Reese Witherspoon Asks Why Female Ambition Is A Trait People Are Afraid Of?

Reese Witherspoon Female Ambition: Why actor Reese Witherspoon moving speech on Ambition still remains relevant?

Reese Witherspoon is known for her exemplary acting and skills. Reese has an awe-inspiring screen presence and so are her thoughts on the position of women in the industry. In the speech she focused on breaking the stereotypes related to the portrayal of women in movies.

Reese an untamed feminist

Time and again Witherspoon has been witnessed vouching for females characters and portrayal of women in mainstream Hollywood movies. In certain interviews, she also stated that many directors found her 'crazy' and 'too ambitious' as she claimed there no women-centric shows or strong female leads for the movies.

Reese like any fierce feminist decided not to step down and rather find a solution to this, which led her to start her own company and self-fund it for developing roles for women, with a motto for creating more dynamic and complex characters with layers instead of superficial and surface-level delineation. The Legally Blonde actor with her production company, Hello Sunshine was behind the films like Wild, Gone Girl, and HBO's Big Little Lies which all centered around female characters. She also provides a platform to young female filmmakers and believes in creating opportunities for other women around her.

Her opinion on female desire and ambition

In her speech at Glamour's 2015 Women of the Year Awards, Reese spoke about her affinity towards and her own ambitious nature. She said, “I’m so excited that so many young women are here tonight. This all started for me when I was a little girl. I was 14 years old when I learnt that I love acting, and I still do. Acting allows me to slip into the skin of all kinds of different women, and not in a creepy Silence of the Lambs way… But in a way that let’s me explore the full spectrum of humanity.”

When talking about ambition Reese asked the audience to close their eyes and think of a dirty word and continued her statement as “I want everybody to close their eyes and think of a dirty word, like a really dirty word. Now open your eyes. Was any of your words ambition? I didn’t think so. See, I just kind of started wondering lately why female ambition is a trait that people are so afraid of. Why do people have prejudiced opinions about women who accomplish things? Why is that perceived as a negative?”

With a simple action, the actor addressed a rather complex notion, the idea around desires of women and how it is viewed as something negative by the society, anything that lets a woman transgress the boundaries apparently becomes unworthy or bad.

Reese concluded her speech with a serious question and urged the people around her to ask themselves, "What do we do now? That’s a big question. What is it in life that you think you can’t accomplish? Or what is it that people have said that you cannot do? Wouldn’t it feel really good to prove them all wrong? Because I believe ambition is not a dirty word. It’s just believing in yourself and your abilities. Imagine this: What would happen if we were all brave enough to be a little bit more ambitious? I think the world would change.”

Reese's Bookclub

On Tuesday Reese Witherspoon's book club known as the Reese's Bookclub launched a writers fellowship aimed at underrepresented and unpublished women. Their idea is to mentor and elevate first-time women writers and make sure the stories have a diverse background. The fellowship is meant for a women writer who is a person of color, Native, LGBTQIA, a person with disabilities, or a person from an ethnic, cultural, or religious minority.