A Brief History of Famous Women of a Certain Age Stepping In It

Women, she told the London Telegraph Tuesday, are partly at fault for our own mistreatment. “We must sometimes take blame, women. I really do think that. Although it’s awful to say, we can’t make ourselves look as attractive as possible without being knocked down and raped,” she said. When we dress with the male gaze in mind, Lansbury, who became a “dame” in 2014, believes, women share some responsibility for men’s basest instincts. The dynamic she described reveals an old-fashioned view of sexual manners—and recalls the grandmotherly scold, “You’re not going out of the house dressed like that, are you?” It also clashes with today’s framework for personal responsibility and harassment avoidance—which rightly leaves it to men not to molest women, however invitingly they’ve appointed themselves.

Since her Oscar-nominated screen debut in Gaslight at only 17, Lansbury has never been far from the public eye as a movie and TV actress despite her first loyalty to the stage. A 12-year turn as Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote made her a “rock star,” she told British tabloids last year, and a role model to older women who prize their independence. But Lansbury’s idiosyncratic and outdated ideas about men and women clash too uneasily with modern sex politics, at the worst possible time. Such that her remarks Tuesday could even be called an attempt at “gaslighting the public,” per the loosened definition today’s commentators use anyway . . .

Charlotte Rampling

The swinging 60s’ favorite indie pinup returned triumphant in the last decade as a hipster heroine, a high-fashion model for labels like Marc Jacobs, and last year, an Oscar nominee for best actress. An award she would have won, according to an apres-scandal Times profile, if only she hadn’t criticized the #OscarsSoWhite boycott, calling it “racist against white people.” Her complaint about the viral Twitter activist effort to shame the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for nominating no black actors, invariably, went viral on Twitter. The worst part—or the best, depending on your appetite for outrage—of the whole ordeal was Rampling’s not-quite apology: “I regret,” she said, “that my comments could have been misinterpreted. I simply meant to say that in an ideal world every performance will be given equal opportunities for consideration.”

Dame Helen Mirren

Mirren, another seemingly infallible English actress anointed by the queen, weighed in on #OscarsSoWhite last year as well. She may have come to regret it, though she never ventured a public clarification like Rampling’s. “I think it’s unfair to attack the Academy,” Mirren said. Idris Elba, the most controversial omission, was not nominated, according to Mirren, because too few members saw his hard-to-watch film Beasts of No Nation. (And not, she implied in an uneasy echo of Rampling’s un-P.C. leanings, because he’s black.) Elba, she went on to say, certainly should have been nominated. But Mirren, commentators concluded in the moment, was whitesplaining. And so another elegant older actress met the frothy ire of the internet.

Gloria Steinem

Second Wave feminism’s first true super star rose to fame on the power of her undercover journalism posing as a Playboy bunny. To land this break-out role and expose an ugly underworld of lusty American babbitry, Steinem traded on her attractiveness. That base appeal to the male gaze brings out the worst in men, Steinem proved—and Lansbury would agree. But who would listen?

Last year, Steinem’s remarks to Bill Maher in support of Hillary Clinton’s last-ditch campaign for millennial support demonstrated her long slow slide from relevancy. Steinem, who is 83, triggered a rich Sandernisti outrage with a sassy jab about boyfriend-hunting gender traitors.

What she actually said, alongside Madeleine Albright on Maher’s HBO show, was: “And, when you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.” On the hotseat, she defended her comments, only later turning around with a Rampling-esque non-apology: “I misspoke on the Bill Maher show recently, and apologize for what’s been misinterpreted as implying young women aren’t serious in their politics,” she wrote in a Facebook post. It did little to help her win back the good will she’d lost. Steinem opened the Women’s March last January with a call to keep united, which much like her appeal to female Bernie fans, failed utterly. And since then, the movement has made an even finer point of forgetting its old white lady forebears.

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep’s offense is the most harmless and innocent—but it was also the most disappointing. As a devout progressive campaigner whose award show speeches never want for political moralizing, she had the furthest to fall. The T-shirts that Streep and her female co-stars wore in a photo spread to promote the 2015 film Suffragette bore a slogan borrowed from the proto-feminists they portrayed in the movie. “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.” Out of context, these words—which were actually said by Emmeline Pankhurst, whom Streep plays in the movie, in reference to men’s legal ownership of all their wives’ property—could have been read as making light of slavery and the American Civil War. Bitter critics to the PR snafu blamed Streep for not knowing better, but at the time no one really mistook the T-shirt for a message about slavery. The controversy didn’t help shore up interest in the context of the film, or the film itself. Time Out London, where the photos initially ran, apologized—but not without having first proven that hugely famous, venerable and well-meaning women will always find a way to disappoint us.

We could theoretically dismiss our ladies of the gaffe as racist, sexist relics from a less enlightened era—for the minor crime of saying (or wearing) something unorthodox by the standards of modern progressive dogma. Or we could try to write off their stumbles as “senior moments.” But the cultural footprints of Dames Lansbury and Mirren, Steinem and Rampling—which is not to mention Streep and her seeming sacred cow status—mean they’ll never fully fade into ignominy. Not while their offenses pale in comparison to the apparently endless depredations of their male co-stars.

But invariably elegant, accomplished women will sin against progressive orthodoxy again. So now’s the time to ask, before Judi Dench tells us what she really thinks: Why should anyone expect a woman of 92 to anticipate the outrage of the Jezebel cartel? Or to care? The idea that she should reform her thinking, or apologize, ties to one of the more absurd fallacies of modern life. What’s most sinister about the rebuttals to these faux pas is their root in the arrogant conviction that every out-of-fashion idea is also morally verboten. And every time we shame an innocent verbal misstep, or tune out an honest expression of dissent from a mature vantage, however misguided it may seem, the arrogant ignorance of a disapproving mob counts one more win.

Correction, 12/1/17: The article originally stated that Angela Lansbury won the Oscar for her role in Gaslight. In fact, she was nominated for best supporting actress in 1944 for her work in the film, but did not win the Oscar.