Culture

Megan Fox Says She "Got Ridiculed" For Speaking Out Against The "Abusive, Misogynistic" Things She Witnessed In Hollywood

Megan Fox has been front and center lately due to her colorful relationship with Machine Gun Kelly, to whom she is now engaged.

By Gina Florio2 min read
megan fox
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But the beautiful actress has been in the spotlight since she was only a teenager. She started modeling at 13 years old and appeared in her first blockbuster movie at 15 – Bad Boys II. Even at that young age, she was asked to dance under a waterfall in cowboy boots and a bikini. Megan Fox is the cover star of Glamour's latest edition, and in her interview, she opens up about the experiences she's had in Hollywood.

Megan Fox Was "Ridiculed" for Speaking Up About the "Abusive, Misogynistic" Things She Saw in Hollywood

Megan Fox has always been an outspoken actress who doesn't hold back about topics like feminism, and although she became a sex symbol at a young age, she didn't hesitate to comment on what it was like to be objectified. In a 2009 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, she explained that the scene in Bad Boys II in which she danced scantily clad under a waterfall only took place because she was too young to appear in a scene at a bar.

"At 15, I was in tenth grade. So that’s a sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works," Fox said to Kimmel.

“Yeah, well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work, but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist," Kimmel responded.

Shortly after Bad Boys II, Fox starred in Transformers, and she became the talk of town when the crew members penned a letter about their experience with Fox on set. They called her "the grump of the set" and said they saw her "being a porn star in the future" as a career option because of the way she talked and acted.

“I wasn’t allowed to be a human, because I was a topic of conversation and gossip and punch lines,” she told Glamour. Fox continues on to say that she "was ahead of the #MeToo movement by almost a decade."

“I was always speaking out against some of the abusive, misogynistic, patriarchal things that were going on in Hollywood back in 2008 and 2009, way before people were ready to embrace that or tolerate it," she added. "And I actually got ridiculed for doing it. I think people just have had time to review that, in retrospect.”

Fox is now hailed as a feminist icon more than a decade after these incidents took place, although she says she hasn't always felt accepted by feminists.

“I’ve never felt completely included in the feminist community, and I do still think that it’s tricky in an awful way,” she said. “Whatever I provoke in them is not something that they can digest very well. And so that comes back on me, as they reject me for those reasons. And I just don’t think that I was a very sympathetic victim.”

She hints that her status as a sex symbol hasn't always put her in the best position with feminists. “Me just being free and having fun with how I am and my personality is very provocative for people,” she said. “I trigger the people who I trigger. That is something that I, as a famous person, do. That is my purpose in a lot of ways."

Fox said she was celebrated as a feminist "until I had the nerve to call my boyfriend, ‘Daddy.'" She pushed back against this, insisting that we should allow women to be women. "Allowing us to experience what we want in life, what we like. That is feminism," she concluded.