Jennifer Lawrence is easily our favourite current celebrity; she is loveable, relatable and a celebrity we can be proud to call a role model! There are just so many reasons why your obsession with Jennifer Lawrence is completely justified.
1. She doesn’t hold back. She famously fangirls over her favourite celebrities.
2. She’s real. She falls over at award shows, she pulls faces in interviews when asked irrelevant questions, she is herself and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
3. She’s the perfect role model and wants to ensure that her image doesn’t encourage her fans to change themselves in negative ways.
It’s not just the quirky little things that make Jennifer Lawrence great, it’s also the way she is aware of her influence and seeks to use it positively. She encourages girls to embrace healthy living; basically she’s permanently hungry (we feel you!) She doesn’t want to be a celebrity that girls aspire to starve themselves to look like. She is a role model for young girls for all the right reasons.
And most recently she has reminded us that we should not be afraid to fight for equality and has spoken out about the gender wage gap. She has voiced the perfect argument in Lenny Letter to spread awareness of this issue. So, what do you think, should women get paid as much as men?
In her letter she wrote that after the Sony hack revealed the wages of celebrities, she discovered she had been paid considerably less for her role in American Hustle than her male counterparts. The revelation of the pay gap encouraged her to try and negotiate her wage, to which she received a strange response. Jennifer Lawrence on the encounter: “All I hear all day are men speaking their opinions, and I give mine in the same exact manner, and you would have thought I had said something offensive.”
Instead of negotiating this professionally, the man she addressed acted as though she had been aggressive and confrontational. Lawrence notes that if a man had raised the same point the request would have been handled differently. You don’t see Jeremy Renner or Christian Bale being labelled as “spoiled brats” for negotiating powerful deals for themselves.
Her argument is perfectly just and it has gained enough publicity to highlight the issue. It has been supported by co-star Bradley Cooper and many other actors and actresses, but has also been criticised by the government. Conservatives have commented on Jennifer Lawrence’s essay on the gender pay gap by dismissing it as: “A bratty display.” This pretty much shows that they didn’t bother to read the whole essay as Lawrence herself said the following: “It’s hard for me to speak about my experience as a working woman because I can safely say my problems aren’t exactly relatable.” She states outright that it is not the money that bothers her but the principle of women as a whole being paid less for the same jobs simply because they’re lacking male genitalia.
Jennifer Lawrence was not being a brat. She was not throwing herself onto the floor and having a tantrum, screaming: “I want more money!” She was simply highlighting that there is still a current issue of men and women being paid unequally. Not just in Hollywood but in all kinds of jobs. In 2014 the overall pay gap stood at 19.1%, so to condemn Lawrence’s argument as “bratty” is just another demonstration of the way women are still being treated differently in power positions to this day. Don’t worry Jen, we’ve got your back!
Edited by Lucy Jackman
Sources:
http://us11.campaign-archive1.com/?u=a5b04a26aae05a24bc4efb63e&id=64e6f35176&e=1ba99d671e
http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/gender-pay-gap/
http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/10/19/conservatives-dismiss-jennifer-lawrences-experi/206265
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