson for salary inequality arguments when you’re the top earning female actress in Hollywood.

Jennifer Lawrence fell into the trap of trying to please her self-satisfied tubby friend Lena Dunham by penning an essay in Lena’s new website for secretly very unhappy wealthy women about the wage gap for women in Hollywood. In her testament to blind feminist faith, Lawrence argues that she got paid less than her male counterparts for American Hustle., implying that there’s a wage gap based entirely on gender. Though a couple sentences later she admits this may be because she didn’t negotiate as hard as the male actors did for fear of coming across as a ‘spoiled brat’

When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need.

Lawrence could have demanded more pay and almost certainly received it. But she didn’t. Lawrence blames social conditioning for women asking for less money for fear of seeming shrewish or bitchy. And the remedy is for business negotiators on the other end to give women more money in deals simply because they realize women are self-conscious about being seen as aggressive? Isn’t that actually horribly sexist?

Lawrence doesn’t even negotiate her own deals. Her agents do. The same agents who represent all the A-list male actors. It’s never not the right time to blame the Jews. As a female celebrity, Lawrence also earns heavily off of licensed merchandise deals like clothing lines and celebrity perfumes that would be nearly impossible for her male peers to match. Nobody’s buying Bradley Cooper’s I Fuck Tons O’ Young Pussy cologne. Though I probably would if it were available.

The perceived gender wage gap is a function of a factors not at all related to being lucky people with dicks. What is more startling is how many large dollar gigs Lawrence and a very small number of actors in Hollywood book because the film business is star-based. There are tons of potentially great actresses not named Jennifer Lawrence who make squat each year because of the vast quantities of money paid out to Lawrence. Helping a miniscule number of women roll up from seven figures to eight figures on a movie isn’t going to help jack diddly squat. How about taking your $50 million in fees and asking it to be spread out to a thousand talented actresses trying to make rent? Do you see how slippery the ‘life is unfair’ slope can be?

If you’re penning essays for Lena Dunham, you’ve already lost. Buy yourself an island in the Bahamas and shut the fuck up. That’s really all we ask.

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