Guys, this is why we can’t have nice things. All we wanted was a nice love story starring Liam Neeson and Olivia Wilde, as well as some other power-house actors, but GQ writer Tom Carson had to go and ruin the fun for everyone by being ignorant and sexist. In his review of “Third Person,” so refreshingly titled “The Redeeming Part of Paul Haggis’s ‘Third Person:’ Liam Neeson and Olivia Wilde’s Sex Scene,” Carson brings us [this](http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-feed/2014/06/liam-neeson-olivia-wilde-sex.html) lovely, not-at-all-sexist string of sentences.
_“Yet the fantasy hasn’t totally lost its shlock-Hemingway appeal, and Neeson and Wilde get up to some believably wayward antics: games, one-upmanship, the kind of desire for each other that comes from old acquaintance rather than novelty. She’s supposed to be a writer too, but your belief in that won’t outlast Wilde scampering naked through hotel corridors once Neeson playfully locks her out of his room. With that tush, who’d need to be literate? Who’d want to?”_
I’m sorry, but I didn’t realize squats killed brain cells. Who knew the butt required a lack of intelligence to look perky? This is part of the way too common “brains vs. beauty” dilemma, which suggests that smart women can’t be beautiful, and vice versa. Although I hesitate to call it a dilemma at all. It’s more of an antiquated, sexist belief that unfortunately still haunts us. Why can’t a genetically-blessed woman want to pursue a career and education? Why can’t said woman go to the gym and to the library? The idea that Wilde is so attractive she doesn’t even need to be literate — not even to be a functioning, active member of society — is disgusting. And the idea that she shouldn’t even want to use anything other than her looks to get by in life is worse.
Don’t tell me we don’t need feminism when things like this are still being printed in national magazines. It never even made headlines when Zac Efron played a doctor in “Parkland,” and certainly no one said he was too attractive to be a believable one. And no one ever says George Clooney is too attractive for anything ever. But Olivia Wilde was far too beautiful to realistically have any sort of working brain cells. Silly me for thinking otherwise.
Yes, Carson and GQ have since apologized for what was written, but that paragraph still went through several pairs of eyes before it was printed, and clearly the majority opinion of those who read it before it was published thought sexist comments like that were OK.
Not that situations like these are ever, ever, acceptable; fortunately, however, the situation could have been worse. It could have been about someone other than Olivia Wilde. A little bit of background on Wilde, the actress who is supposedly too pretty to be a writer. Both of her parents are writers. Her uncles? Writers. Aunt? Writer. Her grandfather? You guessed it, he was a writer too. Wilde grew up surrounded by novelists and journalists, and if anyone in Hollywood were to play the part of a writer, it makes perfect sense for it to be her. Writing is in her blood. Even her stage name is a tribute to the famous writer Oscar Wilde. But hey, someone should tell the long line of literary greats she comes from that her rear end is too perfect for her to believably have a working brain.
But still, I’m glad it happened to Olivia Wilde, if it had to happen to anyone. Because if it had happened to anyone other than her, we might not have gotten such a zinger of a response. And we can only hope to be as great as Wilde when it comes to being faced with sexism at work. After being told her tush was too perfect to play a believable writer, Wilde took to Twitter to respond with this line so good I want to put it on a t-shirt: “HA. Kiss my smart ass, GQ,” Wilde tweeted June 24.
HA. Kiss my smart ass, GQ. “@Jezebel: Olivia Wilde's ass too nice for her to play a writer, says GQ review http://t.co/WJx8BbjWgJ”
— olivia wilde (@oliviawilde) June 25, 2014
