Daily Inspiration Quote by Ally Sheedy

Hollywood sells itself as a dream factory, but Ally Sheedy’s line drags the machinery into view: discrimination isn’t a glitch in the system, it is the system. The phrasing is deliberately blunt, almost prosecutorial. “The definition” isn’t a complaint about a bad casting call; it’s an accusation that the industry has written inequality into its basic grammar, the way it decides who gets seen, who gets paid, and who gets to age in public.

Coming from Sheedy, the remark carries the lived texture of someone who came up in an era when women were packaged as types - the ingenue, the girlfriend, the “difficult” one - and then quietly penalized for stepping outside the packaging. Her generation watched the contract between Hollywood and women get rewritten in real time: a performer’s desirability treated like currency, her “marketability” policed by executives, tabloids, and sometimes her own representation. Sexual discrimination here isn’t just harassment or casting couch lore; it’s the everyday math of the business: roles that narrow after 30, pay gaps defended as “box office,” careers made contingent on being appealing to a presumed male gaze.

The subtext is also about complicity. Hollywood isn’t a single villain; it’s a network of incentives that rewards people for looking away. Sheedy’s sentence works because it refuses the industry’s favorite alibi - that sexism is isolated, outdated, or scandal-specific. It’s a summary judgment: if you want to understand sexual discrimination, don’t start with policy manuals. Start with the movies.