Reese Witherspoon Proves that in Hollywood Money Decides Women's Humanity

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Hollywood has never cared about women's stories, and that's why we need to do it ourselves. Hey, and welcome or welcome back to the channel. I'm Imani Forrester, author of the book 30 reasons why men deserve nothing. It's available right now on Amazon, and it's free to read if you have Kindle Unlimited. We also have a Patreon now for videos and deep dives that might be a little too much for YouTube. Links are in the description.

[00:00:23]Also, I don't know what's going on with YouTube, but many of you are being unsubscribed without your knowledge or consent. So, please make sure to check that you're still subscribed and hit the bell notification so you never miss a video. Jobs are designed to keep you just over broke, not financially free.

[00:00:38]And this is especially true for women thanks to the gender pay gap. Studies show that we are up to 80% more likely to retire in poverty than males, even when we work full-time. So, yes, a job can pay your bills, but it's never going to build the life that you actually want. If you want real financial security, you need to be able to make money in your sleep. That's why Sheena and I love self-publishing and it's what inspired us to create our program, The Self-Publishing Success Blueprint. Books are a scalable and consistent income, and there's no inventory. Plus, once you publish books, they keep paying you over time. And no, you don't need to be some professional writer to start. You can start where you are. You also don't need to write 300-page books. We specialize in short books, and if you don't want to write at all, that's fine, too. Activity books do so well. If you're serious about changing your financial situation this year, you need to do something different. You can keep overthinking and making excuses, or you can finally start building something that creates life-changing income. If you're ready, the link is in my bio to join us. Don't let another year pass doing the exact same thing as last year because nothing changes if nothing changes. See you inside. So, I recently came across an article on msn.com, and it really struck a chord with me because it happens to be something that I mentioned in my latest book, 30 reasons why women deserve to be rich, title is called no one was coming to save me. How Reese Witherspoon built a $900 million company from a problem Hollywood wouldn't fix.

[00:02:07]What, like it's hard? While it's an iconic line from her career-making film Legally Blonde, it's also a mantra that Reese Witherspoon lives by. The actress turned media company owner has long had the grit required to ideate, found, and ultimately sell a near billion-dollar company that flipped Hollywood's script on its head. By the time Witherspoon was 34, she had spent two decades inside the movie business. She had seen enough. The scripts landing on her desk in 2011 were, in her words, abysmal and really demeaning.

[00:02:36]One project built around a man with two women just vying for his attention really pushed her over the edge because of its gross jokes and scatological humor. Witherspoon said on a recent published episode of Founder Mindset by Harvard Business School's Reisa Satsuma.

[00:02:51]"I called my agent and said, I'm not auditioning for this and I'm not interested." she said. In response, her agent told her every actress in Hollywood was fighting for those two parts because there was nothing else.

[00:03:01]So, Witherspoon set out on what she called a listening tour, visiting the heads of all seven major studios with a single question. How many movies are you developing right now with a female lead?

[00:03:11]The answer, for the most part, was none.

[00:03:13]One executive even told her the studio had already made one movie, quote, with the woman at the center of it that year and couldn't make a second.

[00:03:22]"First I got mad and then I was like, wait, this is a huge white space."

[00:03:26]With that, Witherspoon set out on her journey to develop Hello Sunshine, a movie company made by and for the next generation of women with the mission of putting female stories at the center of film, television, podcasts, books, and other media. And of course, the article goes on to explain how she ended up building her business and selling it, too. But I want to get into my book because I further explain why women with money are needed in the media. So, chapter 28 is called "Wealth Allows Women to Tell Their Own Stories." And in every chapter I try to include at least one quote. So, I'm going to read one of them.

[00:04:01]This one's from Shonda Rhimes. She says, "Quote, there are stories to be told that are still untold and characters to be portrayed that haven't been portrayed correctly. So, there's work to be done."

[00:04:13]End quote.

[00:04:14]Just a forewarning, I'm not going to read the entire chapter. I'm going to skip around a little bit, but let's get into it.

[00:04:20]It's no coincidence that most film directors, studio heads, showrunners, radio executives, and news anchors have historically been men.

[00:04:28]It's no accident that women's stories remain underfunded, underproduced, and underrepresented. This is deliberate.

[00:04:35]The media doesn't simply mirror society, it manufactures it. It programs it. The media tells us who to root for and who to fear. Who deserves empathy and who deserves violence? Who matters and who disappears? When men hold the pen, the camera, the mic, and the money, everything is told through their lens, their desires, fears, egos, and fantasies.

[00:04:57]You've heard the saying, "History is written by the victors." But it wasn't just applied to nations or wars, it was applied to genders, too.

[00:05:05]Before there was God the Father, there was Mother Earth. Before Bibles, Popes, and European conquest, ancient cultures worshipped goddesses.

[00:05:13]These civilizations honored divine femininity in all its forms, from Inanna to Isis, Shakti to Spider Grandmother and countless others.

[00:05:24]But when patriarchal men overthrew matriarchal societies, they didn't just claim land and power, they rewrote the story of the world.

[00:05:31]They erased the original female deities, slaughtered female leaders, the priestesses, the midwives, the sibyls, and the female philosophers. Then they replaced them with male gods, male leaders, male priests, male doctors, and male philosophers. They destroyed the goddess temples. Women rulers became myth and women storytellers were considered threats and branded witches, liars, and hysterics. Suddenly, the natural order was flipped around and the result was the clown world we now reside in known as the patriarchy. This isn't about challenging anyone's religious views. It's about realizing how deeply our understanding of the world has been shaped by men who controlled the story.

[00:06:10]>> [snorts] >> And today, the storytellers shaping our reality are sitting in writers' rooms.

[00:06:15]Most people will never visit Antarctica, Madagascar, Iceland, North Korea, yet many still have opinions about all of them and the people who live there.

[00:06:24]If you have ever lived in a slum or a ghetto, but they still have plenty to say about {quote} those people. How? The media. It teaches us who to fear, who to respect, who to pity, who to laugh at.

[00:06:37]It also teaches us who we are and who we're supposed to be.

[00:06:40]The media has always been a tool of propaganda, not just perception.

[00:06:45]Nowadays, we have algorithms and podcast bros to thank for the aggressive radicalization of boys and men into the manosphere.

[00:06:53]Meanwhile, from childhood, girls are taught to view themselves and life through the eyes of men. A perfect example of this is that the majority of children's books center boys as the main characters. Another example is that required reading in most schools tend to focus on male protagonists and follow the same pattern. Young boys finding themselves, old men reflecting on life, and male anti-heroes struggling with power. As a result, girls develop empathy towards boys. They're socialized to center male experiences, taught to emotionally exhibit their perspectives.

[00:07:23]Girls learn to see themselves in boys, to understand their pain, but boys aren't taught to empathize with girls.

[00:07:29]Boys don't read many books about girls, if any at all. They aren't regularly asked to relate to female characters or to feel for them.

[00:07:37]In the books they read, the games they play, the movies and the shows they watch, boys aren't asked to sit a young girl's perspective, to care about her safety, her friendships, her heartbreak, rage, or her joy.

[00:07:48]Girls are trained to humanize boys, boys are not trained to humanize girls.

[00:07:53]And this creates a dangerous emotional asymmetry that plays out in real life.

[00:07:57]Because what do we get when boys grow up emotionally disconnected from girls? We get girls who learn early to center men in their lives, and boys who are encouraged to be selfish. This imbalance leads to men's emotional detachment, cruelty, and eventual violence towards women and girls.

[00:08:14]We get men who often times just don't care when they commit harm, because they were never trained to see women as human beings in the first place. Men are conditioned to be the main characters of their lives and women's, while women are expected to be the supporting cast, even in their own lives. This is the cost of male-dominated media, and it's built into the system.

[00:08:33]In the 100 highest-grossing films in recent years, women make up only 11% of directors, 19% of writers, and 7% of cinematographers.

[00:08:44]In global news, women make up less than 30% of sources and narrators. Even when women do create content, studies show their work is more likely to receive sexist reviews.

[00:08:54]Representation gaps aren't just numbers, they're power gaps, and yet there's a shift. Reese Witherspoon didn't wait for better roles.

[00:09:02]She created a company, Hello Sunshine, dedicated to putting women at the center of every story. She launched a book club, adapted women-authored novels into hit films and shows, and even created a filmmaking lab for teen girls.

[00:09:17]Shonda Rhimes made network TV history with Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder.

[00:09:23]These are shows led by women, full of complex characters, and are unapologetic in their ambition, sexuality, and power.

[00:09:30]She rewrote what prestige television could look like. Mindy Kaling is a highly accredited writer, actor, and producer who formed her own production banner called Kayling International that develops hit TV shows and projects that highlight the stories of Asian women and other women of color. Women like them are changing the narrative of who women are, how we think and feel, and how we show up in the world. But they can't and shouldn't have to do it alone. That's why women should be rich as hell because none of what these amazing women are doing is possible without money.

[00:10:04]Women don't just need a seat at the writer's room table of some guy's TV show.

[00:10:08]We need to own the whole damn studio. We need to be the ones publishing the books, green-lighting the TV shows and movies, hiring the actors, funding the projects, marketing the productions, and training the next generation of women to tell their own stories. We need more women-run podcasts, publishers, production companies, animation studios, and streaming platforms. We need more films, shows, and books that center women and girls as full human beings, not plot devices. We need boys growing up immersed in the stories that center girls and humanize girls. We need girls growing up seeing themselves reflected with honesty, depth, uniqueness, diversity, and power.

[00:10:47]I truly believe that social perceptions are shaped in writers' rooms. The way women, men, races, religions, orientations are portrayed in media affects our daily lives, our sense of self-worth, community, and our worldview. Presently, far too many of those rooms belong to the same old gatekeepers who cause division among the masses, men.

[00:11:12]If women want to change our perception globally, we need to write and share new stories, stories where women and girls are more than background noise, where we're thoughtfully and beautifully portrayed as the complex, interesting, and relatable people we are.

[00:11:27]That kind of storytelling power isn't just handed out, it's funded. And to do that, more women need to be resourced enough that we don't have to beg men for better representation in their works. We need to be able to be resourced enough that we can create better representation ourselves, without anyone else's blessing. Wealth allows us to tell our own stories, as we should.

[00:11:48]If any of this conversation resonates with you, then make sure to pick up my book, 30 Reasons Why Women Deserve to Be Rich and Men Don't. It's available right now on Amazon and it's free to read if you have Kindle Unlimited. Thanks so much for watching. Like and follow for more.